Modern Intellectual History

Showing 1–24 of 32 results

  • Early Modern Philosophy

    This new anthology of early modern philosophy enriches the possibilities for teaching this period by highlighting not only metaphysics and epistemology, but also new themes…

  • Discourse on Method

    The Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences offers a concise presentation and defense of René Descartes’s method…

  • Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy

    This volume provides new translations of René Descartes’s two most important philosophical works. The Discourse offers a concise presentation and defense of Descartes’s method of…

  • Grounds of Natural Philosophy

    This edition aims to make Margaret Cavendish’s most mature philosophical work more accessible to students and scholars of the period. Grounds of Natural Philosophy is…

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings

    This classroom edition includes On the Social Contract, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and the…

  • Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…

  • Civil Disobedience

    In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as…

  • Utilitarianism – Ed. Bailey

    Utilitarianism is a classic work of ethical theory, arguably the most persuasive and comprehensible presentation of this widely influential position. While he didn’t invent utilitarianism,…

  • Civilization and Its Discontents

    In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud extends and clarifies his analysis of religion; analyzes human unhappiness in contemporary civilization; ratifies the critical importance of the…

  • On Perpetual Peace

    Kant’s landmark essay “On Perpetual Peace” is as timely, relevant, and inspiring today as when it was first written over 200 years ago. In it…

  • The Second Treatise of Civil Government

    In this, the second of his Two Treatises of Government, John Locke examines humankind’s transition from its original state of nature to a civil society.…

  • On Liberty – Ed. Kahn

    In this work, Mill reflects on the struggle between liberty and authority and defends the view that “the only purpose for which power can be…

  • Meditations on First Philosophy

    Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the Meditations on First Philosophy presents numerous powerful arguments that to this day influence debates in epistemology, the…

  • Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous

    This is a new critical edition of Berkeley’s 1734 (third edition, first 1713) Three Dialogues, a text that is deservedly one of the most challenging…

  • Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Writings

    This is an edition of what are arguably Leibniz’s three most important presentations of his metaphysical system: the Discourse on Metaphysics, from 1686, and The…

  • The Future of an Illusion

    Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, declared that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis in his famous work of 1927, The Future of an Illusion.…

  • An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

    Over a series of elegantly written, engaging essays, the Enquiry examines the experiential and psychological sources of meaning and knowledge, the foundations of reasoning about…

  • The Age of Reason

    The Age of Reason is one of the most influential defences of Deism (the idea that God can be known without organized religion) ever written.…

  • Rights of Man

    Advocating equality, meritocracy, and social responsibility in plain language, Thomas Paine galvanized tens of thousands of readers and changed the framework of political discourse with…

  • Beyond the Pleasure Principle

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces…

  • Leviathan – Revised Edition

    Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. Beginning with premises that…

  • Leviathan, Parts I and II – Revised Edition

    Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. Beginning with premises that…

  • Utilitarianism – Ed. Heydt

    John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism, a moral theory stating that right actions are those that tend to promote overall happiness.…

  • Candide

    The philosophical problem of evil—that a supposedly good God could allow terrible human suffering—troubled the minds of eighteenth-century thinkers as it troubles us today. Voltaire’s…