Probably only for those with a decent amount of philosophy in their past, but with that caveat, this is one of the best histories of philosophy you're likely to read. It's beautifully written, and also 'innovative,' a term that I don't usually use. Ree aspires to write a less top-down history, and more or less succeeds, particularly in the first few chapters. Each chapter is nicely structured: an individual is the focus, and Ree branches out from there, showing, as best he can, what philosophy was like in the Anglosphere during that person's life. This is quite a literary feat, and for that alone, anyone who writes anything should have a look at the book.

Intellectually, too, it's compelling, particularly because Ree just admits that most of the history of philosophy has been adjacent to religion and religious questions.

I dock a star for the last chapters. I can just about see why one would choose William James and Wittgenstein as your representatives of early and mid twentieth century philosophy, but both chapters are too long and too focused on those two men. That's a particular shame for James, since his thought is really more representative of recent philosophy than the thinking of his time, and something on the growth of analytic philosophy (about which Ree is rightly ambivalent) would have been more interesting. The Wittgenstein was just too long, and has been told so often that it was hard to care about this particular version of it. ( )

I'm re-reading “Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English” by Jonathan Rée. One of his theses is that philosophy has long been a multilingual study, and much of its peculiar character derives from attempts by speakers of one language to make sense of terms used in another. For example, scholars of Latin who knew no Greek might not realize that the terms they were coming across, oratio, definitio, ratiocinatio, sermo, disputatio, verbum and proportio, were all translations of a single Greek word, logos. And when literacy spread, and there were for the first time readers of English who knew no other languages wanting to read about ideas, this presented a problem for authors: should they use "inkhorn terms", anglicizations of the Latin technicalities, like "proposition" or "accident", or something more English-sounding? One writer who chose the latter option was Ralph Lever, who rendered the principle "every proposition is either an affirmation or a negation" as "every simple shewsay is either a yeasay or a naysay". Ree's title Witcraft is taken from that of Lever's book, an anglicized version of the word 'philosophy'.

Rée deliberately includes the lesser-known thinkers along with the big names, but it's very noticeable when someone comes along who changes the way everyone else thinks. Descartes is the first such figure in the book, looking at the material world in a proto-scientific way while trying to be true to his sense of spiritual reality. People reacted with astonishment at his dualism. A Jesuit called Gabriel Daniel wrote a satirical novel in which Descartes, bored with life at court, leaves his body behind and takes his soul on "a little turn for Recreation-sake". When he gets back he discovers that the court physician, assuming his body was ill, has subjected it to bloodletting and cupping and other unpleasant treatments of the time, leaving it damaged beyond repair. But this only confirms him in his view of the superiority of the soul.

I've now got on to another big name, John Locke. I had no idea that he invented both the use of "self" as a noun and the phrase "personal identity", which must have seemed an obscure technical concept or inkhorn term when he first used it. (Come to think of it, an idea itself was an inkhorn term at the time.) Anyway, the book is fascinating and I'm learning a lot from it. ( )

This is an excellent history with a unique approach and some interesting choices of protagonists. There is an oversampling of quotations, which can make the book feel long-winded; however, there are enough juxtapositions of philosophers and ideas to make the loquacity worth enduring. ( )