Category - Philosophy

"It is not the well-being of individuals that makes cities great, but the well-being of the community"Few figures in intellectual history have pr...

This selection of thoughts on religion, ethics, politics, women, suicide, books, and much more is taken from Schopenhauer's last work, Parerga an...

In A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man’s natural happiness and freedom by cre...

One of the most significant works of Western philosophy, Hume's Treatise was published in 1739-40, before he was thirty years old. A pinnacle of ...

Selections from one of the greatest essayists of the Graeco-Roman worldPlutarch used an encyclopedic knowledge of the Roman Empire to produce a c...

"It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well"René Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of th...

In the sixth century b.c.-twenty-five hundred years before Einstein-Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that eve...

Taking the form of a dialogue between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, the Gorgias debates crucial questions about the nature of governmen...

The acclaimed translation of the classic poem at the heart of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve“A plague . . . tests us in unique ways. . . . Only ...

One of the foundation-stones of modern philosophy Descartes was prepared to go to any lengths in his search for certainty—even to deny those thin...

"Consider just this, and give your minds to this alone: whether or not what I say is just" Plato's account of Socrates' trial and death (399 BC) ...

The first book by the author of the classic philosophical text Beyond Good and Evil.   The youthful faults of this work were exposed by the autho...

"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains"These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate s...

Timaeus and Critias is a Socratic dialogue in two parts. A response to an account of an ideal state told by Socrates, it begins with Timaeus’s th...

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspira...

Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia ...

'Perhaps the most entertaining work of philosophy ever written ... the first really systematic and serious attempt to say what love is' John Armstr...