50 Classic Philosophy Books


Book Description

An anthology of 50 classic philosophy works with an active table of contents to make it easy to quickly find the book you are looking for. Works include: As A Man Thinketh by James Allen The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine Alcibiades I by Plato Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley An 'Attic' Philosopher by Emile Souvestre An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty, etc. by Frances Reynolds An Essay on the Beautiful by Plotinus An Introduction to Philosophy by George Stuart Fullerton The Analects of Confucius by James Legge The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell The Ancient East by D. G. Hogarth SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR by Sun Tzu The Basis of Morality by Annie Besant Bergson and His Philosophy by J. Alexander Gunn Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura Book of Wise Sayings by W. A. Clouston The Breath of Life by John Burroughs Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobé The Conditions of Existence as Affecting the Perpetuation of Living Beings by Thomas H. Huxley The Complete Angler 1653 by Isaak Walton The Conquest of Fear by Basil King Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad Creative Unity by Rabindranath Tagore The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant Death by Maurice Maeterlinck Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life by Samuel Taylor Coleridge A History of Freedom of Thought by John Bagnell Bury History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy by Isaac Husik The Idea of God in Early Religions by F. B. Jevons Initiation into Philosophy by Emile Faguet Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato by Thomas Taylor Kant's Theory of Knowledge by Harold Arthur Prichard The Law and the Word by Thomas Troward Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes Man And Superman by George Bernard Shaw On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau Pragmatism by William James Principles of Philosophy by Rene Descartes Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno What is Property? by P. J. Proudhon Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear by Arthur Christopher Benson Within You is the Power by Henry Thomas Hamblin Fundamental Principals of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell The Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza




The Animated Image


Book Description

Many Romans wrote about the belief that an image - a sculpture or painting, as well as a verbal description or a personage on stage - is not a representation, but the image’s prototype or that an image had particular aspects of life. A first group of authors explained these believes as incorrect observation or wrong mental processing by the beholder. Other authors pointed at the excellent craftsmanship of the maker of the image. A third group looked at the supernatural involvement of its prototype, often a god. Together these discourses on the animation of images bring us to what intellectuals from all over the Roman empire saw as reprehensible or acceptable in beholding images as works of art or as cult images. Moreover, these discourses touch upon ontological and epistemological problems. The barrier between life and death was explored and also the conditions to obtain knowledge from observation.




Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England


Book Description

The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches in a wider conversation about religious knowledge: why we need it, how to get there, where to stop, and how to recognise it once it has been attained. Its relative freedom from specialised disciplinary investments allows a literary lens to bring into focus the relatively elusive strands of thinking about belief, knowledge and salvation, probing the particulars of affect implicit in the generalities of doctrine. The essays in this volume collectively probe the dynamic between literary form, religious faith and the process, psychology and ethics of knowing in early modern England. Addressing both the poetics of theological texts and literary treatments of theological matter, they stretch from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, and cover a variety of themes ranging across religious hermeneutics, rhetoric and controversy, the role of the senses, and the entanglement of justice, ethics and practical theology. The book should appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, theologians and historians of religion, and general readers with a broad interest in Renaissance cultures of knowing.




Images of Others


Book Description

In this volume, Nathaniel Levtow articulately interacts with Mesopotamian and Israelite iconoclastic traditions, locating Israelite polemics against cult images among a spectrum of ancient West Asian literary genres and ritual practices that target the embodied deities of political opponents. Levtow argues that Israelite parodies of Mesopotamian iconic cult were not unique expressions of aniconic monotheism but assertions of Israelite political potency during and shortly after the Babylonian Exile. By interpreting Israelite icon parodies in this context, Levtow rejects the idea of “idolatry” as a static, native Israelite descriptive category and highlights the ability of Israelite writers to compose authoritative classifications of cult that profoundly influenced ancient and modern understandings of iconic worship practices. He concludes that biblical representations of iconic cult reveal dynamic acts of Israelite social formation and exemplify the enduring power of the cult image in ancient West Asian societies.




The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature


Book Description

This landmark contribution to ongoing debates about perceptions of the Jews in antiquity examines the attitudes of Greek writers of the Hellenistic period toward the Jewish people. Among the leading Greek intellectuals who devoted special attention to the Jews were Theophrastus (the successor of Aristotle), Hecataeus of Abdera (the father of "scientific" ethnography), and Apollonius Molon (probably the greatest rhetorician of the Hellenistic world). Bezalel Bar-Kochva examines the references of these writers and others to the Jews in light of their literary output and personal background; their religious, social, and political views; their literary and stylistic methods; ethnographic stereotypes current at the time; and more.







The Image of Christ in Russian Literature


Book Description

Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.




Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England


Book Description

This book capitalizes on brilliant recent work on sixteenth-century iconoclasm to extend the study of images, both their making and their breaking, into an earlier period and wider discursive territories. Pressures towards iconoclasm are powerfully registered in fourteenth and fifteenth-century writings, both heterodox and orthodox, just as the use of images is central to the practice of both politics and religion. The governance of images turns out, indeed, to be central to governance itself. It is also of critical concern in any moment of historical change, when new cultural forms must incorporate or destroy the images of the old order. The iconoclast redescribes images as pure matter, objects of idolatry worthy only of the hammer. Issues of historical memory, no less than of social ethics, are, then, inherent to the making, love, and destruction of images. These issues are the consistent concern of the essays of this volume, essays commissioned from a range of outstanding late medievalists in a variety of disciplines: literature, art history, Biblical studies, and intellectual history.




The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination


Book Description

While A Traveler Disguised focused on the rhetoric of the speaking voice or the persona in these classics, the nine essays gathered here concentrate on the artistic reconstruction of the "world" conveyed by that persona. As much as the earlier volume put to rest the conventional understanding of "Mendele the Book-Peddler" as a mere representative of the author, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, this book invalidates the common views of the literary shtetl as a mere mimetic reflection of the historical Jewish shtetl of Eastern Europe and examines its structure as an autonomous aesthetic construct. These essays dwell particularly on the fictional modalities displayed in some of Sholem Aleichem's major works. They also offer innovative insights into the works of both earlier and later masters such as A. M. Dik, Y. Aksenfeld, Y .Y. Linetski and Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Y. L. Peretz, I. M. Vaysenberg, Sh. Asch, D. Bergelson, and I. B. Singer.




The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature


Book Description

Bar Kokhba led the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 132–135 A.D., which resulted in massive destruction and dislocation of the Jewish populace of Judea. In early rabbinic literature, Bar Kokhba was remembered in two ways: as an imposter claiming to be the Messiah and as a glorious military leader whose successes led Rabbi Akiba, one of the great rabbinic authorities of Jewish tradition, to acclaim him the Messiah. These two earliest images formed the core of most later perceptions of Bar Kokhba, so that he became the prototypical false messiah and the paradigmatic rebel of Jewish history. The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature is a history of the perceptions that later Jewish writers living in the fourth through seventeenth centuries formed of this legendary hero-villain whose actions, in their eyes, had caused enormous suffering and disappointed messianic hopes. Richard Marks examines each writer's account individually and in the context of its period, exploring particularly political and religious implications. He builds a history of images and looks at larger patterns, such as the desacralizing of traditional imagery. His findings raise timely political questions about Bar Kokhba's image among Jews today.