Ten Great Works of Philosophy [Penguin]

In its vast scope, this book presents the continuum of Western philosophy. Ranging from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century America, it traces the history of our civilization through the seminal works of its most influential thinkers. Each philosopher in this volume made intellectual history; each created a revolution in ideas; each reaffirmed man's view of himself as a sentient being capable of creating order out of the baffling contradictions of existence. And the most powerful reflections and speculations of each are represented here.

Plato — Apology, Crito and the Death of Socrates, from Phado

Aristotle — Poetics

St. Ansem — The ontological Proof of St. Ansem, from Proslogium

St. Thomas Aquinas — St. Thomas' Proofs of God's Existence, from the SummaTheologica

Rene Descartes — Meditations on the First Philosophy

David Hume — An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Immanuel Kant — Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

John Stuart Mill — Utilitarianism

William James — The Will to Believe