Books

Written for himself rather than for publication, it survives as the most personal document of Roman Stoic practice.

The founding text of Western political philosophy, argued with and against for over two millennia.

The origin of virtue ethics and still the standard reference point for character-based moral theory.

The most readable entry point into Stoicism, blending moral argument with lived detail.

A pivotal challenge to moral philosophy that shaped later existentialism, genealogy, and critical theory.

Nietzsche’s most influential and most misread work, written as prophecy and parody at once.

Defined absurdism as a distinct response to the loss of inherited meaning.

The systematic core of French existentialism and its phenomenological method.

A novel that carried absurdist philosophy into world literature.

A foundational work of feminist philosophy and of situated existential ethics.

The dividing line of modern philosophy: nearly everything after responds to it.

The first fully modern social-contract argument, still central to political theory.

Copied and taught for centuries, including in Christian adaptations, it carried Stoic training into later Europe.

The first sustained Western autobiography and a bridge between ancient philosophy and medieval theology.

The organising monument of scholastic thought and still the reference point for natural-law ethics.

Written in French for a wide audience, it announced the modern turn toward the knowing subject.

Written in geometrical order and published after his death, it became the great heterodox system of the age.

The founding statement of British empiricism, decisive for Hume, Kant, and modern liberal thought.

Hume’s clearest work, and the provocation that Kant said woke him from dogmatic slumber.

The short book behind most modern rights talk and the standard rival to utilitarian ethics.

Brought Indian philosophy into European debate and shaped Nietzsche, Wagner, and Freud.

Published pseudonymously, it made Kierkegaard the starting point of existential thought.

A political pamphlet that became one of the most consequential texts of the modern era.

The classic liberal argument for free expression and the limits of majority power.

The most influential defence of consequentialist ethics, still the main rival to Kantian duty.

The book that broke Camus’ friendship with Sartre and reframed post-war debates over political violence.

Arendt’s central work of political philosophy and a lasting defence of the public realm.

The essential doorway into Socrates: short, dramatic, and still the clearest statement of philosophy as a risk taken in public.

A literary masterpiece that lets readers see philosophical eros as both desire and education.

A foundational work for political science, valuable both for its analytic clarity and for the moral limits modern readers must confront.

Dense and difficult, it established the vocabulary by which medieval and later European philosophy asked what reality most fundamentally is.

The major surviving poetic vehicle of Epicurean physics, and a decisive text for Renaissance and early modern materialism.

The fuller companion to the Enchiridion, showing Stoic practice as a demanding pedagogy rather than a set of slogans.

A monumental late-antique response to political catastrophe and one of the founding works of Christian political thought.

The most concentrated statement of Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, still unavoidable in philosophy of mind.

A central liberal text, powerful in constitutional history and troubling where rights language meets colonial property claims.

Hume’s ambitious early masterwork, less polished than the Enquiry but broader and more radical.

Nietzsche’s sharpest sustained argument and a source for later critical theory, psychoanalysis and suspicion toward moral origins.

A vast critique of political economy whose categories still shape debate about work, markets and power.

James’ public lectures made pragmatism readable, vivid and controversial far beyond academic philosophy.

The classic statement of democratic education, still central to pedagogy and public philosophy.

Short, scandalous and precise, it forced political theory to confront the gap between moral ideals and effective rule.

A founding text of feminist philosophy and Enlightenment rights argument.

One of the world’s most influential ethical texts, shaping East Asian education and public life for centuries.