Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in false piety and infected with a "slave morality," and rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil.

As a mathematician, philosopher, logician, historian, socialist, pacifist, and social critic, Bertrand Russell is noted for his "revolt against idealism" in Britain in the early 20th century, as well as his pacifist activism during WWI, a campaign against Adolf Hitler and later the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. In addition to his political activism, he is considered to be one of the founders of analytic philosophy, receiving the Nobel...

"One hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche’s most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, this volume also features...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
"The Varieties of Religious Experience is certainly the most notable of all books in the field of the psychology of religion and probably destined to be the most influential [one] written on religion in the twentieth century," said Walter Houston Clark in Psychology Today.  The book was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in...

As a Jamaican immigrant arriving in the United States at the age of twenty, Jason Hill noticed how often Americans identified themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. He observed, for example, the reluctance of West Indians to joins 'black causes' for fear of losing their identity. He began to ask himself what sort of world he wanted to live in, a quest that in time led him to the idea of the cosmopolitan. In Becoming a Cosmopolitan, Jason D. Hill...

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was a prolific philosopher and public intellectual who, throughout his illustrious career, taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and, until his death, Stanford University. When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the...

In this philosophical fantasy, naive Candide sees and suffers such misfortune that he ultimately rejects the philosophy of his tutor Doctor Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Candide and his companions--Pangloss, his beloved Cunegonde, and his servant Cacambo--display an instinct for survival that provides them hope in an otherwise somber setting. When they all retire together to a simple life on a...

Counted among his admirers are Jonas Salk, Aldous Huxley, David Hockney, and Van Morrison, along with countless other philosophers, artist, writers and students of the spiritual path. Now the trustees of Krishnamurti's work have gathered his very best and most illuminating writings and talks to present in one volume the truly essential ideas of this great spiritual thinker. Total Freedom includes selections from Krishnamurti's early works, his 'Commentaries...

"The Art of Literature" by Arthur Schopenhauer is a profound exploration of the power and significance of literature in the realm of human experience. In this enlightening work, Schopenhauer delves into the essence of art and the unique capacity of literature to deeply touch the hearts and minds of its readers. Schopenhauer recognizes literature as a form of artistic expression that transcends time and space, allowing individuals to connect with the...