There remains a need for a reckoning with the 'history of Western philosophy.' This book responds to this need not by the conventional strategy of questioning History, the West, and Philosophy, but by presupposing them, and arguing that such presuppositions are unavoidable for the history of philosophy itself. By organizing the narrative according to the intersection of two relations (life/death, metaphysics/sociality) and two logics (neo-platonic/aporetic) the book presents material over a millennial history in a narrative of the comedy of education and the mis-education of reason. This framework, clearly declared at the outset, allows the author to present the essence of arguments while maintaining a powerful argumentative and even dramatic thrust absent from many more antiquarian histories of philosophy. At the same time the book covers the important stages of the history of philosophy and introduces in a novel way the contributions of Islamic and Jewish thinkers.