"The Dream of Reason illustrates how the story of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than of a sharply defined discipline. We engage immediately with both the personalities and the arguments of every major philosopher from Ancient Greece to the birth of modern philosophy in the seventeenth century; the modern era will be addressed in a second volume. Among a large cast of curious individuals, we encounter Thales, perhaps the first philosopher, certainly the first of a long line of absent-minded professors; Empedocles, who in the fourth century BC invented a theory of matter which convinced nearly everybody until the Renaissance, despite the fact that Empedocles believed himself to be a reincarnated bush; Anaxagoras, who was convicted of impiety for believing that the heavenly bodies were not gods to be worshipped but red-hot rocks to be avoided; Diogenes, the cynic who lived in an earthenware tub; and Epicurus, no bon viveur, but a philosopher devoted to the simple life."--BOOK JACKET.