📚 The library
Read the originals
Every work your courses cite, in full — 41 books, 2,440,311 words. Click any citation in a lesson and you land on the exact passage.
Currently reading
Ancient Greek philosophy
Plato
🏛️ Republic c. 375 BCE · tr. Paul Shorey What is justice, and is the just life actually better? Ten books that build a city in words to find out — and give us the Cave. 125,770 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🕊️ Phaedo c. 380 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler Socrates' last day, and four arguments that the soul outlives the body. He is hours from the hemlock — and cheerful. 28,220 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek ⚖️ Apology c. 399 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler Socrates on trial for his life, refusing to grovel. The unexamined life is not worth living — said to the men about to end his. 11,742 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🔓 Crito c. 399 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler His friends have bribed the guards and the door is open. Socrates argues himself into staying. 5,715 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 📐 Meno c. 385 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb Can virtue be taught? Detours into a paradox about learning and a slave boy who does geometry he was never taught. 13,244 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🗣️ Protagoras c. 380 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb Socrates versus the most famous sophist alive, on whether virtue is knowledge — and whether anyone knowingly does wrong. 23,461 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🎭 Gorgias c. 380 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb Rhetoric on trial. Is it better to suffer wrong than to do it? Callicles says that is a slave’s answer. 36,945 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🔄 Parmenides c. 370 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler Plato takes his own Theory of Forms apart, including the Third Man regress. Philosophy’s great act of self-criticism. 19,776 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🧠 Theaetetus c. 369 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler What is knowledge? Three answers tried and all three broken — including "man is the measure of all things". 34,155 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🌌 Timaeus c. 360 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb Plato’s cosmology: a craftsman god shaping the world from geometry. The dialogue that taught the Middle Ages its physics. 35,292 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🍷 Symposium c. 385 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler A drinking party where everyone must praise Love — and the ladder that climbs from one beautiful body to Beauty itself. 23,916 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek ⛪ Euthyphro c. 399 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler On the courthouse steps, Socrates asks a man prosecuting his own father what piety actually is — and gets five answers, none of which survive. 6,985 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🛡️ Laches c. 380 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb Two generals are asked what courage is. Neither can say — which is awkward, since they teach it. 10,801 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🪞 Charmides c. 380 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb What is temperance — self-control, modesty, or knowing yourself? An early dialogue that ends, honestly, in failure. 11,195 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🔤 Cratylus c. 380 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler Do names belong to things by nature or by convention? Philosophy’s first sustained argument about language. 24,124 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🐎 Phaedrus c. 370 BCE · tr. Harold North Fowler Love, rhetoric, and the soul as a charioteer driving two horses — plus Plato’s famous complaint that writing weakens memory. 23,225 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🪖 Alcibiades c. 390 BCE · tr. W. R. M. Lamb Socrates takes apart the ambitions of Athens’ most glamorous young man, and arrives at "know thyself". 15,236 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek 🌊 Critias c. 360 BCE · tr. R. G. Bury The unfinished sequel to the Timaeus, and the origin of Atlantis — a story that breaks off mid-sentence. 7,296 words · cited by Stephanus numbers
⇄ Greek
Aristotle
🔺 Metaphysics c. 340 BCE · tr. Hugh Tredennick "All men by nature desire to know." Fourteen books on being, substance, and the Prime Mover that moves without being moved. 108,339 words · cited by Bekker numbers
⇄ Greek 🎯 Nicomachean Ethics c. 340 BCE · tr. H. Rackham What is the good life, and how do you become the kind of person who lives it? Virtue as a hard-won habit, not a rule. 89,665 words · cited by Bekker numbers
⇄ Greek 🏛️ Politics c. 335 BCE · tr. H. Rackham Man is by nature a political animal. What cities are for, which constitutions work, and why Plato’s Republic would fail. 98,864 words · cited by Bekker numbers
⇄ Greek 🌍 On the Heavens c. 350 BCE · tr. J. L. Stocks The cosmos as Aristotle saw it: a motionless Earth, perfect circling spheres — and the claim that heavier things fall faster. 39,356 words · cited by book & chapter 💗 On the Soul c. 350 BCE · tr. Claude (AI) The soul is not a ghost in the body but its form — what a living thing does. Aristotle’s answer to Plato. 30,376 words · cited by book & chapter
⇄ Greek
AI translation
🗂️ Categories c. 350 BCE · tr. Claude (AI) The ten ways anything can be said to be — substance, quantity, quality, relation… The book that gave philosophy its filing system. 13,723 words · cited by book & chapter
⇄ Greek
AI translation
Early modern philosophy
René Descartes
🕯️ Meditations on First Philosophy 1641 · tr. John Veitch Six days of demolishing everything you believe to find one thing that survives doubt. It does: I think, therefore I am. 25,812 words · cited by Meditation number 🧭 Discourse on the Method 1637 · tr. John Veitch Descartes’ intellectual autobiography and his four rules for thinking — the book where the cogito first appears in print. 22,835 words · cited by Part number
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
🔮 The Monadology 1714 · tr. Robert Latta Ninety numbered paragraphs claiming reality is made of windowless, mirror-like simple substances — and that this is the best possible world. 6,404 words · cited by section numbers ⚖️ Theodicy 1710 · tr. E. M. Huggard If God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil? Leibniz’s book-length answer, and the origin of "the best of all possible worlds". 188,703 words · cited by section numbers
George Berkeley
👁️ Principles of Human Knowledge 1710 To be is to be perceived. Berkeley argues matter does not exist — and that this is common sense, not madness. 37,021 words · cited by section numbers 💬 Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous 1713 Berkeley’s idealism as a conversation, where the plain-speaking Philonous walks a materialist into contradiction after contradiction. 36,484 words · cited by Dialogue number
David Hume
🌊 A Treatise of Human Nature 1739 Hume’s youthful masterpiece: impressions and ideas, the missing self, and the discovery that causation is a habit of mind. 225,747 words · cited by book & chapter ❓ An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1748 The Treatise rewritten to actually be read. Hume’s fork, the problem of induction, and the attack on miracles. 57,808 words · cited by Section number
Enlightenment philosophy
Immanuel Kant
💡 What is Enlightenment? 1784 · tr. Mary C. Smith The essay that named an age. Enlightenment is our emergence from self-imposed immaturity; its motto, Sapere aude — dare to use your own understanding. 2,576 words · cited by the essay 📜 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals 1785 · tr. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott Kant hunts for the supreme principle of morality and finds it in the categorical imperative: act only on a rule you could will to be a universal law. 30,785 words · cited by section number 🧩 The Critique of Pure Reason 1781 · tr. J. M. D. Meiklejohn Kant’s Copernican turn: the mind does not conform to objects — objects conform to the mind. Space, time and cause are the lenses we cannot take off. 207,973 words · cited by part 🌍 Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim 1784 · tr. Thomas De Quincey Nine propositions arguing that history has a hidden plan: our "unsocial sociability" — the friction of living together — is what drives the species toward reason and a just civil order. 5,723 words · cited by the essay 🗝️ Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics 1783 · tr. Paul Carus The Critique of Pure Reason rewritten to be read: sixty numbered sections asking how mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics itself are possible — and answering the Hume who woke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber". 46,898 words · cited by section numbers
⇄ German