Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English

An ambitious new history of philosophy in English that broadens the canon to include many lesser-known figures

Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “philosophy should be written like poetry.” But philosophy has often been presented more prosaically as a long trudge through canonical authors and great works. But what, Jonathan Rée asks, if we instead saw the history of philosophy as a haphazard series of unmapped forest paths, a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience, and good humor?
 
Here, Jonathan Rée brilliantly retells this history, covering such figures as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, James, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. But he also includes authors not usually associated with philosophy, such as William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, and W. H. Auden. Above all, he uncovers dozens of unremembered figures—puritans, revolutionaries, pantheists, feminists, nihilists, socialists, and scientists—who were passionate and active readers of philosophy, and often authors themselves. Breaking away from high-altitude narratives, he shows how philosophy finds its way into ordinary lives, enriching and transforming them in unexpected ways.

• The History of Philosophy
• The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal
• Job: A New Translation
• The History of Philosophy
• A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
• A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book
• Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
• Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
• The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found
• The Assault on American Excellence