What is the best history of philosophy?

I mean, that's just demonstrably untrue. Copleston is huge but he's also just a fraction of the source material's size. Plato's complete works are around 1400 pages; Copleston's section on Plato is about 150 pages, so about 10%. It's also stripped (for better or worse) of the dramatic and literary elements, and focuses on a few big points (again, for better or worse) out of far more which are considered by Plato.

Also you don't have to read Copleston all at once. I read the relevant section of him after reading about/from the pre-socratics and sophists (about 150 pages in copleston), and another about Plato and the Academy after reading Plato (again, about 150 pages in Copleston), and will read the relevant section about Aristotle later. Copleston is a summary, not a primer; you're better off reading Durant's story of philosophy or some other ~400 page book if what you want is to just peek into what's been going on in "thought" for thousands of years.

I said "most," mein n word. I also said I like Copleston. I just meant he shouldn't be considered a substitute for the great philosophers themselves (which I was afraid OP might be thinking.)

Russell is to british philosophy what british philosophy is to philosophy.

tf is it with snark against Anglo philosophy on this board

jelly continentals

>Anglo "philosophy"

ftfy

...

Roger Scruton

bump.

just read the texts you dingus

Anglo philosophy is legitimately fucking horrible?

It takes too many things for granted, to the point that it ends up barely being philosophy half the time. About a third of its pragmatist and positivist impetus was just absorbed into uncritical scientism, a third was absorbed into the critical strains of scientism and neopositivism that all died ignominiously in the '60s, and the rest is piffly shit-stained neo-pragmatist and neo-analytic remnants like Rorty and Kripke and Quine, whose ideas are either unknowing throwbacks to better formulations of themselves a century earlier, or are simply outdone by a dozen continental variations.

What do people really learn of Quine? Some shit that he stole from Duhem and that was done better by a handful of his contemporaries. Kripke is a non-creative misreading of Wittgenstein and no one gives a fuck about him otherwise. Rorty is a grumpy old bitch who thinks he successfully contained and transcended the entire preceding century of philosophy, and yet no one seemed to care. Meanwhile a bunch of Anglo-continental contemporaries of his have been a thousand times more seminal.

What else are you going to read? Rawls? Six thousand post-analytic octogenarian mediocrities who still can't fucking think historically when they do philosophy and who still think the sole criterion of judgment in evaluating a work of philosophy is to piece its "implicit" chain of syllogisms, and then agree or disagree with the chain on a superficial level?

>hurrrrr see Spinoza doesn't realize that his 5th implicit syllogism contradicts his 9th implicit syllogism, which I've unearthed for you, therefore Spinoza is wrong everyone go home haha liberalism is good keep doing what you've been doing
>t. analytic

Fuck analytics. Read cutting-edge Wittgenstein scholarship, read some basic histories of analytic thought, read the four or five good books they've ever produced, mostly in the philosophy of science, and then ignore them forever.

ignore thisRussell is trash

Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy is acceptable.

Just read Anthony Kenny

this

William Barret has a great summary of Existentialist thought and it's manifestations in, then contemporary, society.

What makes Kenny a good starting place in terms of the history of philosophy?