Excerpt: "When Schopenhauer was asked where he wished to be buried, he answered, "Anywhere; they will find me;" and the stone that marks his grave at Frankfort bears merely the inscription "Arthur Schopenhauer," without even the date of his birth or death. Schopenhauer, the pessimist, had a sufficiently optimistic conviction that his message to the world would ultimately be listened to-a conviction that never failed him during a lifetime of disappointments,...

"Reconstruction in Philosophy" by John Dewey is a groundbreaking philosophical work that challenges traditional modes of thinking and calls for a profound reevaluation of philosophical inquiry. In this transformative book, Dewey offers a compelling vision for reconstructing philosophy to better serve the needs and complexities of the modern world. With incisive intellect and deep insight, Dewey argues for a shift away from abstract metaphysical speculations...

One of the middle or transitional dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, "Gorgias" depicts a dinner gathering attended by Socrates and a group of sophists. Gorgias, a foreigner, has been drawn to Athens by its cultural and intellectual sophistication. In this dialogue Plato contrasts Gorgias, the rhetorician, with Socrates, the philosopher, whose differing specialties are persuasion and refutation, respectively. As Plato delves into arguments...

The first of Immanuel Kant's mature works on moral philosophy and remains one of the most influential in the field. Kant conceives his investigation as a work of foundational ethics, one that clears the ground for future research by explaining the core concepts and principles of moral theory and showing that they are normative for rational agents. Kant aspires to nothing less than this: to lay bare the fundamental principle of morality and show that...

Ethics is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to apply the method of Euclid in philosophy. Spinoza puts forward a small number of definitions and axioms from which he attempts to derive hundreds of propositions and corollaries, such as 'When the Mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it', 'A free man thinks of nothing less than of death', and "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which...

"Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic" is French philosopher Henri Bergson's treatise on laughter and the timeless role of comedy in human society. Originally published in three parts in French in 1900 and translated into English in 1924, Bergson makes three essential observations about laughter and comedy. First, that comedy is a necessary human behavior and acts as a sort of caricature or parody of essential human activities and behaviors....

The aged Belus, king of Babylon, thought himself the first man upon earth; for all his courtiers told him so, and his historians proved it. We know that his palace and his park, situated at a few parafangs from Babylon, extended between the Euphrates and the Tigris, which washed those enchanted banks. His vast house, three thousand feet in front, almost reached the clouds. The platform was surrounded with a balustrade of white marble, fifty feet high,...

Extrait: "Ces psychologues anglais à qui nous sommes redevables des seules tentatives faites jusqu'à présent pour constituer une histoire des origines de la morale, nous présentent en leur personne une énigme qui n'est pas à dédaigner; j'avoue que, par cela même, en tant qu'énigmes incarnées, ils ont sur leurs livres un avantage capital, ils sont eux-mêmes intéressants!"

Micromegas, an inhabitant of one of the planets that orbits Sirius. His home world is 21.6 million times greater in circumference than the Earth. Micromegas stands 23 miles tall. When he is almost 450 years old, approaching the end of his infancy, Micromegas writes a scientific book examining the insects on his planet, which at 30 m are too small to be detected by ordinary microscopes.

The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus or Theologico-Political Treatise was one of the most controversial texts of the early modern period. It was a preemptive defense of Spinoza's later work, Ethics, published posthumously, for which he anticipated harsh criticism.