Texts and works

Hume's ambitious attempt to build a science of human nature through impressions, ideas, causation, personal identity, passions, and morals.

Hume's mature and concise presentation of empiricist skepticism about causation, induction, miracles, necessity, and human knowledge.

Locke's major empiricist study of ideas, knowledge, probability, personal identity, language, and the limits of human understanding.

Heidegger's inquiry into the question of being through Dasein, worldhood, care, temporality, death, and authenticity.

Marx's mature critique of capitalist production, commodity form, surplus value, exploitation, accumulation, and crisis.

Kant's first critique, written to determine the conditions, scope, and limits of human knowledge and metaphysics.

Foucault's genealogy of modern punishment, discipline, surveillance, normalization, and the production of docile bodies.

Descartes's methodological manifesto for clear reasoning, scientific reform, and the route from doubt to the cogito.

Marcus Aurelius's private Stoic notes on judgment, mortality, duty, discipline, nature, and maintaining character under pressure.

Descartes's central metaphysical work, moving from radical doubt to the cogito, God, mind-body distinction, and the possibility of knowledge.

Aristotle's practical study of happiness, virtue, character, friendship, practical wisdom, and the shape of a flourishing life.

Mill's classic defense of individual liberty, free discussion, experiments in living, and the harm principle against legal and social coercion.

Hegel's 1807 account of consciousness, recognition, culture, religion, and absolute knowing as a historical education of Spirit.

Wittgenstein's later work on meaning, language-games, rule-following, private language, forms of life, and philosophical confusion.

Plato's dialogue on justice, the soul, education, political order, philosopher-rulers, and the ascent from appearance to knowledge.

Rousseau's compact political work on legitimate authority, popular sovereignty, law, freedom, and the general will.

Montesquieu's comparative study of laws, regimes, institutions, liberty, climate, commerce, religion, and social causes.

Adam Smith's 1759 account of sympathy, the impartial spectator, propriety, virtue, resentment, and moral judgment in social life.

Adam Smith's 1776 political economy of labor, division of labor, markets, trade, state policy, monopoly, and commercial society.

Nietzsche's critique of dogmatic philosophy, morality, herd values, free will, truth, and modern European culture.

Maimonides' philosophical guide for readers caught between Jewish law, scripture, and Aristotelian philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas's outward-facing defense of Christian truth using philosophical argument and theological clarification.

Thomas Aquinas's major theological synthesis of God, creation, human action, virtue, law, Christ, and sacraments.

Ibn Sina's philosophical encyclopedia covering logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, psychology, and metaphysics.

Ibn Rushd's reply to al-Ghazali defending Aristotelian philosophy, demonstration, and causal intelligibility.

al-Ghazali's critique of the philosophers on causality, eternity, divine knowledge, and resurrection.

Pico della Mirandola's ambitious set of theses meant for public disputation, staging concord across philosophy, theology, and esoteric traditions.

Mary Astell's proposal for women's serious intellectual and spiritual education through disciplined community.

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1790 reply to conservative defenses of hierarchy, hereditary privilege, and anti-revolutionary politics.

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 argument that women are rational moral agents whose apparent weakness is produced by poor education and social dependency.

Berkeley's dialogue defense of Christianity, common sense, and moral life against freethinking skepticism.

Compiled sayings and scenes centered on Confucius, foundational for Confucian ethics, ritual practice, learning, and political example.

Plato's trial speech of Socrates, focused on examined life, civic conscience, divine mission, and philosophy under democratic judgment.

Apology for Raymond Sebond is a linked work object for Michel de Montaigne, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Book of Letters is a linked work object for al-Farabi, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Ibn Sina's great medical encyclopedia, joining clinical medicine, natural philosophy, classification, and the systematic ordering of knowledge.

Marsilio Ficino's Renaissance explanations of Plato, especially love, beauty, soul, nature, and the fit between Platonism and Christianity.

Mulla Sadra's engagement with Aristotle's Metaphysics, read through the later Islamic debates over existence, causality, and divine reality.

Maimonides' early commentary explaining the Mishnah and presenting key principles of law, belief, ethics, and rabbinic interpretation.

