The Anglo-American writer and political theorist Thomas Paine (1737-1809) boldly spoke out for social and political reforms, and played an active role in the American War of Independence. His great and highly influential pamphlet, Common Sense, published in January 1776, was the first bold, explicit assault on monarchical rule, and the first advocacy of the American colonies' independence from Britain.
Written in clear language, Common Sense laid out how an independent government could be established and controlled by the people, and how rich and poor alike could share equally in...

The art of rhetoric, or persuasive public speaking, was brought to perfection in classical Athens. During the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., rhetoric came under the scrutiny of the philosophers. While Plato dismissed public speaking as mere hackwork devoid of a rational basis, Aristotle defended it as a true art.
In his great work, Treatise on Rhetoric, which laid the foundations of philosophical rhetoric, Aristotle deals at length with the processes of argument and with style, including rhythm and meter. For Aristotle, rhetoric is a brand of the art of reasoning; its function he...

Nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) championed individual strength of will and independent, reasoned deliberation above the irrational impulses that animated most of society. In The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims, two essays from his last work, Parerga und Paralipomena (1851), he discusses how to order our lives to obtain the greatest amount of pleasure and success; then he offers guidelines for living life to its fullest. But for Schopenhauer a life well lived should always reach beyond itself to a higher plane.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), author and pioneering feminist, answers Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in this, her first stirring political pamphlet. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft refutes Burke's assertions that human liberties are an "entailed inheritance," that the alliance between church and state is necessary for civil order, and that civil authority should be restricted to men "of permanent property." Rather, liberties are rights which all human beings "inherit at their birth, as rational creatures."

Comparing the lived world with the ideal world, noted American philosophical naturalist, poet, and literary critic George Santayana (1863-1952) seeks in this influential compilation of his earlier works to outline the ancient ideal of a well-ordered life, one in which reason is the organizing force that recognizes the need to allocate science, religion, art, social concerns, and practical wisdom their proper role and appropriate emphasis within the fully developed human experience.

Nearly two years before his powerful Communist Manifesto, Marx (1818-1883) co-wrote The German Ideology in 1845 with friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels expounding a new political worldview, including positions on materialism, labor, production, alienation, the expansion of capitalism, class conflict, revolution, and eventually communism. They chart the course of -true- socialism based on Hegel's dialectic, while criticizing the ideas of Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx expanded his criticism of the latter in his now famous Theses on Feuerbach, found after Marx's death...

America's most renowned social philosopher John Dewey shines his powerful intellect on the serious public and cultural issues surrounding the place of the individual in a technologically advanced society. In this penetrating study, he addresses the fear that personal creative potential will be trampled by assembly-line monotony, political bureaucracy, and an industrialized culture of uniformity. Armed with his pragmatic approach and his belief in the power of critical intelligence, Dewey argues that individualism has in fact been offered a uniquely higher plane of technological development...

A work of Nietzsche's later years, The Antichrist was written after Thus Spoke Zarathustra and shortly before the mental collapse that incapacitated him for the rest of his life. The work is both an unrestrained attack on Christianity and a further exposition of Nietzsche's will-to-power philosophy so dramatically presented in Zarathustra.
Christianity, says Nietzsche, represents "everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservative instincts of strong life." By contrast, Nietzsche defines good as: "All that...

Considered by Kant to be the culmination of his critical philosophy, "The Critique of Judgement" was the last work in the trilogy begun with "The Critique of Pure Reason" and continued with "The Critique of Practical Reason." In this work Kant seeks to establish the a priori principles underlying the faculty of judgement, just as he did in his previous analyses of pure and practical reason. The first part deals with the subject of our aesthetic sensibility; we respond to certain natural phenomena as beautiful, says Kant, when we recognise in nature a harmonious order that satisfies the mind's...

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) had a powerful influence on the development of American pragmatism in the twentieth century. He also had a strong impact on the social sciences. This classic book represents Mead's philosophy of experience, so central to his outlook.
The present as unique experience is the focus of this deep analysis of the basic structure of temporality and consciousness. Mead emphasizes the novel character of both the present and the past. Though science is predicated on the assumption that the present is predictable based on a thorough knowledge of the past, the...