Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

Tyler Cowen thinks highly of the work of Harold Bloom. In particular he recommends Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), which is a one-volume conspectus of Western literature from Dante through Samuel Beckett. As skeptical as I am of Bloom (see my remarks on Bloom in The Discipline of Literary Criticism) Cowen’s got me there. I don’t know of any other comparable one-volume introduction to Western literature, though I imagine that, with a bit of care, you could have your favorite top-of-the-line chatbot do something comparable for you.

But if what interests you is not so much the sweep of Western literature as the sweep of the Western mind, then you might consider Bertrand Russell’s one volume History of Western Philosophy. The emphasis is different, obviously, but philosophy is literature adjacent. And the sweep is grander, from the Pre-Socrates to the 20th century. It has been criticized for its, shall we say, idiosyncratic emphasis and judgements,  but the same can be said for Bloom. Neither man pretended to take stock of their respective domains as a neutral observer.

Moreover Russell was arguably one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century. His early contributions to mathematical logic and analytic philosophy are foundational; he was also a public intellectual of considerable influence, writing God knows how many essays collected into tens of books, and a political activist as well, collaborating with diverse figures in opposition to nuclear weapons (Albert Einstein) and the war in Vietnam (Jean-Paul Sartre). (Alas, he was also a eugenicist in the first half of his life.)

And, I suppose, roughly the same chatbot strategy that would allow you to displace Bloom from your reading list would also work with Russell.

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FWIW, I’m only four degrees of separation from Bertrand Russell, and all the links are strong, none of them mere acquaintance. Here’s the chain:

(1) Bertrand Russell taught Ludwig Wittgenstein;
(2) Wittgenstein taught Margaret Masterman;
(3) Masterman was a colleague of David Hays;
(4) David Hays was my teacher and then colleague.

Given my teachers at Johns Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo I’m likely no more than two links from Bloom in two or three directions. For example, I audited a graduate course on the Victorian novel taught by J. Hillis Miller, who also wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school. He became Bloom's colleague at Yale as one of the infamous “Yale Mafia.”