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The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time–A Philosophy Study Starter

Whether you’re majoring in philosophy, beginning your personal journey to better understand the universe, or you just have some humanities credits to fulfill, this is a great place to start. Logically speaking (which is an important way to speak within the context of philosophy), the most influential philosophers in history are responsible for the most influential ideas in history. These are the thinkers who put forth notions that still inform our understanding of the human condition today—groundbreaking, illuminating, ingenious (and frequently debunked) notions about reasoning, reality, spirituality, consciousness, dreams, social organization, human behavior, logic, and even love.

The list here is a portal to the history of human thought, a window into everything and nothing all at once. And yet, this is by no means a comprehensive discussion. The number of individuals who have impacted the course of human history through their insight, intuition, and intellect is far too great to quantify. And ideas expressed just by those included here fill untold volumes of writing. But based on our findings, this is the top tier of thinkers, those who paved the way for all which came after, who laid the foundation for so much of what we hold to be true, who in essence created the field of study we call philosophy.

What follows is a list of the The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of all time based on the period of history between 1000 BCE and 2000 CE. This is a bird’s eye view of philosophy, an overview from the very top, but by no means a comprehensive nor probing dive into any one area. That’s why we call this a Study Starter. We just get the ball rolling. The rest is up to you...

Influence Rankings

The InfluenceRanking engine calculates a numerical influence score for people, institutions, and disciplinary programs. It performs this calculation by drawing from Wikipedia/data, Crossref, and an ever-growing body of data reflecting academic achievement and merit.

The InfluenceRanking engine measures the influence of a given person in a given discipline, as well as in important related subdisciplines. Influence can also be measured within a specific set of time parameters. For instance, it is said that Greek thinker Pythagoras coined the term philosophy in the 6th Century BC. This, therefore, seems an appropriate starting point for the period under investigation. Accordingly, our ranking of the 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time uses the time parameters of 1000 BC to 2000 CE.

A Note On Diversity

We concede from the outset that this ranking list reflects a problem, not specifically with our algorithm, but with the human history of influence. What follows is a list composed entirely of men, most of them European, descendent from European ancestry, or famous for proliferating European ideas. Absent are the great women who have altered the course of human history by way of their ideas and actions. Also limited in appearance are the brilliant thinkers from Arabic or African antiquity, from Eastern traditions of thought, or from more recent centuries where the greatest minds were set to work on advancing civil rights.

• Top Influential Black Philosophers

This is not because we have overlooked these thinkers, nor because their contributions don’t warrant inclusion in such a list. Rather, this is a direct reflection of the enormous scope of time accounted for in our ranking. Across the vast majority of the 3000 years represented here, social, racial, and gender inequality have been very real and very consequential realities. Moreover, our rankings are limited to those thinkers whose work has enjoyed extensive translation in the English-speaking world.

Because our influence rankings measure the raw permeation of citations, writing, and ideas originating with each of these thinkers, the rigid prejudices that have persisted throughout history are also reflected on our list. This is not an endorsement of those prejudices-merely a faithful reporting on a subject which is inherently reflective of those prejudices.

Happily, when one distills a more current period of history in the philosophy discipline, one can see just how much the field of thought has evolved today, such that a meaningful number of women, people of color, and people of non-European origin are represented. This denotes a clear evolution in an academic field that, for all of its insight and illumination, also has a deep-seated history of Eurocentrism.

For a look at the philosophers with the greatest influence on the field today, check out:

• Top Influential Philosophers Today

With this limitation acknowledged, we bring you...

The Most Influential Philosophers of All Time

What follows is a list, in order, of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. Most of the names below will be familiar, though you might find a few surprises.

Other information provided below includes a condensed Wikipedia bio for each philosopher, their Key Contributions to the discipline, and Selected Works. You can also click on the profile link for each philosopher to see where they rank in specific philosophy subdisciplines, such as logic, ethics, and metaphysics.

1. Socrates (470 BC–399 BC)/ Plato (429 BC–347 BC)

*Socrates and Plato are inseparable from one another in the history of thought and are therefore inseparable in our ranking.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates’ lifetime, though a fragment of Ion of Chios’ Travel Journal provides important information about Socrates’ youth.

