he is lively and often witty in a style that only occasionally lapses into facetiousness; he manages with remarkably few technical terms, and when he does use them, he explains them clearly. (…) At the center of the book stand Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; these three alone occupy more than a third of its length. Much of the discussion of Aristotle is splendid, in part because of Gottlieb's resolute defense of him against the travesties of his science that are too often parroted in modern books. (…) Though there is much in the book to admire, it cannot be gainsaid that its last part is deficient. Gottlieb deals with the thousand years of medieval philosophy much more briefly than Greek philosophy. That in itself is fair enough: any survey of so wide a field must pick and choose. But it is extraordinary that Aquinas, whom many competent judges would reckon to be the greatest philosopher in the 2,000 years between Aristotle and Descartes, should be mentioned only in a few scattered sentences or half-sentences. More broadly, his depiction of medieval philosophers as almost all narrow and second-rate is dated and ignorant in just the sort of way that he deplores in the popularizers who have slandered Aristotle. It is pretty obvious that Gottlieb has little firsthand knowledge of the vast body of work that he so airily belittles. Luckily, it does not matter too much: his book can be read as a history of classical philosophy (with an ill-advised pendant), and as such it is amply rewarding.’ (RICHARD JENKYNS on the English edition in The New York Times, 11.02.2001).