Philosophy, the essential books

Philosophy is the one subject in which the founding books are still the working books. A student reads Plato and Descartes not as history but as arguments waiting to be answered, and a reader outside any classroom can do exactly the same, because almost none of it assumes prior training — only patience and a willingness to be contradicted by a dead man.

This page gathers the philosophy in the Bibliomancer library, oldest first. It opens with Plato — the Republic on justice and the well-ordered city, the Symposium on love — and with Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations were notes to himself that were never meant for a reader at all. Then the moderns arrive and the questions change: Machiavelli on how power is really taken and kept, Hobbes on why anyone submits to a state, Descartes rebuilding knowledge from the one sentence he could not doubt, Hume patiently taking most of that apart again, Wollstonecraft on the education of women, Mill on liberty and on what makes an action right, Emerson and Thoreau on what a person owes the crowd and the law, Nietzsche against the whole apparatus, and William James proposing that the truth of a belief is what it does.

Several are shorter than their reputations suggest. The Discourse on the Method runs to fifty-four pages in this setting, the Symposium to sixty-two, Utilitarianism to fifty-eight — an evening each. The Republic and Leviathan are the long ones, and both are easier after the short books they argue with.

Where a work was written in Greek, Latin, French, German or Italian, the book page names the translator and the year: Plato in Benjamin Jowett’s English, Marcus Aurelius in Meric Casaubon’s, Machiavelli in W. K. Marriott’s, Descartes in John Veitch’s. With philosophy the choice of English words is part of the argument, so the book page states whose choice it was. Every text is complete and free to read online.