The most influential of Socrates’ students, Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He was the founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.

Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-called neoplatonism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato’s entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated, Plato’s works have consistently been read and studied.

Key Contributions from Socrates

• Socratic Dialogue
• Socratic Questioning
• Socratic Method

Key Contributions from Plato

• Theory of Forms
• Theory of Soul

Selected Works

*There is limited consensus about the exact publication date for each of these works. Dates below should be seen as approximations.

**Though Socrates is widely considered the father of the Western philosophical tradition, he authored no texts during his lifetime. His influence was felt in his lifetime through his dialogues with prominent pupils. Therefore, he is best read through the works of his most influential students:

• Apology of Socrates (c. 399 BC)
• The Phaedo (c. 399 BC)
• Crito (c. 399 BC)
• Symposium (c. 385-370 BC)
• The Republic (c. 375 BC)
• The Sophist (c. 360 BC)
• Timaeus (c. 360 BC)
• Symposium (c. 422 BC)
• Apology of Socrates to the Jury (c. 399 BC)
• Memorabilia (c. 371 BC)
• Oeconomicus (c. 362 BC)

Find out where Socrates among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

Find out where Plato among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

2. Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government.

Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.

Key Contributions

• Aristotelianism
• Peripatetic school
• On the Soul (c. 350 BC)
• Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC)
• Metaphysics (c. 335-323 BC)*
• Rhetoric (c. 322 BC)

Find out where this influencer ranks among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

3. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere “forms of intuition” which structure all experience, and therefore that while “things-in-themselves” exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere “appearances”, and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.

In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses. Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant’s views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.

• Categorical Imperative
• Kantian Ethics
• Practical Reason
• Transcendental Idealism
• Universal Natural History (1755)
• Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
• Critique of Judgment (1790)
• Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793)
• Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

4. René Descartes (1596–1650)

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.

Many elements of Descartes’s philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul , an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic “as if no one had written on these matters before.” His best known philosophical statement is ” cogito, ergo sum ″ (“I think, therefore I am”; French: Je pense, donc je suis ), found in Discourse on the Method (1637; in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy (1644, in Latin).

Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention given to epistemology in the 17th century.

• Cogito, Ergo Sum
• Cartesian Doubt
• Cartesian Coordinate System
• Cartesian Dualism
• Discourse on the Method (1637)
• Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
• Principles of Philosophy (1644)
• Passions of the Soul (1649)

5. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

• Master-slave Morality
• God is Dead
• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• Ecce Homo (1888; published in 1908)

6. Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum.

His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital . Marx’s political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

• Economic Determinism
• Historical Materialism
• Marxist Dialectic
• Marxist Philosophy of Nature
• Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)
• Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
• Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
• Das Kapital, Vol. 1 (1867)

7. Avicenna (980–1037)

Ibn Sina, also known as Abu Ali Sina , Pur Sina , and often known in the West as Avicenna , was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna “arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era”. He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine.

His most famous works are The Book of Healing , a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine , a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna’s corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and works of poetry.

• Islamic Metaphysics
• Proof of the Truthful
• Floating Man
• The Canon of Medicine (1025)
• The Book of Healing (1027)
• Al Nijat (Published 1913)

8. David Hume (1711–1776)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley, as a British Empiricist.

• Bundle Theory
• Association of Ideas
• Hume’s Fork
• A Treatise of Human Nature (1740)
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758)
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; posthumously)

9. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. In Heidegger’s fundamental text Being and Time (1927), “Dasein” is introduced as a term for the specific type of being that humans possess.[15] Dasein has been translated as “being there”. Heidegger believes that Dasein already has a “pre-ontological” and non-abstract understanding that shapes how it lives. This mode of being he terms “being-in-the-world”.

Commentators have noted that Dasein and “being-in-the-world” are unitary concepts in contrast with the “subject/object” view of rationalist philosophy since at least René Descartes. Heidegger uses an analysis of Dasein to approach the question of the meaning of being, which Heidegger scholar Michael Wheeler describes as “concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings”. Heidegger’s later work includes criticism of the view, common in the Western tradition, that all of nature is a “standing reserve” on call, as if it were a part of industrial inventory. Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.