Montesquieu's historical study of Rome as a political organism whose rise and decline reveal the dependence of power on institutions, virtue, war, and corruption.

Anselm's dialogue on why God became human, famous for its satisfaction account of atonement and its rational analysis of sin, justice, and redemption.

Hobbes's early political treatise on citizen, commonwealth, natural right, and the need for sovereign authority.

Ibn Rushd's argument that philosophical demonstration is religiously legitimate for those qualified to practice it.

Francisco Suarez's political-theological defense of Catholic authority against royal supremacy, important for sovereignty, resistance, and limits on political power.

al-Ghazali's intellectual autobiography, tracing his crisis of certainty and his turn through theology, philosophy, and Sufism.

William of Ockham's major political-theological dialogue on papal power, church authority, heresy, and the limits of ecclesial rule.

Rousseau's genealogy of social inequality, property, dependence, pride, and the way civilization can deform natural pity and freedom.

Leibniz's compact statement of individual substance, divine wisdom, sufficient reason, and the intelligibility of the world.

Machiavelli's republican reflections on Rome, civic conflict, law, military virtue, corruption, and the conditions of durable liberty.

Thomas Aquinas's disputed questions on truth, knowledge, divine ideas, conscience, and the relation between intellect, being, and God.

Hobbes's early English statement of human nature, obligation, and political authority.

Rousseau's educational novel arguing that moral freedom requires careful formation, protected development, experience, and resistance to corrupt social vanity.

Hume's clearer moral treatise arguing that utility, sympathy, sentiment, and social usefulness explain much of moral approval.

Enumeration of the Sciences is a linked work object for al-Farabi, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Essays is a linked work object for Michel de Montaigne, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Peter Abelard's ethical treatise, also known as Know Yourself, which argues that moral fault turns on consent and intention rather than the external act alone.

Spinoza's geometric system of God or Nature, mind, affect, bondage, and freedom through understanding.

Fear and Trembling is a linked work object for Soren Kierkegaard, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Machiavelli's history of Florence, using faction, ambition, class conflict, and institutional weakness to diagnose republican instability.

Judith Butler's 1990 work arguing that gender is performative, produced through repeated norms, and not the expression of a fixed inner essence.

Pico della Mirandola's sevenfold interpretation of Genesis, joining biblical exegesis, metaphysics, allegory, and Renaissance concord.

Peter Abelard's autobiographical account of ambition, conflict, teaching, punishment, and misfortune in the twelfth-century schools.

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1794 attempt to interpret the French Revolution as a moral and political crisis of liberty, violence, reform, and civic character.

Locke's defense of religious toleration through the limits of civil power, the nature of belief, and the distinction between church and commonwealth.

Hobbes's major work on human nature, fear, covenant, sovereignty, and the artificial person of the state.

Ibn Rushd's major commentary on Aristotle's psychology, central to later debates over intellect, soul, and Latin Averroism.

Text of debates and teachings associated with Mencius, central for Confucian moral psychology, human nature, and humane government.

Francisco Suarez's systematic metaphysical work that reorganized scholastic debates on being, causality, substance, distinction, and God for early modern school philosophy.

Maimonides' systematic code of Jewish law, organizing practice with philosophical confidence in order, clarity, and legal completeness.

Leibniz's dense summary of monads, perception, pre-established harmony, and the rational order of the world.

Anselm's rational meditation on God, goodness, divine attributes, and the intelligibility of faith before the more compressed Proslogion.

Nagarjuna's root verses of Madhyamaka, arguing that dependent arising and emptiness undercut inherent existence without collapsing conventional truth.

Francis Bacon's posthumously published utopian fiction imagining a research society organized around experiment, collective knowledge, and public benefit.

Leibniz's line-by-line rationalist response to Locke on ideas, experience, necessity, and innate structure.

New Science is a linked work object for Giambattista Vico, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Francis Bacon's 1620 work proposing a new method of inquiry built around induction, experiment, and the correction of mental idols.

Margaret Cavendish's major critique of experimental science, mechanism, instruments, and dead matter, defending active and perceptive nature.

On First Philosophy is a linked work object for al-Kindi, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Francisco Suarez's major work on law, obligation, natural law, human law, divine law, political authority, and the common good.

