The Story of Philosophy was preceded by a number of pamphlets in the Little Blue Books series of inexpensive worker education pamphlets. They proved so popular they were assembled into a single book and published in hardcover form by Simon & Schuster in 1926. Philosophers profiled are, in order: Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza (with a section on Descartes), Voltaire (with a section on Rousseau), Immanuel Kant (with a section on Hegel), Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The final two chapters are devoted to European and then American philosophers. Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, and Bertrand Russell are covered in the tenth,
The Bertrand Russell Case was not a student at CCNY. The judge hearing the case was the Irish Catholic John E. McGeehan who on the basis of four of Russell's popular and non-philosophic books ("On Education", "What I Believe", "Education and the Modern World", and "Marriage and Morals") ruled against 'a chair of indecency,' finding Russell morally unfit to teach philosophy. In the books, Russell advocated sex before marriage, among other things. Russell was prevented from appearing in court and an appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union was denied in several courts. The City of New York's lawyers told the Board of Higher