Great Ideas of Philosophy

Herodotus. The Persian Wars. G. Rawlinson, trans. New York: Random House, 1942. HISTORY 101, as itsinventor intended it.Hippocrates. Works of various authors, all presumably in the “Hippocratic” tradition, revealing the essentials ofHippocratic medicine.⎯⎯⎯. “On the Wounds of the Head,” in Hippocrates, W. Jones, trans. New York: Putnam, 1923. The Hippocraticunderstanding of brain-based disorders is a remarkable achievement given its date and the method then available.Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Here is the “mechanistic” and scientificapproach to statecraft by one of the architects of modern thought on the nature of law and society.Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. An interesting account ofTuring’s background, his approach to the problem of decidability, and his achievements in code-breaking.Hollingdale, R. J. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965.An accessible account of an elusive and, indeed, troubled mind, as revealed in selections from his major works.Homer. The Iliad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. The “Genesis” of Hellenism.Honore, A. Emperors and Lawyers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. An authoritative and non-technicalintroduction to Roman law and to the part taken in its development by a number of emperors.Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Essays Moral, Political and Literary. Eugene Miller, ed. Indianapolis:Liberty Fund, 1985. Eugene Miller has collected the most important of Hume’s briefer works, including essays thatHume withdrew from publication.Hume, Robert, trans. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Snippets thatconvey the elusive but elevating abstractions of Hindu thought.Hussey, E. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. This is a fine collectionof the sparse record that remains of this fertile philosophical tradition.Irwin, T.H. Plato’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.Isocrates. Panegyricus. George Norlen, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 2000.In this work one hears the rhetoric of Isocrates as he attempts to persuade Hellenes to locate their true enemy(Persia) and to cease fighting with each other. In this same place, he identifies the “Hellene” as one committed to aconception of culture.James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe. Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1977.Empiricism with the courage of its convictions, liberated from all forms of the “block universe.”Kant, I. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. In this work,Kant labors to make clearer what is rather ponderously developed in his Critique of Practical Reason. It is, ofcourse, one of the classic works in moral philosophy.⎯⎯⎯. Critique of Pure Reason. N.K. Smith, trans. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. One of the more difficulttreatises in all of philosophy; the most systematic of epistemologies and of attempts to determine the nature andlimits of rational comprehension.———. The Moral Law. New York: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1948. An abbreviated version of the secondcritique and rather more accessible.Kaufmann, W. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1961. Carefully chosen by a leading scholar, thishandy volume samples the full range of Nietzsche’s critical perspective on life and thought.Keen, M. Chivalry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. This is the best study of an often misunderstoodsocial institution; the one that conveyed to European civilization much that is “civilizing” in human conduct.Kim, J. Mind in a Physical World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Another approach to the mind/body problem.Larner, Christina. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. New York: Blackwell, 1984. A mostinteresting analysis of the “witch” theory and the “science” surrounding it.Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. Robert Latta, trans. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1981. These short and numbered passages convey significant features of Leibniz’s philosophy ofmind.44©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership