Nova: What if I told you that half a million words could fit into a single paperback, sold at airport bookstores for flights between London and Sydney? That was the actual brief given by Oxford University Press to one man: Sir Anthony Kenny.

Atlas: Wait. Half a million words? That's not a book, that's a cargo shipment. And it fits in a paperback?

Nova: It does, and it covers nearly 2,500 years of human thought. A New History of Western Philosophy is a monumental work. It starts with Thales in the fifth century BC and ends with Jacques Derrida in the late twentieth century. And here's the thing: Kenny was a former Catholic priest turned agnostic, a Master of Balliol College Oxford, and one of the very few people on earth who had written scholarly books on Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Wittgenstein. He spent his entire life preparing to write this history.

Atlas: So this isn't some armchair survey. This is a life's work condensed into one volume.

Nova: Exactly. And the reason it matters is simple: most of us have no roadmap for the big ideas that shaped civilization. We know names like Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, but we don't know how they connect. Kenny gives us that map. He also set himself a very specific challenge. He wanted his book to be more entertaining than Father Copleston's multi-volume history which, while accurate, he said put students to sleep. And he wanted it to be more accurate than Bertrand Russell's famous history, which he said was brilliantly written but wildly unfair and often just wrong.

Atlas: Bold ambition. Did he pull it off?

Nova: Let's find out. I'm Nova.

Atlas: And I'm Atlas. This is Aibrary.

Nova: Today we're exploring Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, the book that attempts to tell the entire story of Western thought in one gripping narrative. Let's begin.

Nova: Before we dive into the book itself, we have to talk about the man who wrote it, because Kenny's life reads like a novel. Born in Liverpool in 1931, he trained as a Roman Catholic priest in Rome and was ordained in 1955. He served as a curate in Liverpool for four years.

Atlas: So this is a priest writing about Aristotle and Wittgenstein?

Nova: Not exactly. By 1963, Kenny had lost his faith and requested to be returned to the lay state. He became an agnostic, though he never became an atheist. He wrote in his book What I Believe that atheism makes a much stronger claim than theism does. The atheist says that no matter what definition you choose, God exists is always false. Kenny thought neither theism nor atheism had been convincingly established.

Atlas: That is such a philosophically careful position. He's applying the same kind of rigor to his own beliefs that he would to any philosophical argument.

Nova: Precisely. And here's where it gets dramatic. When he married in 1965, he was technically excommunicated because he was never released from his obligation of clerical celibacy. He had to rebuild his entire life. He got his doctorate from Oxford, became a lecturer, then a fellow at Balliol College, and eventually rose to become Master of Balliol from 1978 to 1989. He was knighted in 1992. He served as President of the British Academy.

Atlas: That trajectory is extraordinary. From excommunicated former priest to one of the most honored philosophers in Britain.

Nova: And throughout that journey, he was writing. Three dozen books on everything from Aristotle's ethics to Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind, stylometric studies of the New Testament using computer analysis, and even translations of Wittgenstein's work. He was an executor of Wittgenstein's literary estate. By the time he began writing A New History of Western Philosophy in the early 2000s, he had effectively been researching it his entire life.

Atlas: So this book represents, what, fifty years of scholarship compressed into a single narrative?

Nova: That's exactly what it is. And Kenny passed away just last year, in August 2025, at the age of 95, leaving behind one of the most complete and accessible histories of Western thought ever written by a single author.

Nova: So let's talk about what makes this book structurally unique. Kenny's history is divided into four massive parts: Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, The Rise of Modern Philosophy, and Philosophy in the Modern World. Each part was originally published as a separate volume between 2004 and 2007 before being combined into one giant paperback in 2010.

Atlas: Four volumes into one book. That's the half million words we mentioned.

Nova: Right. But the really innovative thing is what Kenny does inside each volume. He splits each one into two sections. First, there is a straight chronological narrative that introduces the major philosophers, their lives, their historical context, and their big ideas. Think of it as the story of philosophy.

Atlas: So for the ancient volume, you go from the Pre-Socratics, through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, into the Hellenistic schools, and end with Augustine. A continuous story.

