Philosophy

Part 1
The Bhagavad-Gita; Krishna's Counsel in Time of War
by Barbara Miller
The Bhagavad-Gita has been an essential text of Hindu culture in India since the time of its composition in the first century A.D. One of the great classics of world literature, it has inspired such diverse thinkers as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi

Part 1
Basic Writings of Nietzsche
by Friedrich Nietzsche
One hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche's most important works, from his first book to his last

Absurdity and Suicide
The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
by Albert Camus
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions

Part 1
The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers
The Power Of Myth launched an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Joseph Campbell and his work. A preeminient scholar, writer, and teacher, he has had a profound influence on millions of people.

Part 1
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ph.D.
Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill - the world of business - Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood

Part 1
The Case for God
by Karen Armstrong
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao.

Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship
Responsibility and Judgment
by Hannah Arendt
Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt's life, where she addresses fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices.

Lovelessness: Our Need for Love, Our Desire for Status
Status Anxiety
by Alain De Botton
Anyone who's ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor's Lexus had better read Alain de Botton's irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns

Consolations for Unpopularity
The Consolations of Philosophy
by Alain De Botton
The ancient Greek Epicurus has the wisest, and most affordable, solution to cash flow problems. A remedy for impotence lies in Montaigne. Seneca offers advice upon losing a job. And Nietzsche has shrewd counsel for everything from loneliness to illness.

Part 1
Shadows; Unlocking Their Secrets, from Plato to Our Time
by Roberto Casati
For Plato, shadows were the symbol of our limitations. For Galileo, they knocked the Earth from the center of the cosmos. They are a source of fear and a symbol of ignorance, and they loom large in art and design, mythology and folklore, physics

On The Plumage of Birds
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ph.D.
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world.

Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth
by René Descartes
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure

Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
by Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators and the chief master of Latin prose style, was born at Arpinum, Jan. 3,106 B.C. His father, who was a man of property and belonged to the class of the 'Knights,' moved to Rome when Cicero was a child

Studies in Pessimism
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable

On Human Nature
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Truths of the physical order may possess much external significance, but internal significance they have none. The latter is the privilege of intellectual and moral truths, which are concerned with the objectivation of the will in its highest stages

Counsels and Maxims
by Arthur Schopenhauer
The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle parenthetically refers in the Nichomachean Ethics: or, as it may be rendered, not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will

The Philosophy of Misery
by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Before entering upon the subject-matter of these new memoirs, I must explain an hypothesis which will undoubtedly seem strange, but in the absence of which it is impossible for me to proceed intelligibly: I mean the hypothesis of a God.

The Nature of Goodness
by George Herbert Palmer
In undertaking the following discussion I foresee two grave difficulties. My reader may well feel that goodness is already the most familiar of all the thoughts we employ, and yet he may at the same time suspect that there is something about it perplexing

Evolution and Ethics
by Thomas H. Huxley
The discourse on 'Evolution and Ethics,' reprinted in the first half of the present volume, was delivered before the University of Oxford, as the second of the annual lectures founded by Mr. Romanes: whose name I may not write without deploring

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
by David Hume
DISPUTES with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy