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Beyond the Exam: Why Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy Is Still the Best First Date With Ideas

There is a peculiar kind of terror that lives in the phrase “I should probably read some philosophy.”

It conjures images of dusty, thousand-page tomes written in German, sentences that fold in on themselves like origami, and the quiet fear that you aren’t smart enough to get it. For decades, the solution to this terror has been a book that is nearly a century old: Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy.

Published in 1926, Durant’s magnum opus was never meant for the academy. It was written for the curious. It is the rare work of non-fiction that has aged not like milk, but like oak—gaining character, warmth, and relevance with every passing decade.

The Final Verdict

The Story of Philosophy is not a perfect book. It is biased (Durant clearly loves Plato and Spinoza more than he loves Kant). It is dated in its language. And it occasionally veers into a romanticism that modern scholars would scoff at. story of philosophy by will durant

But it is, without question, the most infectious introduction to philosophy ever written.

Reading it feels less like studying and more like falling in love with thinking. By the time you finish Durant’s chapter on Voltaire, you will want to argue. By the time you finish Schopenhauer, you will want to cry. And by the time you reach the final page, you will understand why Durant believed that the purpose of philosophy is not to answer questions, but to clarify them—and in that clarification, to find a kind of peace.

So buy a used copy. Spill coffee on it. Argue with the margins. Because in a world screaming for your attention, Will Durant offers you something radical: a quiet place to think. Beyond the Exam: Why Will Durant’s The Story

Rating: 5/5 (Essential Reading)

Memorable Quotes from the Book

• “Philosophy is nothing less than the prolonged effort of the human mind to understand itself and the world.”
• “Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”
• On Plato: “He was the first and greatest of the systematic thinkers.”
• On Spinoza: “He was a man drunk with God, yet sober enough to see the world as a necessary chain of cause and effect.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

While mostly forgotten today, Spencer was the superstar of the Victorian era. Durant explains "Social Darwinism" before Darwin and Spencer’s attempt to apply evolution to sociology.

The Genesis of a Classic: Why Durant Wrote It

To understand the book, one must understand the man. William James Durant (1885–1981) was a philosopher, historian, and teacher. In the 1920s, while teaching at the Labor Temple School in New York, he realized that his working-class students—despite their hunger for knowledge—were terrified of philosophy. They saw it as a cold, jargon-filled monologue reserved for tweed-wearing professors. Memorable Quotes from the Book

Durant disagreed. He believed philosophy was the most practical of all sciences. In his view, it was not a sterile analysis of semantics but a passionate quest for wisdom: the art of integrating knowledge into a coherent life.

Originally, Durant published a series of pamphlets called The Little Blue Books to explain major thinkers. Encouraged by their popularity, he compiled and expanded them into a single manuscript. When no publisher showed interest, his wife, Ariel, typed the final draft. Simon & Schuster finally took a risk, printing The Story of Philosophy as a $5 book. It became an instant sensation, catapulting Durant to fame and remaining on bestseller lists for decades.

Core Purpose

Durant believed philosophy had been locked away in academic jargon for too long. His goal was to show that philosophy matters—to politics, ethics, religion, and daily life. He writes:

“We study philosophy not to find a final answer, but to learn how to live with questions.”

Thus, the book is as much about human drama as it is about abstract ideas.