Nova: Exactly. And then the second, larger section of each volume is organized thematically. He has chapters on logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and theology. In these thematic chapters, he tracks how each topic developed across that entire era.

Atlas: So if I'm really interested in ethics, I can read just the ethics chapter from each of the four volumes and trace that thread from Plato to Peter Singer?

Nova: That's precisely the idea. Kenny himself said there are two kinds of readers. Some people are interested in the history, others are interested in the philosophy. The chronological section serves the history buffs. The thematic chapters serve people who want to understand the philosophical problems themselves and how they've evolved over time.

Atlas: That's actually genius. It means the book functions both as a narrative you can read straight through and as a reference work you can dip into by topic.

Nova: And Kenny was very deliberate about wanting readers to go back and forth. His ideal scenario was that someone would read the ethics chapter, get curious about the historical context of a particular thinker, and then flip back to the chronological section to learn more. The two sections are designed to reinforce each other.

Atlas: I have to ask, how does he decide which philosophers get the spotlight? There must be thousands of figures he could include.

Nova: Kenny uses a fascinating criterion. He measures influence on three levels: impact on academic philosophy departments, impact on wider intellectual culture including literature departments, and impact on broader society. Most of his choices are guided by the first level, academic influence. But that second level explains why he includes figures like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Derrida. And the third level explains why he includes Freud, who Kenny himself admits was not really a philosopher at all, but whose influence on how we think about human relationships was simply too enormous to ignore.

Nova: One of the most distinctive things about this book is that Kenny is not a neutral tour guide. He has opinions, and he's not shy about them. The reviewers at First Things magazine described it beautifully: the hero of Kenny's narrative is Aristotle.

Atlas: Aristotle? Not Plato?

Nova: It's a fascinating choice. Kenny sees the entire history of Western philosophy as a story of the development, use, loss, and recovery of key Aristotelian ideas. The two lesser heroes in his story are Thomas Aquinas, who is obviously an Aristotelian, and surprisingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who Kenny reads as a kind of modern quasi-Aristotelian.

Atlas: Explain that connection between Wittgenstein and Aristotle. They seem worlds apart.

Nova: Kenny argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind, particularly his rejection of both Cartesian dualism and crude materialism, actually has deep affinities with Aristotle's theory of the mind. Both thinkers reject the idea that the mind is a ghostly inner substance while also rejecting the idea that mental states are nothing but brain processes. Kenny sees Wittgenstein as recovering something Aristotle understood two millennia earlier.

Atlas: And who's the anti-hero in this narrative?

Nova: Descartes. Kenny argues that both empiricism and rationalism, the two great rival traditions of early modern philosophy, actually derive from a common failure to grasp certain Aristotelian truths. Descartes made a wrong turn, and according to Kenny, philosophy has been dealing with the consequences ever since.

Atlas: Though he does say we can learn from studying Descartes. He's not dismissive.

Nova: No, he's remarkably fair even to the thinkers he disagrees with. But there's one exception. In his final volume, Kenny discusses Jacques Derrida, and his treatment is memorably sharp. He writes that in Derrida's later work, there are no doctrines to present. He argues that philosophers traditionally draw distinctions between concepts that might be confused with each other, but Derrida introduced new terms whose effect was to confuse ideas that are perfectly distinct. He even suggested that Derrida in his old age turned into more of a comedian than a philosopher.

Atlas: That's quite savage for an Oxford don.

Nova: It is. But here's what makes the book so compelling: Kenny is equally capable of changing his mind and admitting when he was wrong about someone. During the research for this book, he discovered that several philosophers he had previously dismissed turned out to be far more impressive once he actually sat down and read them carefully. Plotinus went way up in his estimation. He realized Plotinus argues with immense skill, taking premises any sensible person would accept and then gradually, almost inexorably, pulling you into his extraordinary metaphysical system.

Atlas: Anyone else?

Nova: Peter Abelard, the twelfth-century philosopher. Kenny had always thought of him as just one of the Scholastics. But he discovered that Abelard was actually the first person to articulate many ideas that later became commonplaces of medieval philosophy. He was a schoolmaster in Paris thinking these things up entirely on his own, with no tradition behind him. And then there's Schopenhauer. Kenny said reading Schopenhauer was like discovering that Henry James had been rewritten by P. G. Wodehouse. Schopenhauer takes Kantian metaphysics, which is famously dense and difficult, and presents it with extraordinary clarity and literary style.

