Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can lay claim to being the most important single work of modern philosophy, a work whose methodology, if not necessarily always its conclusions, has had a profound influence on almost all subsequent philosophical discourse. In this work Kant addresses, in a groundbreaking elucidation of the nature of reason, the age-old question of philosophy: “How do we know what we know?” and the limits of what it is that we can know with certainty.Immanuel...

The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) is one of Nietzsche's greatest books. His wonderfully fertile mind roams over mankind, his thoughts, his emotions, his behaviour and his weaknesses with remarkable clarity, with insight - but also with humour!In this work are 383 separate paragraphs, some short, some long, but all singular observations - the epitome of his famous aphoristic style. 'Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.' 'The world is overfull of beautiful things, but i...

Throughout history philosophers have sought to define, understand, and delineate concepts important to human well-being. One such concept is "knowledge." Many philosophers believed that absolute, certain knowledge, is possible—that the physical world and ideas formulated about it could be given solid foundation unaffected by the varieties of mere opinion.Sextus Empiricus stands as an example of the "skeptic" school of thought whose members believed that knowledge was either unattai...

The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, is the first book of modern political economy and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, to give it is full title, was an immediate best seller and has since rightfully claimed its place in the Western intellectual canon. Its author, Adam Smith (1723-1790), was one of the brightest stars of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment.Along with import...

Morrison offers an illuminating study of two linked traditions that have figured prominently in 20th-century thought: Buddhism and the philosophy of Nietzsche.Nietzsche admired Buddhism, but saw it as a dangerously nihilistic religion; he forged his own affirmative philosophy in reaction against the nihilism that he feared would overwhelm Europe. Morrison shows that Nietzsche's influential view of Buddhism was mistaken, and that far from being nihilistic, it has notable and perhaps...

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi-occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’He was indeed all these things and many more, being as famous in his lifetime for his political activities, working with US President Woodrow Wilson to found the League of Nations, as for being a member of the Académie française an...

The Critique of Practical Reason was published in 1788, seven years after Immanuel Kant's major work, Critique of Pure Reason.In it, Kant sets out his moral philosophy - and it proved a seminal text in the history of the subject. He argues that the summum bonum (the highest good) of life is that rather than just pursuing happiness, people should inhabit a moral dimension that enables them to deserve the happiness that God can give. Though much shorter than Critique of Pure Reason, ...

Kant’s Critique of Judgement is the third and final part of his series of Critiques, which began with Critique of Pure Reason and continued with Critique of Practical Reason.Critique of Judgement was published in 1790 and is divided into two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement.Our ‘judgements of taste’, as Kant describes our aesthetic judgements, have both a personal and a universal function: personal because we have a subje...

Untimely Considerations contain four essays: 'David Strauss - Writer and Confessor'; 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life'; 'Schopenhauer as Educator'; and 'Richard Wagner at Bayreuth'.The essays date from the early part of Nietzsche’s life when his Romantic view on life and art was coloured by the powerful writings and personalities of such figures as Schopenhauer and Wagner - as the titles of two of the essays proclaim. Published between 1873 and 1876, they were presented un...

Matter and Memory, (Matière et Mémoire), published in 1896, was the second book written by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), one of the leading French philosophers of his age. It followed Time and Free Will (1889) and helped to establish him as a major force in anti-mechanistic thought, opposing the trend towards uncompromisingly secular and scientific views. However, when Matter and Memory appeared, Bergson was 39 and had yet to become the hugely influential figure he became in the first decades...

It was with Human, All Too Human, first published in 1878, that Nietzsche developed the aphoristic style that so suited his challenging views and uncompromising style. The text is divided into three main sections: 'Of the First and Last Things', 'History of the Moral Feelings' and 'The Religious Life'. But the style remains the same: he declares the subjects - dream and civilisation; private ethics and world ethics; gratitude and revenge; well-wishing; vanity - and then discusses them in a...

Henri Bergson’s highly influential book, ‘Creative Evolution’ (‘Evolution Creatrice’, 1907) established a theory of evolution - called ‘Creative Evolution Theory’ - which gained a considerable following in the first half of the 20th Century. It also helped the author to win the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his work investigating the origins of biological information and divergence in the evolutionary process.In this work, Bergson seeks an alternative explanation as to how new forms of l...