*Indeed, because of Heidegger’s connection to Nazism, we consider his inclusion on this list controversial. However, his performance using our Ranking Analytics made this inclusion unavoidable. For more on the sometimes overlapping phenomena of influence and infamy, take a look at our discussion on the undeniable influence of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden .

• Heideggerian terminology
• Ontological Difference
• Being and Time (1927)
• Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929)
• Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)
• The Principle of Reason (1955-56)
• Identity and Difference (1955-57)

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the relatively slim 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise) (1921) which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus .

His only other published works were an article, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (1929), a book review, and a children’s dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations . A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations.”

• Family Resemblance
• Form of Life
• Language-Game
• Wittgenstein’s Ladder
• Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1921)
• Some Remarks on Logical Form (1929)
• Philosophical Investigations (1953)
• Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1967)

11. John Locke (1632–1704)

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

• Natural Rights
• Lockean Proviso
• Consent of the Governed
• Consciousness
• Social Contract
• A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
• Two Treatises of Government (1690)
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and an important figure in German idealism. He is considered one of the fundamental figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from aesthetics to ontology to politics, both in the analytic and continental tradition. Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism , in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome.

• Hegelian Dialectic
• Master-slave Dialectic
• Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
• Science of Logic (1812-1816)
• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)
• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)

13. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the and the . The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism; of which he argued that reason is found in God. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.

• Scholasticism
• Theological Intellectualism
• Moderate Realism
• Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265)
• Summa Theologiae (1265-1274)

14. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian Andersen were all “understood” far too quickly by “scholars”.

• Existentialism
• Leap of Faith
• On The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
• Fear and Trembling (1843)
• Either/Or (1843)
• The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

15. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl’s thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.

• Phenomenology
• Formal Ontology
• Theory of Moments
• Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)
• Logical Investigations (1900)
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Present Phenomenological Philosophy (1913)
• Cartesian Meditations (1931)

16. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. Russell was also a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.

• Analytic Philosophy
• Axiom of Reducibility
• Automated Reasoning
• Mathematical Beauty
• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• On Denoting (1905)
• Principia Mathematica (1910)
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919)

17. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

• Existence Precedes Essence
• Being-in-itself
• Nausea (1938)
• Being and Nothingness (1943)
• No Exit (1944)
• Existentialism and Humanism (1946)

18. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

• Deconstruction
• Phallogocentrism
• Speech and Phenomena (1967)
• Of Grammatology (1967)
• Writing and Difference (1967)
• Margins of Philosophy (1972)

19. Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

• Disciplinary institution
• Foucauldian discourse analysis
• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961)
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963)
• The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966)
• The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

20. Averroes (1126–1198)

Ibn Rushd (full name in Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد, romanized: Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd;) often Latinized as Averroes was a Muslim Andalusian polymath and jurist of Berber descent who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the western world as The Commentator and Father of Rationalism . Ibn Rushd also served as a chief judge and a court physician for the Almohad Caliphate. Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna.

• Unity of the Intellect
• Aristotelianism in the Islamic philosophical tradition
• Philosophy within a Muslim Religious Tradition
• The General Principles of Medicine (c. 1162)
• Decisive Treatise on the Agreement Between Religious Law and Philosophy (c. 1178-1180)
• Examination of the Methods of Proof Concerning the Doctrines of Religion (c. 1179-1180)
• The Incoherence of the Incoherence (c. 1179-1180)

21. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

John Stuart Mill , usually cited as J. S. Mill, was an English philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

• Utilitarianism
• Liberal Feminism
• Mill’s Methods
• A System of Logic (1843)
• On Liberty (1859)
• Utilitarianism (1863)
• The Subjection of Women (1869)

22. William James (1842–1910)

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the “Father of American psychology”. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James’s reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism.

• The Will to Believe
• Pragmatic Theory of Truth
• Radical Empiricism
• Stream of Consciousness
• The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• The Will To Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)
• Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

23. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a prominent German polymath and one of the most important logicians, mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment. As a representative of the seventeenth-century tradition of rationalism, Leibniz developed, as his most prominent accomplishment, the ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton’s contemporaneous developments. Mathematical works have consistently favored Leibniz’s notation as the conventional expression of calculus. It was only in the 20th century that Leibniz’s law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity found mathematical implementation.