Atlas: There's something wonderful about a seventy-something scholar, after a lifetime in philosophy, still being surprised by what he finds in the texts.

Nova: After surveying 2,500 years of thought, Kenny arrives at a provocative thesis about what philosophy actually is. He says philosophy is neither a science nor an art. It occupies a special middle position between the two.

Atlas: That seems like a bold claim to make at the end of a four-volume history.

Nova: It's a claim he builds throughout the entire work. He points out that philosophy was once an enormously broad enterprise. Aristotle's works include what we would now call zoology, biology, psychology, and physics. Over time, these fields split off and became sciences with their own methods of investigation. What remained under the heading of philosophy were the problems that couldn't be settled by observation or experiment alone.

Atlas: So philosophy is what's left after the sciences peel away?

Nova: In a sense, yes. But Kenny, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, makes a more specific argument. He says philosophy is not about discovering new facts. It's about achieving understanding. It's about clarifying concepts and analyzing the language we use to think about the world. Unlike science, where you don't need to read Newton to do modern physics, philosophy actually requires its history. You read Plato and Aristotle not as quaint historical curiosities but because they still have things to teach us about metaphysics and ethics.

Atlas: That's a strong claim. Why would Plato still be relevant today?

Nova: Because the fundamental philosophical problems haven't been solved in the way scientific problems get solved. There is no definitive answer to questions like What is justice? or What is the nature of knowledge? or Do we have free will? in the way there are definitive answers to questions like What is the chemical composition of water? Instead, each generation has to grapple with these questions anew, and the great philosophers of the past remain genuine dialogue partners.

Atlas: So when Kenny says philosophy is not exactly a science and not exactly an art, he means it's something in between: it pursues truth like science does, but it does so through methods of reflection and conceptual analysis that are closer to the humanities.

Nova: That's it. And for Kenny, this middle position is precisely what makes philosophy the most exciting of all subjects. He writes that philosophy is like science in trying to get further in the understanding of truth, but like art in trying to produce something of clarity and insight. It's this dual nature that has sustained it for 2,500 years.

Atlas: There's a real passion in that view. You can tell he's not just cataloging ideas but genuinely invested in the enterprise.

Nova: Kenny admitted that the fourth volume, covering the period from roughly 1870 to the present, was by far the hardest to write. And for a very specific reason.

Atlas: Let me guess. There are exponentially more philosophers alive today than in all of previous history combined.

Nova: Exactly. And more than that, Kenny personally knew or worked with many of them. He had been colleagues with Peter Strawson at Oxford. He had debated with Derrida in Paris, where they discovered they could only communicate by reading Descartes together. He had met or worked with most of the major analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century. How do you decide which of your contemporaries will be remembered in a hundred years?

Atlas: That must be agonizing. You're bound to offend people and infuriate others.

Nova: Kenny himself said he was sure his choices would do exactly that. In the analytical tradition, the last philosopher he discusses in depth is Peter Strawson. In the continental tradition, it's Derrida. Many readers have noted that his treatment of philosophy after Wittgenstein is thinner and less detailed than his coverage of earlier periods.

Atlas: And that actually makes sense. You can't have the same kind of historical perspective on living memory that you have on ancient Greece.

Nova: But here's what I find interesting. Despite those challenges, Kenny maintains his characteristic judgments. He's convinced Wittgenstein is the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and is willing, as he put it, to defend that at boring length. He thinks Husserl was much more important than he had previously realized. And he includes Marx partly because, regardless of what you think of his philosophy, the sheer scale of his influence on world history makes him impossible to ignore.

Atlas: So influence remains the key criterion, even for contemporaries.

Nova: Yes, but with a twist. Kenny is not just describing what philosophers thought. He's evaluating them. This is a history that makes arguments. The Bryn Mawr Classical Review noted that Kenny's survey is not just descriptive but prescriptive. He is setting out what he believes we ought to focus on in past philosophy. That editorial voice, that willingness to say this idea is good and that idea is not, is what gives the book its distinctive character.

