Like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or the fictional Old West or feudal Japan in samurai films, classical mythology consists not only of a corpus of stories but also of a world, one with a geography and a history as well as relationships and rules and narrative conventions. Whereas most works on classical mythology focus their attention on the stories, neglecting the world in which they are situated, the present book explores both elements in an effort to give each its due. The result is a sort of ethnography of the imaginary.

Here is the concluding volume of Sir Anthony Kenny's monumental four-volume history of philosophy, the first major single-author narrative history to appear for several decades.
In this volume, Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy in the modern world, from the early nineteenth century to the end of the millennium. Alongside (and intertwined with) extraordinary scientific advances, cultural changes, and political upheavals, the last two centuries have seen some of the most intriguing and original developments in philosophical thinking, which have transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. In the first part of the book, Kenny offers a lively narrative introducing the major thinkers in their historical context. Among those we meet are the great figures of continental European philosophy, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida; the Pragmatists such as C.S. Pierce and William James, who first developed a distinctively American philosophical tradition; Marx, Darwin, and Freud, the non-philosophers whose influence on philosophy was immense; and Wittgenstein and Russell, friends and colleagues who set the agenda for analytic philosophy in the twentieth century.

The majority of the information in these volumes was provided by the U.S. Department of State and is the most recent release of that information as of March 2008. However, changes in countries and governments occur rapidly. Therefore, the reader is advised to check directly with the consulate of the country he or she intends to visit before making final plans.