This is the final volume of a four-volume history of Western philosophy from its beginnings to its most recent past. The first volume, published in 2004, told the story of ancient philosophy, and the second volume, published in 2005, covered medieval philosophy from the time of St Augustine to the Renaissance. The third volume, The Rise of Modern Philosophy, treated of the major philosophers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, ending with the death of Hegel early in the nineteenth. This present volume continues the narrative up to the final years of the twentieth century.