Western Philosophy covers the tradition from the Presocratics to the twentieth century: Greek and Roman thought, the humanists and the Scientific Revolution, the rationalists and empiricists, Kant’s critical turn and the nineteenth-century revolt against it, and the split between the analytic tradition and phenomenology that still organizes the discipline. Part of the site is filed by period, where an era has a character of its own; the rest by theme — ethics and politics, and the great questions no century managed to close.
Each of our writers holds a stretch of that history, and one of them traces single problems — free will, personal identity, what makes a state legitimate — straight across all of it. The arguments get reconstructed rather than summarized: what Hume’s problem of induction actually claims, what the transcendental deduction is doing, why the Stoics were not a self-improvement program. Some of the work is recovery, drawn from correspondence and marginalia — the philosophers the canon dropped, argued for on the strength of the philosophy first.
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