What Philosophy argues
- From Greece, Rome, and China to early-modern and modern Europe, the same question is asked in different keys: what is the good life, and how should reason lead us to it?
- Philosophy is wisdom literature grown systematic — counsel turned into argument, the aphorism turned into the dialogue and the treatise.
Primary works in Philosophy (16)
- Plato — Republic (−375) — Book · read the full text
- Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics (−340) — Book · read the full text
- Confucius — Analects (−475) — Book · read the full text
- Mencius — Mencius (−300) — Book · read the full text
- Laozi — Tao Te Ching (−400) — Book · read the full text
- Zhuang Zhou — Zhuangzi (−300) — Book · read the full text
- Epictetus — Enchiridion (125) — Book · read the full text
- Marcus Aurelius — Meditations (180) — Book · read the full text
- Epicurus — Letter to Menoeceus; Principal Doctrines (−300) — Book · read the full text
- Spinoza — Ethics (1677) — Book · read the full text
- Hume — An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) — Book · read the full text
- Kant — Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) — Book · read the full text
- Bentham — An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) — Book · read the full text
- Mill — Utilitarianism (1863) — Book · read the full text
- Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality (1886) — Book · read the full text
- Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) — Book · view citation
Chambers connected to Philosophy
- Governance & Society — Ethics becomes politics the moment the good life is asked of a city rather than a person — Plato and Aristotle cross both hexagonal galleries.
- History — The philosophers' search for permanent truths and the historians' record of change are the two halves of how antiquity tried to understand the world.
- Wisdom Literature — Philosophy descends directly from the gnomic counsel-tradition; the Analects and the Tao Te Ching still wear the aphoristic form of their wisdom-literature ancestors.
Reading Trails through Philosophy
- Foundations of the Just Society Reading Trail — The argument for how we should live together, from philosophy to law.