Philosophy

Advancement of Learning, The, by Francis Bacon (1605), the original title being ‘Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human.’ This book, received with great favor by the court and by scholars, was…

Bacon's “new instrument” for the study of nature, published in Latin in 1620 as the second part of his unfinished Great Instauration.

Hobbes’s account of the commonwealth as an artificial man, made by the covenant of every man with every man to escape the war of all against all: the nature of man, the rights of the sovereign and the liberty of…

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) is a book by Scottish philosopher David Hume, considered by many to be Hume's most important work and one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy.

Hume's first collection of essays, in two volumes (1741, 1742).

Four Dissertations is a collection of four essays by the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume, first published in 1757.

Sartor Resartus (meaning 'The tailor re-tailored') is an 1836 novel by Thomas Carlyle, first published as a serial in Fraser's Magazine in November 1833–August 1834.

Twelve essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “History” and “Self-Reliance” to “Art”, first published in Boston in 1841 and revised by him for the New Edition of 1847, in which most of the essays gained a verse motto of…

Eight essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “The Poet” and “Experience” to “Nominalist and Realist”, with the lecture “New England Reformers”, first published in Boston in 1844 and revised by him for the Second Edition of…

Emerson's first book, Nature (1836), collected in 1849 with nine addresses and lectures he gave between 1837 and 1844, among them “The American Scholar” and the Divinity School address.

Seven lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the uses of great men and on six of them, Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare, Napoleon and Goethe, as the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet, the man of the…

Ralph Waldo Emerson's account of England and the English, drawn from his visits of 1833 and 1847–48: their land, race, manners, wealth, aristocracy, universities, religion and literature, with his meetings with…

Mill’s essay on the nature and limits of the power that society may rightly exercise over the individual, first published in 1859 and dedicated to the memory of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill: a defence of free thought…

Nine essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Fate” to “Illusions”, each headed by a verse motto of his own, published in Boston in December 1860.

Twelve essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, first published in 1870. Most grew out of lectures he had given in the preceding years.

Newman's account of what a university is for, written when he was founding the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin.

Eleven essays and addresses by Ralph Waldo Emerson, put together from his manuscripts with the help of James Elliot Cabot and published in 1876 without a preface.

Peirce's account of how we come to settle our opinions, first printed in Popular Science Monthly in November 1877 as the opening paper of his “Illustrations of the Logic of Science”.

An anonymous eight-page pamphlet that Blood printed and sold himself at Amsterdam, New York: “a sketch of the nature, process and status of philosophy”, from Heraclitus to Hegel, which finds contradiction at the root of…

In this book, first published in book form in 1897, James ponders such conundrums as... Is life worth living?. The sentiment of rationality. The dilemma of determinism. The moral philosopher and the moral life.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James.

Blood's last book, published the year after his death: a pluralist's quarrel with the monists and idealists from Parmenides to Hegel, closing on the “anæsthetic revelation” he had first described in 1874, which William…