This project may sound unduly ambitious, but in at least one
important sense this is an "introductory book" in philosophy:
no previous technical philosophical training or knowledge is
required on the part of the reader.

Books in philosophy that are introductory in this sense
usually take one of two forms, and since this one takes nei-
ther, I think it important to make the distinction between it
and other such books at the outset. The first and perhaps
most common type of introductory book is one that takes the
reader through a fist of famous philosophical problems, such
as free will, the existence of God, the mind-body problem,
the problem of good and evil, or the problem of skepticism
and knowledge. A good recent example of this sort of book is
Thomas Nagel's What Does It All Mean? ⁶ The second sort of
introductory book is a short history of the subject. The
reader is given a brief account of the major philosophical
thinkers and doctrines, beginning with the pre-Socratic
Greeks and ending with some prominent recent figure, such
as Wittgenstein, or movement, such as existentialism. Proba-
bly the most famous book of this type is Bertrand Russell's
History of Western Philosophy. ⁷ Russell's book is weak on
scholarship, but I think it has done much more to encourage
the spread of philosophical thought than more accurate his-
tories because anybody can read it with pleasure and with at
least some understanding. I read it as a teenager, and it made
a big impression on me. Jimmy Carter is alleged to have kept
it on his bedside table when he was president.

The present book is neither a survey of big questions nor a
history. Indeed, it is of a type that has gone out of fashion
and that many good philosophers would think impossible. It
is a synthetic book in that it attempts to synthesize a number
of accounts of apparently unrelated or marginally related
subjects. Because we live in one world, we ought to be able to
explain exactly how the different parts of that world relate to

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