On the Intellect is a linked work object for al-Kindi, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

On the Study Methods of Our Time is a linked work object for Giambattista Vico, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Pico della Mirandola's famous preface to his planned disputation, presenting human dignity as the freedom to shape oneself upward or downward.

Duns Scotus's major revised commentary on the Sentences, central for univocity, formal distinction, haecceity, divine freedom, and scholastic metaphysics.

Pensees is a linked work object for Blaise Pascal, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Montesquieu's satirical epistolary novel using foreign observers to expose French absolutism, religious authority, gender hierarchy, and social vanity.

Plato's dialogue on Socrates' final hours, the soul, death, purification, Forms, and the hope that philosophy prepares one to die well.

Voltaire's essays on England using religious toleration, liberty, commerce, Locke, and Newton to criticize French absolutism and dogmatism.

Suhrawardi's central work, presenting Illuminationist method through logic, knowledge by presence, and a metaphysics of light.

Marsilio Ficino's major defense of the soul's immortality and Christian Platonist account of reality, ascent, and divine order.

Pointers and Reminders is a linked work object for Ibn Sina, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Spinoza's unfinished mature political work on power, institutions, democracy, and politics as part of nature.

Descartes's textbook-style attempt to present metaphysics and natural philosophy as one ordered system.

Anne Conway's compact metaphysical system, rejecting Cartesian dualism through a living hierarchy of created substances.

Anselm's prayerful philosophical meditation containing the famous ontological argument from God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived.

Provincial Letters is a linked work object for Blaise Pascal, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Duns Scotus's scholastic questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics, important for being, causality, substance, individuation, and the science of metaphysics.

William of Ockham's quodlibetal questions, applying his nominalist logic and theological method to universals, knowledge, divine power, and disputed scholastic problems.

Duns Scotus's disputed questions across theology and philosophy, showing his method on divine power, will, metaphysics, and moral problems.

al-Ghazali's major synthesis of law, ethics, worship, psychology, and Sufi purification into a program of religious renewal.

Peter Abelard's collection of apparently conflicting authorities, designed to train readers in dialectical method, distinctions, and disciplined interpretation.

Mary Astell's sharp critique of marriage, dependence, and the inconsistency of political liberty beside domestic domination.

William of Ockham's major logical work, central for term logic, supposition theory, nominalism, universals, and the parsimonious analysis of language.

Plato's dialogue on love, desire, beauty, ascent, Socrates, Diotima, and the movement from bodily attraction to philosophical vision.

A shorter Suhrawardian work presenting light, soul, hierarchy, and spiritual metaphysics in a compact form.

Francis Bacon's 1605 survey and defense of learning, arguing for the renewal, classification, and practical expansion of knowledge.

Margaret Cavendish's speculative fiction that stages questions about science, rule, gender, imagination, and philosophical world-making.

Mary Astell's Anglican defense of rational Christianity, moral duty, and women's authority in theological argument.

The Human Condition is a linked work object for Hannah Arendt, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Machiavelli's compact analysis of princely power, necessity, appearance, fortune, and political action under unstable conditions.

The Virtuous City is a linked work object for al-Farabi, seeded so the wiki graph has a page for this reference.

Leibniz's defense of divine goodness, freedom, and the claim that this is the best possible world.

Spinoza's defense of biblical criticism, freedom of thought, and a political order that limits religious coercion.

Marsilio Ficino's guide to the health, temperament, melancholy, and cosmic setting of the intellectual life.

Berkeley's dialogue defense of immaterialism against the belief in matter as something beyond perception.

Plato's cosmological dialogue on order, the demiurge, receptacle, world soul, mathematics, nature, and the intelligibility of the cosmos.

Mulla Sadra's major synthesis of Avicennian philosophy, Illuminationism, Ibn Arabi, Shi'i theology, and the soul's journey through existence.

Berkeley's main statement of immaterialism: objects are ideas, and to be is to be perceived.

Locke's major political work defending natural rights, consent, property, resistance to tyranny, and government as a fiduciary trust.

Kant's formula of universal law in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: act only on maxims that can be willed as universal laws.