Subject: Philosophy (page 2)

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Rights of Man Thomas Paine

The authorities in power in England during Thomas Paine’s lifetime saw him as an agent provocateur who used his seditious eloquence to support the emancipation of slaves and women, the demands of working people, and the rebels of the French and American Revolutions. History, on the other hand, has come to regard him…Read More »
Utopia Thomas More

One of the most influential books in the Western philosophical and literary tradition, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia appeared in 1516. The formidable Henry VIII had recently assumed the throne in England, and conflicting ideas about religion were fuelling the Reformation throughout Europe. A scathing satire, Utopia w…Read More »
Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche's most controversial, and probably his most important work. The concepts that "God is Dead" and "Eternal Recurrence" with their attendant ramifications are major features of this work. Highly original and inventive, part literature, part philosophy, it parodies both, in its stylistic resemblance to the…Read More »
The Antichrist Friedrich Nietzsche

This work is both an unrestrained attack on Christianity and a further exposition of Nietzsche's will-to-power philosophy so dramatically presented in Zarathustra. Christianity, says Nietzsche, represents '_everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservative in…Read More »
Leviathan Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Influenced by the English Civil War, Hobbes wrote that chaos or civil war-situations identified with a state of nature and the famous motto Bellum omnium contra omnes ("the war of all against all")-could only be averted by strong central g…Read More »
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues–brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality–that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. The…Read More »
A Modern Utopia H. G. Wells

Wells' uncanny ability to highlight the problems which are now most acute and supply tentative solutions that allow a maximum of individual freedom merits serious consideration. A Modern Utopia is one of the first important blueprints for the modern welfare state and an early major statement of Wells' idea of the Wo…Read More »
Candide Voltaire

Political satire doesn't age well, but occasionally a diatribe contains enough art and universal mirth to survive long after its timeliness has passed. Candide is such a book. Penned by that Renaissance man of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Candide is steeped in the political and philosophical controversies of the 175…Read More »
Zadig Voltaire

This novel tells the story of Zadig, a philosopher in ancient Babylonia. The author does not attempt any historical accuracy, and some of the problems Zadig faces are thinly disguised references to social and political problems of Voltaire's own day. The book is philosophical in nature, and presents human life as in…Read More »
Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire

The Philosophical Dictionary is one of the most lively, amusing and various books of fact and illustration now in existence; comprising information adapted to every taste and lines of study, delivered with the wit, animation, and ease for which its gifted author was unrivalled. There is scarcely a topic which has in…Read More »
Letters on England Voltaire

Also known as the Lettres anglaises ou philosophiques, Voltaire's response to his exile in England offered the French public of 1734 a panoramic view of British culture. Perceiving them as a veiled attack against the ancient regime, however, the French government ordered the letters burned and Voltaire persecuted.