Philosophy classics

Socrates defends his beliefs before an Athenian jury and explains why he questions other people.

Socrates examines justice through an imagined city, asking whether living justly is better than living unjustly.

Laozi's short teachings consider the way of nature as a guide for human conduct and rulers.

Cicero examines what people owe one another when personal advantage comes into conflict with honour.

Epictetus grounds his advice for daily life in the distinction between what we control and what we cannot.

Marcus Aurelius connects philosophical reflection with daily choices about fairness, self-control, and events beyond his control.

Augustine reflects on his life, education, and search for truth while addressing God about his turn to Christianity.

A prisoner converses with Philosophy about fortune, happiness, and freedom while confronting his own grief.

Maimonides addresses tensions between Jewish scripture and philosophy through a letter to a troubled student.

More uses discussion of an island without private property to examine poverty and how countries should be governed.

Machiavelli examines political power through the practical problems rulers face when gaining states and holding authority.

Descartes makes doubt a starting point for examining education, certainty, and the foundations of knowledge.

Locke argues that political authority rests on consent and that government must protect people's rights.

Hume brings beliefs, emotions, and moral judgments into an inquiry grounded in observation of human nature.

Hume examines how experience and habit shape beliefs, beginning with questions about where our ideas come from.

Rousseau examines how property, law, and government transform human differences into forms of social inequality.

Smith examines how sympathy shapes judgments of conduct and how people develop concern for others.

Kant investigates the limits of reason, asking what knowledge requires experience and what reason alone can establish.

Kant seeks a moral principle grounded in reason rather than personal wishes, feelings, or expected rewards.

Wollstonecraft argues for women's education as a means of developing independent reason rather than obedience.

Hegel traces consciousness from immediate sense experience towards understanding itself through conflicts in its ways of knowing.

Marx and Engels argue that class conflict drives history and call for workers to unite against capitalism.

Schopenhauer examines suffering, desire, and death through his argument that a blind striving governs life.

Nietzsche challenges inherited beliefs about truth and morality, questioning the supposed impartiality of philosophical arguments.

Confucius connects personal virtue with good government, placing learned conduct at the centre of social order.