The Complete Essays
10 best books like The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne): Confessions, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Essays, Pensées, Maxims, New Science, Philosophical Dictionary, The Recognition of Śakuntalā, Essays and Aphorisms, Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions
| Author | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| ISBN | 0192822756 |
In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from...
| Author | François Rabelais |
| ISBN | 0140445501 |
The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c.1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world.
Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable...
| Author | Francis Bacon |
| ISBN | 0140432167 |
Bacon, an Elizabethan legal and government counselor and a scholar, wrote these enduring essays at the tail end of the 16th century. So of what practical use could they possibly be now at the start of the 21st century? From his essay “On Unity” there is this observation, “But it is greater blasphemy...
| Author | Blaise Pascal |
| ISBN | 0140446451 |
Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Penseés is a collection of philosohical fragments, notes and essays in which Pascal...
| Author | François de La Rochefoucauld |
‘Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily,’ declares La Rochefoucauld.
The editors assure us:
the same may be said of his Maxims. Few books as widely read have provoked as much resistance. Most of us can no more look at it without wavering than we could the sun. We cannot...
| Author | Giambattista Vico |
| ISBN | 0140435697 |
Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern,...
Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary is a series of short essays, hortatory and propagandist, over an enormously wide range of subjects.
It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all sides and described as 'a deplorable monument of the extent to which inteligence...
Abhijñānashākuntala = Abhignana sakuntalam = Shakuntala: A sanskrit drama by kalidas, Kālidāsa
Devanagari: अभिज्ञानशाकुन्तलम् – Abhijñānashākuntala, Shakuntala, also known as The Recognition of Shakuntala, The Sign of Shakuntala,...
| Author | Arthur Schopenhauer |
| ISBN | 0140442278 |
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writings on religion, ethics, politics, women and many other themes is taken...
| Author | Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
| ISBN | 0691018618 |
"Biographia Literaria" has emerged over the last century as a supreme work of literary criticism and one of the classics of English literature. Into this volume poured 20 years of speculation about the criticism and uses of poetry and about the psychology of art. Following the text of the 1817 edition,...
I suppose, once again, I will prove my Platonist sympathies by reviewing this book so positively. It's not that I am always in agreement with Plotinus (I'll follow this up below), but this is such an influential and foundational work of Philosophy and Neo-Platonism that I really can't give it a lower...
The Orchard: The Bostan Of Saadi Of Shiraz, Saadi
Bustan ("Būstān") is a book of poetry by the Persian poet Saadi, completed in 1257. Saadi's first work, and its title means "the orchard". The book contains the fruits of Saadi's long experience and his judgements upon life, and is illustrated...
| Author | René Descartes |
| ISBN | 0486600688 |
This is an unabridged republication of the definitive English translation of one of the very greatest classics of science. Originally published in 1637, it has been characterized as "the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences" (John Stuart Mill); as a book which "remade...
| Author | Johannes Kepler |
| ISBN | 1573920363 |
The brilliant German mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), one of the founders of modern astronomy, revolutionized the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe with his three laws of motion: that the planets move not in circular but elliptical orbits, that their speed is greatest when...
| Author | Karl Marx |
| ISBN | 0717803015 |
2011 Reprint of 1939 Edition. Parts I & III of "The German Ideology". Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Originally published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1939. "The German Ideology" was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
| Author | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| ISBN | 0812970055 |
Introduction by Brenda Wineapple
In 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson began a series of lectures and writings in which he limned six figures who embodied the principles and aspirations of a still-young American republic. Emerson offers timeless meditations on the value of individual greatness,...
| Author | Richard M. Rorty |
| ISBN | 0140262881 |
Richard Rorty is one of the most provocative figures in recent philosophical, literary and cultural debate. This collection brings together those of his writings aimed at a wider audience, many published in book form for the first time. In these eloquent essays, articles and lectures, Rorty gives...
| Author | William James |
| ISBN | 0940450380 |
Philosopher and psychologist William James was the best known and most influential American thinker of his time. The five books and nineteen essays collected in this Library of America volume represent all his major work from 1902 until his death in 1910. Most were originally written as lectures addressed...
| Author | Plutarch |
| ISBN | 0375756779 |
Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch reveals the character and personality of his subjects...
| Author | Thomas Browne |
| ISBN | 0140431098 |
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) was a writer of breathtaking range and learning, whose works demonstrate a warm and humorous view of human nature. Religio Medici is a fascinating, witty and intimate exploration of his views on faith and tolerance, while substantial selections from Pseudodoxia Epidemica...
| Author | Alfred North Whitehead |
| ISBN | 0684836394 |
Alfred North Whitehead's SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD, originally published in 1925, redefines the concept of modern science. Presaging by more than half a century most of today's cutting-edge thought on the cultural ramifications of science and technology, Whitehead demands that readers understand...
| Author | Sextus Empiricus |
| ISBN | 0521778093 |
Outlines of Scepticism, by the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, is a work of major importance for the history of Greek philosophy. It is the fullest extant account of ancient skepticism, and it is also one of our most copious sources of information about the other Hellenistic philosophies. Its...
