The Story of Philosophy: 2,500 Years of Great Thinkers from Socrates to the Existentialists and Beyond by Bryan Magee

The Story of Philosophy: 2,500 Years of Great Thinkers from Socrates to the Existentialists and Beyond by Bryan Magee

This study focuses on the interrelationships of three key elements of Montr al's urban form: its fortifications; the ownership, distribution, and use of property within its walls; and the nature of its buildings.

Based on a fifteen-year study of manuscript sources from Europe and North America, Opening the Gates of Eighteenth-Century Montr al focuses on the interrelationships of three key elements of Montr al's urban form: its fortifications; the ownership, distribution, and use of property within its walls; and the nature of its buildings. The first section of the book, Fortifications, traces Montr al's development as one of the most important military and commercial centers of the French colonial network arching from Louisbourg to the Great Lakes and down the Lake Champlain and Ohio corridors. It also discusses the related development of the town's fortifications. Town, the second section, examines how Montr al's diversifying economic activities - many connected with the building, maintenance, and supply of inland military posts -influenced land use and building within the walls. The last section, Buildings, focuses on the urban house, Montr al's principal building type in the eighteenth-century, examining it in its material and social environments: morphology of town and fortifications, distribution of institutional buildings, and formative legal traditions--metropolitan French above all, but later also British and American. The demolition of the walls (1801-1817) that had defined the town blurred town and suburb and augured a new urban form.

Bryan Magee has had a distinguished career as a university professor, music and theater critic, member of Parliament, and author. He is well known for two popular BBC television series on philosophy. Among his internationally acclaimed books are The Story of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, and Aspects of Wagner.