Philosophy

Monotheism and Polytheism
God Against the Gods
by Jonathan Kirsch
Nothing in human nature suggests the inevitability of the notion that there is only one god. On the contrary, men and women in every age and throughout the world have offered worship to literally thousands of gods, goddesses and godlings, male and female

The Not Quite Naked Ape
Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims
Even God understands the importance of a spiffy hairdo. At least his vicar in Hollywood did. In his 1956 remake of his own earlier film The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille, while surpassing even the shameless vulgarity of Samson and Delilah

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

Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Nietzsche
1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us!

The Physiology of Marriage: The Musings of an Eclectic Philosopher on the Happiness and Unhappiness of Married Life
by Honoré de Balzac
Marriage is not an institution of nature. The family in the east is entirely different from the family in the west. Man is the servant of nature, and the institutions of society are grafts, not spontaneous growths of nature. Laws are made to suit manners,

Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary
by Voltaire
A senior magistrate of a French town had the misfortune to have a wife who was debauched by a priest before her marriage, and who since covered herself with disgrace by public scandals: he was so moderate as to leave her without noise.

Epicurus' Dilemma
The End of Certainty
by Ilya Prigogine
Is the universe ruled by deterministic laws? What is the nature of time? These questions were formulated by the pre-Socratics at the very start of Western rationality. After more than twenty-five hundred years, they are still with us.

The Destiny of Man
by John Fiske
When we study the Divine Comedy of Dante - that wonderful book wherein all the knowledge and speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse - we are brought face to face with a theor

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

Superstition In All Ages
by Voltaire
Jean Meslier, born 1678, in the village of Mazerny, dependency of the duchy of Rethel, was the son of a serge weaver; brought up in the country, he nevertheless pursued his studies and succeeded to the priesthood. At the seminary, where he lived with much

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

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

The Antichrist
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, 'Ecce Homo,' 'The Antichrist' is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form.

Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born on April 26, A.D. 121. His real name was M. Annius Verus, and he was sprung of a noble family which claimed descent from Numa, second King of Rome. Thus the most religious of emperors came of the blood of the most pious

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

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

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

Ethics
by Aristotle
Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, 'that which all things aim at.

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.

A Metaphysical Operation
Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims
The story of Samson is about the sheer power of hair its magical strength, its religious energy, as interpreted from its hardy nature. But the symbolic relevance of hair did not die with Samson in the temple of Dagon; it thrives today.