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THE PHILOSOPHERS IN AN HOUR OR SO ...

THE ABRIDGED TEXTS
Aristotle - Ethics
Aristotle - Politics
Augustine - Confessions
Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic
Bacon - Advancement of Learning
Bentham - Morals and Legislation
Berkeley - Principles of Human Knowledge
Boethius - Consolations of Philosophy
Burke - Revolution in France
Cicero - Friendship and Old Age
Clausewitz - On War
Comte - Positive Philosophy
Confucius - The Analects
Copernicus - The Revolutions
Darwin - The Origin of Species
Descartes - Discourse on Method
Descartes - Meditations
Einstein's Relativity
Emerson - Nature
Epicurus - Sovran Maxims
Erasmus - Praise of Folly
Euclid - Elements
Freud - Psychoanalysis
Galileo - Two World Systems
Hayek - The Road to Serfdom
Hegel - Philosophy of History
Hegel - Philosophy of Religion
Hobbes - Leviathan
Hume - Human Understanding
James - Varieties of Religious Experience
Kant - Critiques of Reason
Kant - Metaphysics of Morals
Kierkegaard - Either Or
Leibniz - Monadology
Locke - Human Understanding
Machiavelli - The Prince
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Marx - The Communist Manifesto
Marx and Engels - German Ideology
Mill - On Liberty
Mill - System of Logic
More - Utopia
Newton - Principia
Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals
Paine - Rights of Man
Pascal - Thoughts
Plato - The Apology
Plato - The Republic
Plato - The Symposium
Popper - Scientific Discovery
Rand - Selfishness
Rousseau - Confessions
Rousseau - Social Contract
Sade - Philosophy in the Boudoir
Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism
Schopenhauer - World as Will and Idea
Smith - Wealth of Nations
Spinoza - Ethics
The Ancient Greeks
The Aphorisms of the Philosophers
Thoreau - Walden
Tocqueville - America
Turing - Computing Machinery
Wittgenstein - Tractatus
Wollstonecraft - Rights of Woman




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So, what is philosophy?

Philosophy, at least in the Western Way, is something to do with arguing about definitions, so, of course, philosophers have never managed to agree on a definition of Philosophy itself. It seems to be about finding ways of making the world comprehensible, the science of making sense, if you like.

It works like this; once a Philosopher manages to find a little bit of comprehensibility, the search is over, that bit stops being called 'Philosophy' and it becomes a new subject with a new name all of its own. Over the past twenty-five centuries or so that is how Philosophy, the 'Queen of Sciences', has given birth to astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics and all the natural science, as well as psychology, sociology, linguistics and the rest, it is why the greatest experts, no matter what their field, are still called Doctors of Philosophy, and it is why quite a lot of the Old Philosophies here on the Squashed pages, aren't usually called 'Philosophy' any more.

Other Resources

I like...
Modern philosophy reviews at Notre Dame UniversityThe Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyFree texts from Gutenberg


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About Glyn and the Squashed Philosophers...


Glyn with the Sadhus of The Pashupatinath, Nepal

Squashed Philosophers is entirely my fault - Glyn Hughes of Derbyshire in England. Contact me at glynhughes@btinternet.com. Complaints are especially welcome.
I do keep getting asked if, having spent so long dissecting all those wise tomes in such detail, I haven't stumbled upon some magnificent all-embracing solution to the Problems of Philosophy and the World. Well, there is this: Glyn on Human Nature, which I think you'll find highly entertaining.

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