The World According To Wasp
The book appears designed to act as a basic primer for fresh people who have signed up for the philosophy 101 course at one of the better US universities. The presumptive audience is assumed to possess basic literacy and a burning desire to maintain at least a B grade in the ubiquitous quizzes. Thus, instead of actually being a short history of philosophy, the book could have been more accurately titled a potted biography of philosophers down the ages.
The authors bend over backwards to achieve a bland, inoffensive description of the creators of the 3000-year-emotional maelstrom misleadingly defined as The Love of Wisdom. While objectivity may always be desirable in what is essentially an introductory work, it is a moot point whether writers on such a subject can and indeed should, try to subsume their personal beliefs so self consciously.
Still, in its determination to tread the middle path of American academic political correctness, this book makes a lot of unintentional philosophical statements. For example, the very first footnote is about the consistent usage of BCE (Before Common Era) instead of BC (Before Christ) throughout the book lest the invocation of the name of the Man from Galilee should cause offense to such of their readers as do not subscribe to the same religious beliefs.
Then again, Hegel gets seven pages in the book and one of his followers the young romantic poet turned polemnic called Karl Marx is clubbed together with Kierkegaard and Feuerbach and dealt with in three paragraphs. Nietzche gets slightly more space in the very next section after being clubbed together with Mill and Darwin, both of whom would have considered him a very strange bedfellow. The Ubermensch doctrinaire gets about three pages. Both Marx and Nietzche may have been lousy thinkers and poor, discredited, philosophers, but to our eurocentric minds, something stinks about this quantitative assessment of relative importance.
Thoreau and Emerson are also dealt with in detail. So are American Indian (this was written before `Native American' became pc), Chinese, Japanese, African and Indian movements. But Ken Kesey and Kerouac don't get a look in and neither does Francis Fukoyama! Presumably they would come up for discussion in Philo-201. Or they fail the test of political correctness.
The omissions and the emphases are at the nub of the important differences between this book and something comparable produced by say, Heidelburg or Cologne university lecturers. Consciously or unconsciously, we Indians tend to be Eurocentric in posture, whether Marxian or not. So this book is a possibly, unconscious revelation for the Indian who has not taken Philo 101.
Another possible sub-title could be the world according to Wasp. Not a blindly, bigoted O'Rourkish variant of Waspishness, but definitely a post modernist white North American viewpoint with all its unconscious attitudes and biases and its extremely self-conscious penchant for walking on eggshells around any subject where expressing a firm opinion could lead to flamers and racist accusations bouncing around on the Net.
Having said that, lets admit that a canvas that opens with Abraham (2nd Millenium BCE) and ends with Martin Luther King is a little too large for anyone to deal with objectively in 300-odd pages which is as much study material as can be absorbed in one semester. The pity of it is that the writers tried to be objective