In the mid-1980s, Dr. Thelma Z. Lavine, philosophy professor at George Washington University, hosted a PBS TV series with the From Socrates to Sartre. Unlike the authors of many TV series which are accompanied by expensive hardcover companion books, Lavine wrote an inexpensive paperback. The book has seven parts: Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and "the contemporary scene." (See the table of contents below.)

          The "historical transition to the modern world" is traced from Aristotle, through "the medieval synthesis" and the Renaissance, to era of modern science. She views Descartes mind/body dichotomy his compromise to allow the mechanical conception of the universe to coexist with the church's doctrine of the soul.

          Lavine's explanation of Hegel's principle that "the real is rational and the rational is real" is the clearest summary of this very difficult area I've seen.

          The section on the existentialists is remarkably clear, compared to the obfuscation in the existentialists' own works.

          The only weak part in the book is where the Lavine remarks summarily that the Marxian labor theory of value is wrong, without bothering to refute the theory.

... But suppose you are willing to forego the question of the immortality of the soul. What about your existence as a self, as permanent, identical, continuously the same throughout your life? Did not Descartes establish the Cogito -- I think, therefore I am a thinking thing -- as the rock upon which he built his entire philosophy? Hume answers this challenge by swiftly demolishing Descartes' Cogito proof and its idea of the self. Not only did Descartes fail to base his idea of the self as a thinking thing upon a sensory impression -- he could not have done so. For as Hume points out, the idea of a self which is permanent, identical, continuously the same, must be derived from an impression that is permanent, identical, continuously the same. But Hume adds, "There is no impression constant and invariable...." Hume appeals again to his theory of impressions: All impressions are separate, distinct, and transient. "Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations, succeed each other and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived, and consequently there is no such idea...."

          Hume's Theory of the Self.   What then is Hume's own theory of the self? Doggedly applying his empiricist principle, he says:

When I enter most immediately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself....

          But there are some philosophers who claim they do, says Hume sarcastically, "and who imagine that we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF." But setting them aside, Hume says, "the rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." This is Hume's famous "bundle of perceptions" theory of the self.