• The Product Rule
• Law of Continuity
• Best of All Possible Worlds
• Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1864)
• Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)
• New Essays on Human Understanding (1704)
• The Theodicy (1710)
• Monadology (1714)

24. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)

• Frege’s Propositional Calculus
• Principle of Compositionality
• Context Principle
• Begriffsschrift (1879)
• The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884)
• Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893-1903)

25. John Dewey (1859–1952)

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He is regarded as one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey’s works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.” Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology.

• Instrumentalism
• Functional Psychology
• Progressive Education
• Occupational Psychosis
• Psychology (1887)
• Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888)
• Ethics (1908)
• Democracy and Education (1916)
• Art as Experience (1934)

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• How to Major in Philosophy
• What Can I do With a Master’s in Philosophy?

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Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University

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Matthew Sharpe is part of an ARC funded project on modern reinventions of the ancient idea of "philosophy as a way of life", in which Montaigne is a central figure.

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When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind . He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.

His Essays’ preface almost warns us off:

Reader, you have here an honest book; … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.

The ensuing, free-ranging essays, although steeped in classical poetry, history and philosophy, are unquestionably something new in the history of Western thought. They were almost scandalous for their day.

No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage , a subject which repeatedly concerned him.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.

If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century.

Montaigne frequently apologises for writing so much about himself. He is only a second rate politician and one-time Mayor of Bourdeaux, after all. With an almost Socratic irony , he tells us most about his own habits of writing in the essays titled “Of Presumption”, “Of Giving the Lie”, “Of Vanity”, and “Of Repentance”.

But the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that non, je ne regrette rien , as a more recent French icon sang:

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without … I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.

Montaigne’s persistence in assembling his extraordinary dossier of stories, arguments, asides and observations on nearly everything under the sun (from how to parley with an enemy to whether women should be so demure in matters of sex , has been celebrated by admirers in nearly every generation.

Within a decade of his death, his Essays had left their mark on Bacon and Shakespeare. He was a hero to the enlighteners Montesquieu and Diderot. Voltaire celebrated Montaigne - a man educated only by his own reading, his father and his childhood tutors – as “the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable”. Nietzsche claimed that the very existence of Montaigne’s Essays added to the joy of living in this world.

More recently, Sarah Bakewell’s charming engagement with Montaigne, How to Live or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) made the best-sellers’ lists. Even today’s initiatives in teaching philosophy in schools can look back to Montaigne (and his “ On the Education of Children ”) as a patron saint or sage .

So what are these Essays, which Montaigne protested were indistinguishable from their author? (“ My book and I go hand in hand together ”).

It’s a good question.

Anyone who tries to read the Essays systematically soon finds themselves overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of examples, anecdotes, digressions and curios Montaigne assembles for our delectation, often without more than the hint of a reason why.

To open the book is to venture into a world in which fortune consistently defies expectations; our senses are as uncertain as our understanding is prone to error; opposites turn out very often to be conjoined (“ the most universal quality is diversity ”); even vice can lead to virtue. Many titles seem to have no direct relation to their contents. Nearly everything our author says in one place is qualified, if not overturned, elsewhere.

Without pretending to untangle all of the knots of this “ book with a wild and desultory plan ”, let me tug here on a couple of Montaigne’s threads to invite and assist new readers to find their own way.

Philosophy (and writing) as a way of life

Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic , hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars , and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne de La Boétie through dysentery.

Certainly, for Montaigne, as for ancient thinkers led by his favourites, Plutarch and the Roman Stoic Seneca, philosophy was not solely about constructing theoretical systems, writing books and articles. It was what one more recent admirer of Montaigne has called “ a way of life ”.

Montaigne has little time for forms of pedantry that value learning as a means to insulate scholars from the world, rather than opening out onto it. He writes :

Either our reason mocks us or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment.

We are great fools . ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations.

One feature of the Essays is, accordingly, Montaigne’s fascination with the daily doings of men like Socrates and Cato the Younger ; two of those figures revered amongst the ancients as wise men or “ sages ”.

