After lunch today we went out for our daily exercise walk. We recently took delivery of a consignment of face masks and decided we had better play the game and wear them.

Natty gents’ wear – 2020 style

Thus accoutred, off we went for a quick tour of the local backstreets. Not so much a bal masqué as a promenade masquée!

We met a number of people on the way round: none of them wore masks themselves but neither did they give us a second look.

On the way home we called in at the delicatessen for takeaway coffee – it’s the little treats that help keep you sane at times like this. Also it’s pleasant to be able to interact, even briefly, with another human being.

That’s our outing for today over and done with but there’s always tomorrow…

The word philosophy first appeared in English some time around AD 1300, borrowed from the Norman French filosofie. Norman scholars had taken it from the Latin philosophia and the Latins from the Greek f???s?f?a (“philosophia”). The original meaning is usually rendered as something like “love of wisdom”.

Since the 14th century to the modern day, the word philosophy has been made to mean many different things and today its meanings range from the popular, as when we talk about someone being “philosophical” about his problems, to the formal, as when it names a discipline of study and research. Even in academic fields, the word, by itself, can stand for a variety of meanings, depending on the direction taken by the particular studies performed under its aegis. I think, though, that most people have at least an intuitive sense of what is involved in the word and will be familiar with the names of some of its most distinguished practitioners, from Socrates and Plato to Descartes and our own Bertrand Russell.

As an academic discipline, philosophy is as challenging as any other field of knowledge and we non-specialists must approach it with caution, knowing that we can at best acquire a general understanding of the subject which, moreover, continually changes, advances and breaks new ground. That is not to say that we must give up and “leave it to the experts”. Not at all. The curious mind can find plenty to interest and intrigue it in philosophy and can perhaps learn some valuable truths about life in the process.

It is in this sense that I have dabbled in philosophy over the years though not in any consistent way, I must admit. More recently, deciding that I needed to have a better idea of the whole field of philosophy within which to situate my readings of idividual philosophers, I looked for a history of philosophy. In my very first enquiries I struck gold. This rich seam has an author and a title. These are, respectively, Anthony Kenny and A New History of Western Philosophy.

The version I have is a paperback (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-965649-3, £16.99). The work was originally published in several volumes, all of which are incorporated into a single paperback volume. You can imagine, then, that it is of substantial size. The main text (excluding the General Introduction) starts on page 7 and concludes on page 996, ten pages short of a round thousand.

Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is an eminent schiolar of philosophy as you can easily discover by looking him up online. He is also a first-class writer with a gift for elucidating complex arguments and bringing clarity to theories whose subtlties might overwhelm the non-expert.

Reading A New History of Western Philosophy is of course a challenge because of its size alone and I have found it easiest to set aside a certain time each day to read what you might call a digestible amount. So far I have reached page 335 – about a third of the way through – and remain as keen to continue as when I started. Reading it is not a task to be undertaken lightly but if you have an enquiring mind or wish to receive an authoritative overview of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, then I can heartily recommend this book to you.