A History of Philosophy: Volume 5, Part II -- Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers, Berkeley to Hume

236 pp. "This fifth volume of the series covers the whole scope of British philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the main discussion is concerned with the giants of that period--Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume--other movements of far-reaching significance receive extensive treatment, among them the Cambridge, Platonists, Ethicists such as Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Paley, the Deists, and the Scottish philosophers of common sense who succeeded Hume." "Conceived originally as a serious presentation of the development of philosophy for Catholic seminary students, Frederick Copleston's nine-volume A History Of Philosophy has journeyed far beyond the modest purpose of its author to universal acclaim as the best history of philosophy in English. Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit of immense erudition who once tangled with A.J. Ayer in a fabled debate about the existence of God and the possibility of metaphysics, knew that seminary students were fed a woefully inadequate diet of theses and proofs, and that their familiarity with most of history's great thinkers was reduced to simplistic caricatures. Copleston set out to redress the wrong by writing a complete history of Western philosophy, one crackling with incident and intellectual excitement - and one that gives full place to each thinker, presenting his thought in a beautifully rounded manner and showing his links to those who came after him."