Solid 5* for the content. The book is a wonderful introduction to the major philosophical works and certainly got me more interested in reading more, especially as far as modern philosophers are concerned.

However, I was not convinced by the alphabetic order right from the start and only got progressively more annoyed it as I was reading. I decided to read the chapters in chronological order so first I had to come up with it (I'm attaching a list at the bottom of this review for those of you who want to do the same).

That in itself was an annoying task but then having to always consult my list after every chapter and synchronising progress across my reading devices was a pain each and every time. And that jumping was made even more annoying by the fact that I found it easier to associate ideas with philosophers' names but the chapters are named after particular books which further contributed to the nuisance. It also meant I was not able to easily go back to refresh my memory which, again, was annoying because by far most of the references are chronologically anaphoric so would have made no sense to me had I decided to read the book in the order that it is presented in.

In any case, here is the chronological order:
The number in brackets refers to chapter number
1. (21) Heraclitus - Fragments - 6th century BC (mistakenly written AD in the book)
2. (12) Confucius - Analects - 5th century BC
3. (38) Plato - The Republic - 4th century BC
4. (2) Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics - 4th century BC
5. (15) Epicurus - Letters - 3rd century BC
6. (11) Cicero - On Duties - 44 BC
7. (31) Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince (1513)
8. (34) Michel de Montaigne - Essays (1580)
9. (13) René Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
10. (37) Blaise Pascal - Pensées (1660)
11. (47) Baruch Spinoza - Ethics (1677)
12. (30) John Locke - Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
13. (29) Gottfried Leibniz - Theodicy (1710)
14. (22) David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
15. (41) Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract (1762)
16. (25) Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
17. (7) Jeremy Bentham - Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
18. (19) G.W.F. Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
19. (45) Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation (1818)
20. (26) Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling (1843)
21. (33) John Stuart Mill - On Liberty (1859)
22. (14) Ralph Waldo Emerson - Fate (1860)
23. (36) Friedrich Nietzche - Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
24. (8) Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution (1907)
25. (23) William James - Pragmatism (1907)
26. (20) Martin Heidegger - Being and Time (1927)
27. (42) Bertrand Russel - The Conquest of Happiness (1930)
28. (39) Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
29. (3) A.J. Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
30. (44) Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness (1943)
31. (6) Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1949)
32. (49) Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations (1953)
33. (1) Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (1958)
34. (28) Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
35. (16) Michel Foucault - The Order of Things (1966)
36. (32) Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is the Massage (1967)
37. (35) Iris Murdoch - The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
38. (40) John Rawls - A Theory of Justice (1971)
39. (27) Saul Kripke - Naming and Necessity (1972)
40. (9) David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
41. (5) Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
42. (10) Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power (2002)
43. (17) Henry Frankfurt - On Bullshit (2005)
44. (48) Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan (2007)
45. (46) Peter Singer - The Life You Can Save (2009)
46. (43) Michael Sandel - Justice (2009)
47. (50) Slavoj Žižek - Living in the End Times (2010)
48. (4) Julian Baggini - The Ego Trick (2011)
49. (24) Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
50. (18) Sam Harris - Free Will (2012)

Great opinionated overview

To someone new to the subject, this is an approachable summary of the thinking of some famous philosophers, several of whom, I was unfamiliar with. Excerpts of each book are followed by some helpful paraphrasing and an appreciated short biography of each author. Almost half of the books covered are now on my "to read" list.

Good review.