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A Little History of Philosophy review — the map you keep on the shelf
★★★★★4.5 / 5.0 (our rating)
Verdict: The ideal second book. Forty short chapters, one big thinker each, from Socrates to Peter Singer — where Sophie's World tells a story, Warburton draws the map. It is the rare survey that is genuinely clear without being thin, and it stays on the shelf as the thing you reach for when a name comes up and you want the gist in five minutes.
- Title
- A Little History of Philosophy
- Author
- Nigel Warburton
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Format
- 40 short chapters
- Difficulty
- Entry ★☆☆ — about 6 hours
Kindle edition available／prices and availability on Amazon
What it is — in three lines
Nigel Warburton — a former university lecturer and the maker of the popular Philosophy Bites podcast — walks through the Western tradition in forty compact chapters, each built around one thinker or problem. It deliberately echoes E. H. Gombrich's beloved A Little History of the World: the same warm, plain, chapter-a-sitting voice, turned on philosophy.
What it does better than the rest
The trap for any survey is to become a list of names. Warburton escapes it because he is, above all, a clarifier: each chapter picks the one idea that matters and states it in plain words, then shows why the next thinker pushed back. Read straight through, the forty chapters connect into an argument that moves — you feel the tradition arguing with itself from Socrates to Singer, rather than parading past. It's the book that turns the pleasure of a first read into an actual sense of the terrain.
Three things to look for
1. Chapter length is the secret weapon
Each chapter is a few pages — a single sitting. That format is what makes a "history of philosophy" finishable, and it's why this works where fatter surveys stall.
2. It reaches the present
Unlike older histories that trail off at the nineteenth century, Warburton carries through to Rawls, Turing and Singer, so contemporary debates (justice, minds, animals) have their roots in view.
3. A built-in next step
Because each chapter is a taste, it doubles as a menu: the thinker who grabs you tells you where to go deeper.
One caveat
Breadth means brevity: no thinker gets more than a few pages, and specialists will note the simplifications. That's the right trade for orientation, not a flaw — treat it as a map, not the territory. It also leans Western; that's exactly why this list pairs it with The Way of Zen.
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