""What's the meaning of life?,"" ""Is there a God?,"" ""Why do washing machine doors have windows?."" These are big questions that require some big thinking, and history is littered with some rather clever bods with long beards and sandals, who have forgone time down the pub with their mates to try and answer. We loosely term such chin-stroking intellectuals as philosophers, and the results of their mental gymnastics can often prove quite useful, and not just in helping us to fathom the ""meaning of life,"" but also in our everyday lives. And so, for the benefit of those of us who don't have watermelon-sized brains, or actually would rather just spend time down the pub with our mates, here, in layman's terms, is a little insight into some of that previous thinking around those big questions. This then is a brief history of philosophy, the history of human ideas.