The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) is one of Nietzsche's greatest books. His wonderfully fertile mind roams over mankind, his thoughts, his emotions, his behaviour and his weaknesses with remarkable clarity, with insight - but also with humour!In this work are 383 separate paragraphs, some short, some long, but all singular observations - the epitome of his famous aphoristic style. 'Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.' 'The world is overfull of beautiful things, but i...

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi-occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’He was indeed all these things and many more, being as famous in his lifetime for his political activities, working with US President Woodrow Wilson to found the League of Nations, as for being a member of the Académie française an...

The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, is the first book of modern political economy and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, to give it is full title, was an immediate best seller and has since rightfully claimed its place in the Western intellectual canon. Its author, Adam Smith (1723-1790), was one of the brightest stars of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment.Along with import...

Morrison offers an illuminating study of two linked traditions that have figured prominently in 20th-century thought: Buddhism and the philosophy of Nietzsche.Nietzsche admired Buddhism, but saw it as a dangerously nihilistic religion; he forged his own affirmative philosophy in reaction against the nihilism that he feared would overwhelm Europe. Morrison shows that Nietzsche's influential view of Buddhism was mistaken, and that far from being nihilistic, it has notable and perhaps...

It was with Human, All Too Human, first published in 1878, that Nietzsche developed the aphoristic style that so suited his challenging views and uncompromising style. The text is divided into three main sections: 'Of the First and Last Things', 'History of the Moral Feelings' and 'The Religious Life'. But the style remains the same: he declares the subjects - dream and civilisation; private ethics and world ethics; gratitude and revenge; well-wishing; vanity - and then discusses them in a...

Though Twilight of the Idols (written in a week in 1888 and subtitled How to Philosophise with a Hammer) came near the end of Nietzsche’s creative life, he actually recommended it as a starting point for the study of his work. This was because from the beginning he viewed it as an introduction to his wide-ranging views.After an opening chapter of aphorisms - ‘Maxims and Arrows’ – he takes a challenging look at ‘The Problem of Socrates’, continues to buck the trend with ‘Morality as...

Nietzsche never recovered from his mental breakdown in 1889 and therefore was unable to further any plans he had for the ‘magnum opus’ he had once intended, bringing together in a coherent whole his mature philosophy.It was left to his close friend Heinrich Köselitz and his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche to go through the remaining notebooks and unpublished writings, choosing sections of particular interest to produce The Will to Power, giving it the subtitle An Attempted Trans...

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can lay claim to being the most important single work of modern philosophy, a work whose methodology, if not necessarily always its conclusions, has had a profound influence on almost all subsequent philosophical discourse. In this work Kant addresses, in a groundbreaking elucidation of the nature of reason, the age-old question of philosophy: “How do we know what we know?” and the limits of what it is that we can know with certainty.Immanuel...

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of the towering intellectual figures of the 19th century, a philologist, philosopher and poet of profound complexity and range whose writings in moral philosophy continue to resonate in the present day. The Dawn of Day (Morgenröte), first published in 1881, marked a clear shift in his thinking and prefigures many of the ideas that would be further developed in his later writings.The clue is in the title, sometimes translated as Dawn or Morning...

Untimely Considerations contain four essays: 'David Strauss - Writer and Confessor'; 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life'; 'Schopenhauer as Educator'; and 'Richard Wagner at Bayreuth'.The essays date from the early part of Nietzsche’s life when his Romantic view on life and art was coloured by the powerful writings and personalities of such figures as Schopenhauer and Wagner - as the titles of two of the essays proclaim. Published between 1873 and 1876, they were presented un...

‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’So begins The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the first major text by Adam Smith, who, seven years later, was to publish what was to become one of the major economic classics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). However, Smith regarded The...

Throughout history philosophers have sought to define, understand, and delineate concepts important to human well-being. One such concept is "knowledge." Many philosophers believed that absolute, certain knowledge, is possible—that the physical world and ideas formulated about it could be given solid foundation unaffected by the varieties of mere opinion.Sextus Empiricus stands as an example of the "skeptic" school of thought whose members believed that knowledge was either unattai...