I have always been a fan of the Made Simple series, having from secondary school to the present relied on them for basic overviews and introductions to material I might not otherwise study yet wanted to know in broad strokes. Philosophy is one of the fields in which my education continued in some depth (particularly in regards to those fields that relate closely to theology), and yet for over 20 years, this text, 'Philosophy Made Simple', has remained on my shelf as a well-used ready reference.
The book is a collaboration between two authors, Richard Popkin and Avrum Stroll; they each wrote roughly half the book. The book is arranged topically, according to the following topics:
Ethics (Stroll)
Political Philosophy (Stroll)
Metaphysics (Popkin)
Philosophy of Religion (Popkin)
Theory of Knowledge (Popkin)
Logic (Stroll)
Contemporary Philosophy (Popkin and Stroll)
The largest, and perhaps most interesting, section is Contemporary Philosophy. This is subdivided into pieces dealing largely with Pragmatism, Existentialism, and Philosophical Analysis.
Within each section, the pattern of discussion generally proceeds historically, from the pre-Socratics or Greek classics to the present. Ethics, for example, begins with classical theories of ethics dealt with by Plato and Aristotle, and proceeds through the various Greek schools (Hedonism, Cynicism, Stoicism), to philosophical Christian ethics, to Spinoza, Utilitarianism, Kant, then finally more modern ideas of subjectivism and objectivism, natualism and the like. Some topics begin more recently (Philosophy of Religion begins with Hume, for example; Epistemology begins with Descartes, but circles back to earlier ideas).
The topic on Logic looks as both philosophical ideas as well as general tools for applying logical analysis. However, this does not serve as a logical 'mechanics' primer, and apart from the very basic ideas of logic, the scope of this book is too much a survey to get into much depth.
The last section, on Contemporary Philosophy, deals with philosophy of the past 100 to 150 years. It begins with William James, and proceeds through to Dewey, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and other people and topics of current interest. Philosophy is a slow-moving discipline in comparison to science and technology-driven fields, yet there is room for further developments that this text misses. On the other hand, it is hard to account for the whole of current philosophical discourse, for it is often only after a passage of time and analysis that the crucial ideas and development are recognised in hindsight.
As the authors state in their introduction, almost all of us have philosophical ideas, even if we don't really know it or call these thoughts philosophical. It is important to that all members of a society have an idea about the functioning of that society. This text is a basic, accessible overview of the key ideas of philosophy, and will serve those in any field, even the beginning philosophy and theology student, well as a guide and reference.
