(#4765) The History of Western Philosophy-Bertrand Russell

      For all the attributes I apply to my life most all of them come from the pages within this book. Not that I knew that when I was building myself before reading it. Over the years I have built myself from the principles of better and best. I don't always succeed because I have a temper and do not suffer fools lightly at all. Yet despite my own ever continuing failings as a perfect human being, lol., I do try to emulate the best of what the human experience has to offer. In this book compiled by Bertrand, you can't "find" yourself in a more catalogued way. Although some of the insights in the book are debatable as useful in today's modern world the majority of the insights are meaningful and should be incorporated into who we are when we read them.
     Now I have known of John Stuart Mill from earlier in life studies, but his one short insightful phrase has been the bedrock of my existence. "Do no harm". From that all other nuggets of wisdom fall into place for me. Socrates, Plato, even Pericles have, through nuance or outright declaration, inspired me to reach deep within myself to mold my core to it's most significant form. I am me and that is not much but with help from the genius of those who came before me my not much is a lot to me. Bertrand does humanity a favor by following the timeline of the great philosophers of the western philosophical stream and giving us the opportunity to understand their thinking behind their conclusions of either fact or promoted theory.
     It is up to us each to draw our own conclusions from the past great philosophers but to do so we have to use the logic they ascribed to reach their conclusions. Their logic is the same as ours and with time and knowledge our logic has become even more acute in its application. So some in the book will seem outdated and ancient, yet the foundation of their early considerations help to provide a foundation from which the more earnest and fundamental truisms that relate to our modern era were birthed. It is good to know who we are and how we are. I am of the mind that our human species is rooted in compassion and curiosity and how I got there was from learning about the early fore bearers of philosophical understanding.