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A whirlwind tour of two and a half millennia—told in 100 razor-sharp haiku. In this audacious pocket history, celebrated Greek poet Haris Vlavianos compresses Western philosophy from Thales to Nussbaum into crystalline 5-7-5 bursts: funny, heretical, and unexpectedly illuminating. Plato gets a cave with “all mod cons.” Kant boots up a “laptop mind.” Wittgenstein tries to coax a fly from its bottle. It’s Russell meets Bashō, Socrates with a punchline—and beneath the wit, real argument and insight.
Rendered into live, witty English by Peter Mackridge, The History of Western Philosophy in 100 Haiku is a perfect gift for the philosophically curious, the poetry-obsessed, and anyone who likes their big ideas distilled to their brightest essence. Read it straight through, keep it by the bedside, or press it into a skeptic’s hand: you’ll laugh, you’ll learn, and you’ll never look at the canon the same way again.
Haris Vlavianos is a Greek poet, translator, and scholar. Educated at the University of Bristol and at Oxford, he is Professor of History, Political Theory, and History of Ideas at the American College of Greece, and editor of the literary journal Poetics. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and essays, and has translated T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, and William Blake into Greek.
Peter Mackridge is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at King’s College London. A leading authority on Greek language and literature, he is the author of The Modern Greek Language and Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (both OUP). He has introduced and translated C. P. Cavafy for Oxford World’s Classics and rendered into English major works by Vizyenos, Papadiamandis, Tachtsis, and others—bringing scholarly precision and lyrical ease to every translation.