Herbert Spencer's Fascinating Life and Philosophy, with Will Durant
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Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 --
8 December 1903) was an
English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the
Victorian era.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in
English-speaking academia. In 1902 he was nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature. Indeed, in the
United Kingdom and the
United States at "one time Spencer's disciples had not blushed to compare him with
Aristotle!"
He is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in
Principles of Biology (
1864), after reading
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.
The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the
Greater Philosophers is a book by
Will Durant that profiles several prominent
Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with
Plato and on through
Friedrich Nietzsche. Durant attempts to show the interconnection of their ideas and how one philosopher's ideas informed the next.
Philosophers profiled are, in order: Plato, Aristotle,
Francis Bacon,
Baruch Spinoza,
Voltaire (with a section on
Rousseau),
Immanuel Kant (with a section on
Hegel),
Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The final two chapters are devoted to
European and then
American philosophers.
Henri Bergson,
Benedetto Croce, and
Bertrand Russell are covered in the tenth, and
George Santayana,
William James, and
John Dewey are covered in the eleventh.