David Hume’s (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/) Treatise on Human Nature (1739) and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) are amongst the most widely studied texts in philosophy. They deserve to be. Hume was the most profound thinker ever to write in English. A recent informal poll of contemporary leading philosophers on the philosophy bites website(http://philosophybites.com/2012/11/whos-your-favourite-philosopher.html) brought out Hume as massively […]

Continuum’s Guides for the Perplexed (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/guides-for-the-perplexed) are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of

Socrates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) himself did not write any philosophical texts. Our knowledge of the man and his philosophy is based on writings by his students and contemporaries, particularly Plato’s dialogues, but also the writings of Aristotle, Xenophon and Aristophanes. As these are either the partisan philosophical texts of his supporters, or works of dramatic

Janus: A Summing Up is a 1978 book by Arthur Koestler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler) that develops his philosophical idea of the holarchy, introduced in his 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine). The holarchy provides a coherent way of organizing knowledge and nature all together. The idea of the holarchy is that everything we can think of

It’s fair to say that Friedrich Nietzsche (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/) probably divides opinion more than any other philosopher. A great many philosophers do not even think he counts as one of their number. Yet in a 2005 BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time‘ poll (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_vote_result.shtml) to guage estimations of who was the greatest philosopher in history, Nietzsche came 4th

Aristotle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/) is widely regarded as the greatest of all philosophers; indeed, he is traditionally referred to simply as `the philosopher’. Today, after more than two millennia, his ideas continue to stimulate thinkers and provoke them to controversy. The secondary literature is vast. The task of embracing Aristotle is like an ant setting out on the