In Confucius in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Confucius’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the...
With Hegel, philosophy became very difficult indeed. His dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Even Hegel conceded that "only one man understands me, and...
Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my...
From a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious and original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny. He would indeed go on to transform the nature of modern literature, employing a...
Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the...
In this collection of works by mystical poet Kahlil Gibran, the human soul is presented as essentially noble and good. His best-selling poem collection, The Prophet, is a discourse on love, good and...
In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his...
During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism—at the opportune moment when this set of ideas...
Schopenhauer, the “philosopher of pessimism,” makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. But if the world is indifferent to our fate, it doesn’t thwart us on...
