Frank Thilly

Frank Thilly (1865–1934) was an American philosopher and historian of philosophy, born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He taught at the University of Missouri, Princeton University, and Cornell University; he served as dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences from 1915 to 1921 and was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1912. His representative work, A History of Philosophy (1914), was long widely used as a university textbook, and he also wrote an Introduction to Ethics. The 25 works by him available on this site show his systematic survey of Western philosophy: the successive parts of A History of Philosophy, as well as studies on the classical sources of Christian and medieval philosophy, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and Kant's critical philosophy, and German idealism. His writing is notable for clear structure and broad coverage, combining textbook clarity with the depth of intellectual history, and it is helpful for Chinese readers seeking to understand the development of Western philosophy.