A lucid and inspiring consideration of the challenges we and our world now face, and a proposal for a way to overcome them

Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face?

Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries, and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not-impossible extreme, might be extinction?

To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world: climate change, technology, and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects. As extreme weather events increase in frequency, advances in AI and military technology accelerate, and inequities deepen everywhere, the question of how to confront the world’s various problems becomes even more urgent.

If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement, the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia–the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE.

“A witty, learned, authoritative survey of philosophical thought.” —The New York Times Book Review

The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy to cover both Western and Eastern traditions, from one of the world’s most eminent thinkers
 
The story of philosophy is an epic tale, spanning civilizations and continents. It explores some of the most creative minds in history. But not since the long-popular classic by Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945, has there been a comprehensive and entertaining single-volume history of this great, intellectual, world-shaping journey.

With characteristic clarity and elegance, A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the age of the Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates through Christianity’s capture of the European mind, from the Renaissance and Enlightenment on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre and, finally, philosophy today. Surveying in tandem the great philosophical traditions of India, China, and the Persian-Arabic world, and astonishing in its range and accessibility, Grayling’s The History of Philosophy is destined to be a landmark work.