'We English men have wits,' wrote the clergyman Ralph Lever in 1573, and, 'we have also framed unto ourselves a language.' The book is a fresh and brilliant study of how philosophy became established in England, challenging what Rée calls the 'condescending smugness' of traditional histories of philosophy. He sees it as a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience and good humour from men and women from many walks of life, engaged with the debates and cultures of their age. He includes celebrated British and American philosophers such as Hume, Emerson, Mill and James and also literary authors such as William Hazlitt and George Eliot and an overlooked past of priests and poets, teachers, servants and crofters, thinking for themselves about religion, politics, art and everything else. The book adopts a novel structure examining its subjects at 50 year intervals from the 16th century to the 20th - puritans, comedians, politicians, libertarians, and a collection of nonsense and folly, ethics in wartime and the prophets of the death of metaphysics. Wide ranging, fascinating. 746pp in heavyweight illustrated softback.
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