Atlas: It's a history written by a philosopher, not just a historian.

Nova: Precisely. And that's both its greatest strength and, to some critics, its limitation. If you disagree with Kenny's Aristotelian lens, you'll find plenty to argue with. But you'll never be bored.

Nova: No book of this scope can cover everything, and Kenny's history has received some notable criticisms. The most significant one concerns Islamic philosophy.

Atlas: That's a pretty major gap, given how much medieval Islamic philosophy influenced the Western tradition.

Nova: The critic Carlos Fraenkel, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, argued that Kenny's account of philosophy in the Islamic world is quite limited, focusing only on those works that became important in the Latin tradition. The great Islamic philosophers who didn't have a direct impact on medieval Christian thought get relatively short shrift.

Atlas: So it's a Eurocentric lens even within the Islamic material he does cover.

Nova: Yes. There's also the issue of political philosophy. Kenny doesn't include a separate chapter on political philosophy until the third volume. His reasoning is that ancient and medieval political institutions were so different from ours that pre-modern political philosophy has limited relevance today. Michael Gorman, reviewing the book for First Things, found this troubling. Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics might address different institutional contexts, but the ideas they raise about justice, power, and the good society remain profoundly relevant.

Atlas: And what about women philosophers? That's been a big conversation in recent years.

Nova: The Washington Post noted in 2015 that Kenny's history, like many traditional histories of philosophy, largely overlooks women thinkers. He discusses Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who famously challenged Descartes on the mind-body problem and effectively defeated him, but she's treated as an interlocutor rather than a philosopher in her own right. The broader canon of women philosophers is largely absent.

Atlas: These are significant blind spots, but they also reflect the state of the field when Kenny was writing. The recovery of women's contributions to philosophy has accelerated dramatically in the last decade.

Nova: Right. And another criticism: some reviewers have noted that Kenny's confident tone in evaluating philosophers sometimes outruns the evidence he provides. He'll declare an issue definitively closed when in fact it's still very much debated among specialists. That said, the overall critical consensus is overwhelmingly positive. The Times Higher Education called it wonderfully authoritative. Reviewers consistently praise its clarity, its accessibility, and the sheer achievement of a single author mastering and narrating the entire sweep of Western thought.

Nova: So what do we take away from Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy?

Atlas: I think the first thing is the sheer ambition of it. Half a million words, 2,500 years, written by one person who had spent a lifetime preparing for the task. In an age of hyper-specialization, where most academics spend their careers on one thinker or one narrow problem, Kenny did something almost unimaginable: he told the whole story.

Nova: And he told it with a clear point of view. This is not a neutral encyclopedia. Kenny has heroes, villains, arguments, and surprises. He wants readers not just to learn what philosophers thought, but to engage with whether they were right. That's rare and valuable.

Atlas: The structure is something I'll take with me. The idea that you can read a book of philosophy history either as a chronological narrative or as a thematic deep dive, depending on what you care about, is genuinely innovative. It makes the book useful in multiple ways.

Nova: And then there's Kenny's central thesis about what philosophy is. Not quite science, not quite art, but a unique enterprise of understanding that requires us to remain in dialogue with the past. In a world that often treats newness as its own justification, Kenny reminds us that sometimes the oldest ideas are the best ones, and that we still have things to learn from Aristotle, from Aquinas, from Wittgenstein.

Atlas: The book ends with a wonderful moment. The very last topic Kenny discusses is recent attempts to revive Saint Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, an argument Bertrand Russell had declared definitively dead. Kenny's final word is essentially: don't be too quick to close the book on any philosophical question. Even an agnostic former priest knows that wisdom can come from the most unexpected places.

Nova: And maybe that's the deepest lesson of the entire work. Philosophy is not about arriving at final answers. It's about learning to ask better questions, generation after generation. The conversation that began with Thales, wondering what the world is made of, continues in every philosophy classroom and every late-night discussion today. Kenny's history is an invitation to join that conversation.

Atlas: And what an invitation it is.

Nova: This is Aibrary. Congratulations on your growth!