Book description
For the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp
of the Critiques of Immanuel Kant, or his unformed sense of the line
of thought that descends from Hegel through Marx to 20th-century
Soviet state socialism, or who struggles to call to mind the key
strands in the thinking of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan and Jacques Derrida - help is at hand. It comes in the
comfortingly accessible form of Stephen Trombley's Fifty Thinkers Who
Shaped the Modern World, a concise history of modern thought from the
Enlightenment to the present day. Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern
World opens with a substantial introduction that outlines the history
of human ideas from the philosophers of classical Antiquity to the
European eighteenth century, via the Christian scholastics of the
Middle Ages and the development of Renaissance thought, culminating in
the philosophy of Descartes and the development of scientific method.
Having thus set the scene, Stephen Trombley traces the development of
modern thought through a sequence of accessible profiles of the most
influential thinkers in every domain of intellectual endeavour since
1789. No major representative of any significant strand of
post-Enlightenment thought escapes Trombley's attention: the German
idealists Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham
and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and
the existentialists; founder sof new fields of inquiry such as Weber,
Durkheim and C. S. Peirce; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore,
Whitehead and Wittgenstein; political leaders from Mohandas K. Gandhi
to Adolf Hitler; and - last but not least - the four shapers-in-chief
of our modern world: the philosopher, historian and political theorist
Karl Marx; the naturalist Charles Darwin, proposer of the theory of
evolution; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and the
theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, begetter of the special and
general theories of relativity and founder of post-Newtonian physics.
Stephen Trombley is a writer, editor and Emmy Award-winning
filmmaker. He collaborated with Alan Bullock on the second edition of
The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, and was editor of The New
Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. His books include A Very Short
History of Western Thought; The Execution Protocol; Sir Frederick
Treves: The Extraordinary Edwardian; The Right to Reproduce; and 'All
That Summer She Was Mad': Virginia Woolf and her Doctors.
