"Philosophy in the present, Stephen Gaukroger shows, cannot be understood without history--not just its own history, but also that of other disciplines, which at various moments provided answers to questions that philosophy failed to resolve. This enormously important and illuminating book has significant implications for our understanding of intellectual change over time. The breadth and erudition of Gaukroger's account, which begins in classical antiquity and ends in the late twentieth century, are simply extraordinary." -- Thomas Ahnert, University of Edinburgh "With great clarity and verve, Stephen Gaukroger presents not only a catalog of philosophy's ambitions and defeats, but also reveals how these vicissitudes came to pass. Successive and devastating failures have left us with a discipline that is now merely a metatheory of science and 'a shadow of its former self.' Gaukroger leaves us with the conviction that by recognizing these ultimately unhappy stories, we may be able to learn from them. Through its stunning sweep and erudition, this book is itself one source of hope in philosophy's currently constricted times." --Michael Della Rocca, Yale University "In this audacious and ambitious book, Stephen Gaukroger offers an overview of Western philosophy, from its very beginnings to its current state, emphasizing not its successes, but the failures that have led to its successive transformations.

The Failures of Philosophy is a great deal more than a history of philosophy: it is an inquiry into what philosophy was, is, and could be, executed by a distinguished scholar who has spent his long career immersed in these questions." --Daniel Garber, Princeton University "Most histories of philosophy are stories of progress. This book is a story of failures, not of ideas or theories that are corrected at a later stage, but of the very practices and self-conceptions of philosophy which result in its replacement by something else, such as theology or science. Elegantly written, philosophically insightful, and historically well-informed, this work offers a much-needed challenge to dominant conceptions of philosophy today." --Michael Beaney, University of Aberdeen and Humboldt University, Berlin.