Why it’s here. Will Durant was twenty-two years old when he began teaching philosophy at a labor college in New York, to workers who had not been to university and who, he discovered, responded to philosophy taught as biography — as the lives and struggles of real human beings grappling with real problems — more than to philosophy taught as abstract argument. “The Story of Philosophy,” published in 1926, was the product of that experience: an introduction to the great Western philosophers organized around their lives and personalities as much as their ideas. It sold three million copies in its first decade and made Durant famous. It belongs on this shelf not because it is the most rigorous introduction to the subject but because it is the most human one, and because meeting the philosophers as people — Spinoza grinding lenses in Amsterdam, Voltaire outmaneuvering the censors from across the border, Nietzsche descending into madness — is genuinely useful as a way into their ideas.
What it offers. Durant covers Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, and then a series of contemporary figures (contemporary in 1926) including Bergson, Croce, Russell, and Santayana. The Spinoza chapter is particularly fine — Durant clearly loved Spinoza, understood the difficulty of his life, and explains the “Ethics” with a warmth and clarity that make the book’s strange geometry feel almost approachable. The Nietzsche chapter, too, is excellent: Durant is one of the few popularizers who manages to convey what Nietzsche was actually arguing without reducing him to a caricature. Throughout, his prose is genuinely beautiful — unhurried, precise, full of images and anecdotes that make abstraction concrete.
A word of caution. Durant’s selection is idiosyncratic, and his coverage of the history of philosophy has significant gaps. He says almost nothing about medieval philosophy, skips the British empiricists almost entirely, and is better on the philosophers he admired than on those he found uncongenial. His judgments are sometimes more personal than philosophical — his affection for Spinoza shapes his account in ways that a more dispassionate historian would correct. And the book is, inevitably, dated: written a century ago by a man with the assumptions of his time and culture, it should be supplemented rather than relied upon as a complete account. Russell’s “A History of Western Philosophy” covers more ground and evaluates arguments more critically; Durant is the better companion for a first encounter, Russell for a second.