We in the West live in a peculiar age, one that combines a ruthless, rationalized free-market approach to society with a Romantic attitude toward intimate relations. Personally, we want to believe that intense feeling is the highest truth, while politically we increasingly embrace a steely ethic of laissez-faire capitalism bolstered by a scientific rationalism that's become pretty much the only thing that almost everyone can agree to believe in. This would have horrified the ancient Greeks, who, as a rule, thought that passion ought to be moderated by wisdom and that civic love exists on a higher level than love for another person's body or soul. But even an early 20th century thinker like Russell, if "A History of Western Philosophy" is any indication, would have looked on our time, and perhaps even Gottlieb's elegantly written book, in despair -- not for its glorification of private emotions, but for its indifference to public ones.

Gottlieb, for example, is far harder on the seminal Neo-Platonic thinker Plotinus than is Russell, who writes of the philosopher that "like Spinoza, he has a certain moral purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man." Gottlieb, however, remains unsmitten, writing that "the mystically inclined thought of Plotinus inaugurated the final phase of Greek philosophy as it tottered over the brink of reason into occultism." He stops just short of suggesting that Plotinus pushed it.

On the other hand, Gottlieb is very keen to champion Aristotle, about whose "Ethics" Russell wrote, "to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive." Russell thought Aristotle had feet of clay; to Gottlieb, the Greek master represents the best in ancient philosophy because he was a proto-scientist. Gottlieb doesn't defend Aristotle from accusations that his "Ethics" shows, in Russell's words, "a complete absence of ... benevolence or philanthropy." Instead, he chooses to protest Frances Bacon's charge that "Aristotle habitually ignored facts and disdained observation because of his blind adherence to theories he had cooked up."

It's clear which aspects of the discipline count most in "The Dream of Reason"; better to possess the practical temperament of a "great scientist" -- as Gottlieb argues, convincingly, Aristotle was, despite the philosopher's many famous errors -- than to pursue a moral vision or, even worse, a spiritual one. Where Aristotle falls down, in Gottlieb's eyes, is when, tangled in a bit of knotted reasoning about what made heavenly bodies move, the philosopher posited the existence of an "Unmoved Mover," or God. But, as Gottlieb hastens to point out, whatever God Aristotle's theories may have suggested "was pretty minimal as supreme beings go." (Whew! That was a close one.) Plato may have "wanted to treat everyone like children" in his design for a perfect republic (certainly not an unfair charge), but Aristotle, that exemplary man, had no use for abstractions and preferred to roll up his sleeves and dissect dogfish.

Russell, a liberal pacifist (who, to his credit, distrusted Communism from the very start) and an agnostic, would no doubt find Gottlieb's history lacking in feeling, but in the cool, blue light of our technocratic age, Russell seems embarrassingly idealistic about government at a time when everyone has succumbed to the fatalism of capital. It's up to you which you'd prefer: Gottlieb's tale of the slow, stuttering but inevitable triumph of scientific thinking, or Russell's obsolete notion that philosophy exists in a "no man's land" between science and theology and must find a way to wrangle both.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"