Philosophy

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Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt's life, where she addresses fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral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

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

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

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,

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

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.

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.