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pp. 440, “Malt may do more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man, but St. Augustine and the rest keep trying to entice us from the taverns to the scriptoria to explain the ways the world works. Oxford’s roster of eminent excogitators ranges from Plato to Russell, as summarized by six exceptionally clear-writing teachers. In a subject of, commonly, impenetrable obtuseness and dubious utility to daily life, their essays are apt to pull in the layperson untrained in, but still intrigued by, philosophy’s lineage. If the prose doesn’t, the riot of illustrations must; there are hundreds, spanning Raphael’s School of Athens, statues of Marx, and every thinker in between. Editor Kenny, who takes on the Enlightenment in “Descartes to Kant,” divvies up the duties amongst the ancients, the medievals, continental philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre, and the English analyticals (Bentham and Mill), followed by a survey of political philosophies. As a group, the writers excel at showing how erroneous ideas went wrong, as well as the varieties of explanations for existence, sense, linguistics, and morality.”