In this part of the series on The History of Philosophy, Alan Woods explores the development of materialist philosophy on a higher level as the ideas of dialectics were re-discovered, but with the intervening progress of philosophy during the Renaissance.

In this final part of the series on the History of Philosophy, Alan Woods examines the important role of Indian and Islamic philosophical ideas, and the way in which these influenced and impacted back upon Western philosophy.

This text was originally written as a section of the book Reason in Revolt: Marxist philosophy and modern science, but eventually the book became too long and this section had to be left out. Therefore this history of philosophy is published here for the first time, starting with the question: “Do we need philosophy?”