Is this a good starting point for philosophy? Is it too broad

It's good to get a really skeletal overview of a thinker and it's well-written and fun. It explains the actual philosophy to a certain degree which can be handy if you genuinely have no idea what a Leibniz is. But it's not a systematic thing or a textbook.

There's a good audiobook of it that's up on Youtube.

I think it's a real mess. you can safely skip it if you plan on reading the great philosophers themselves. if not, and you just want a *very* broad and selective and questionable overview of the subject, I guess it's better than nothing....

>>9125540
He didn't even mention Leibniz tho

>>9125523
>Is this a good starting point for philosophy?
There is only one good starting point for philosophy. It's called "The republic". Everything else is a footnote.

>>9125654
what about the presocratics you philistine

>>9125654
It's better to read The Trial's three parts before the Republic

>>9125670
The Presocratics are really interesting (I especially love Heraklit and Empedokles) but you don't -need- to know them to get a clue about philosophy.
>>9125686
Same here, it's really interesting to read them and it helps a little to understand Plato, but "πολιτεια" is by far the most important book and the one book that's forming philosophy up until today. Those books are helpful - and I would wholeheartedly advise everyone to read them - but they are not mandatory.

>>9125523
Yes. Will Durant is actually a compelling writer and this book actually gives you approximate knowledge of many concepts.

>>9125523
audiobook version is on youtube. decent narrator. recently, i've been listening before going to sleep. good overview but don't expect durant to supply much in terms of argumentation

>>9125523

It's not bad, but he does tend to lean quite heavily on the atheistic left. The Syntopicon is a better starting point if you want to know what a lot of different thinkers think about specific topics.

>>9125624
Sorry, I meant Spinoza. I was just trying to use him as a general stand-in for a philosopher I found really puzzling before I read Durant. Durant's simplicity actually helped me to understand him more than reading advanced stuff did, because it cleared the ground a bit.