Frederick Copleston published Greece and Rome in London in 1946 as the opening volume of a history he had begun as lectures for Jesuit students at Heythrop. It runs from Thales of Miletus, early in the sixth century BC, to the last Neoplatonists of the pagan schools, and it sets the pattern of the whole series: a long biographical and textual approach to each thinker, a patient restatement of his arguments, and a short estimate at the end.
Frederick Copleston (1907-1994) · CatalogFrederick CoplestonFrederick Copleston (1907-1994) · CatalogEnglish Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy, author of the multi-volume A History of Philosophy.A History of Philosophy, Vol. I: Greece and Rome A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus A History of Philosophy, Vol. III: Ockham to Suárez A History of Philosophy, Vol. XI: Logical Positivism and Existentialism A History of Philosophy, Vol. IV: Descartes to Leibniz A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Hobbes to Hume A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: Wolff to Kant A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII: Fichte to Nietzsche A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Bentham to Russell A History of Philosophy, Vol. IX: Maine de Biran to Sartre A History of Philosophy, Vol. X: Russian Philosophy
Author
Frederick Copleston
· English Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy, author of the multi-volume A History of Philosophy
Short biography: Frederick Copleston in Great Lives
On this site
Frederick Copleston published Augustine to Scotus in 1950 as the second volume of his A History of Philosophy. His preface admits a change of plan: he had meant to treat the whole of medieval thought in a single book, but the material outgrew it, so this volume halts at Duns Scotus and the turn of the fourteenth century, leaving Ockham, the late scholastics and the Renaissance for Volume III (1953).
Frederick Copleston published Ockham to Suárez in 1953 as the third volume of his History of Philosophy, carrying the story from the death of Duns Scotus in 1308 to the generation of Francisco Suárez, who died in 1617. The Continuum reissue of 2003 renamed it Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy.
This book is not a narrative history but a set of essays in which Frederick Copleston argues with his contemporaries. It first appeared in 1956 as Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism, was revised in 1972 with a new opening chapter, and was added to the Continuum edition of A History of Philosophy in 2003 as Volume XI under the title Logical Positivism and Existentialism.
Descartes to Leibniz (1958) is the fourth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy and the first of three he devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Volume V would take the British philosophers from Hobbes to Hume and Volume VI the French and German Enlightenment through Kant, so this book carries an unusually long introduction meant to serve all three.
Hobbes to Hume appeared in 1959 as the fifth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy, a year after his account of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Where that book followed the continental attempt to build knowledge from clear ideas of reason, this one follows the British attempt to build it from experience, and it asks how far that attempt could go before it began to question its own foundations.
Wolff to Kant, first published in 1960, is the sixth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy and the last of the three volumes he gave to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fourth volume had followed the continental rationalists from Descartes to Leibniz and the fifth the British empiricists from Hobbes to Hume.
Fichte to Nietzsche, the seventh volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy, was published in 1963. It picks up German thought at the point where the previous volume left Kant, and it follows the extraordinary century in which Kant's successors tried to complete his critical philosophy as a single system of reality, then watched that ambition break apart into materialism, existential protest and Nietzsche's revaluation of all values.
Bentham to Russell (1966) is the eighth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy. Having followed German thought from Fichte to Nietzsche in Volume VII, Copleston crosses the Channel and the Atlantic to trace British and American philosophy from the reforming utilitarians of the early nineteenth century to the analytic turn associated with G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.
Maine de Biran to Sartre appeared in 1975 as the ninth volume of Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy and the last in his original plan; Continuum reissued it in 2003 as 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy. Earlier volumes had been organised by period across Europe.
Copleston wrote this book after finishing the nine volumes of his History, and it first appeared in 1986 as Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev, published by Search Press in England and the University of Notre Dame Press in America. Continuum numbered it Volume X when it reissued the series in 2003, after Copleston's death.