Their wisdom, he suggests , was chiefly evident in the lives they led (neither wrote a thing). In particular, it was proven by the nobility each showed in facing their deaths. Socrates consented serenely to taking hemlock, having been sentenced unjustly to death by the Athenians. Cato stabbed himself to death after having meditated upon Socrates’ example , in order not to cede to Julius Caesar’s coup d’état .

To achieve such “philosophic” constancy, Montaigne saw, requires a good deal more than book learning . Indeed, everything about our passions and, above all, our imagination , speaks against achieving that perfect tranquillity the classical thinkers saw as the highest philosophical goal.

We discharge our hopes and fears, very often, on the wrong objects, Montaigne notes , in an observation that anticipates the thinking of Freud and modern psychology. Always, these emotions dwell on things we cannot presently change. Sometimes, they inhibit our ability to see and deal in a supple way with the changing demands of life.

Philosophy, in this classical view, involves a retraining of our ways of thinking, seeing and being in the world. Montaigne’s earlier essay “ To philosophise is to learn how to die ” is perhaps the clearest exemplar of his indebtedness to this ancient idea of philosophy.

Yet there is a strong sense in which all of the Essays are a form of what one 20th century author has dubbed “ self-writing ”: an ethical exercise to “strengthen and enlighten” Montaigne’s own judgement, as much as that of we readers:

And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? … I have no more made my book than my book has made me: it is a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life …

As for the seeming disorder of the product, and Montaigne’s frequent claims that he is playing the fool , this is arguably one more feature of the Essays that reflects his Socratic irony. Montaigne wants to leave us with some work to do and scope to find our own paths through the labyrinth of his thoughts, or alternatively, to bobble about on their diverting surfaces .

A free-thinking sceptic

Yet Montaigne’s Essays, for all of their classicism and their idiosyncracies, are rightly numbered as one of the founding texts of modern thought . Their author keeps his own prerogatives, even as he bows deferentially before the altars of ancient heroes like Socrates, Cato, Alexander the Great or the Theban general Epaminondas .

There is a good deal of the Christian, Augustinian legacy in Montaigne’s makeup. And of all the philosophers, he most frequently echoes ancient sceptics like Pyrrho or Carneades who argued that we can know almost nothing with certainty. This is especially true concerning the “ultimate questions” the Catholics and Huguenots of Montaigne’s day were bloodily contesting.

Writing in a time of cruel sectarian violence , Montaigne is unconvinced by the ageless claim that having a dogmatic faith is necessary or especially effective in assisting people to love their neighbours :

Between ourselves, I have ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of singular accord …

This scepticism applies as much to the pagan ideal of a perfected philosophical sage as it does to theological speculations.

Socrates’ constancy before death, Montaigne concludes, was simply too demanding for most people, almost superhuman . As for Cato’s proud suicide, Montaigne takes liberty to doubt whether it was as much the product of Stoic tranquility, as of a singular turn of mind that could take pleasure in such extreme virtue .

Indeed when it comes to his essays “ Of Moderation ” or “ Of Virtue ”, Montaigne quietly breaks the ancient mold. Instead of celebrating the feats of the world’s Catos or Alexanders, here he lists example after example of people moved by their sense of transcendent self-righteousness to acts of murderous or suicidal excess.

Even virtue can become vicious, these essays imply, unless we know how to moderate our own presumptions.

Of cannibals and cruelties

If there is one form of argument Montaigne uses most often, it is the sceptical argument drawing on the disagreement amongst even the wisest authorities.

If human beings could know if, say, the soul was immortal, with or without the body, or dissolved when we die … then the wisest people would all have come to the same conclusions by now, the argument goes. Yet even the “most knowing” authorities disagree about such things, Montaigne delights in showing us .

The existence of such “ an infinite confusion ” of opinions and customs ceases to be the problem, for Montaigne. It points the way to a new kind of solution, and could in fact enlighten us.

Documenting such manifold differences between customs and opinions is, for him, an education in humility :

Manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me.

His essay “ Of Cannibals ” for instance, presents all of the different aspects of American Indian culture, as known to Montaigne through travellers’ reports then filtering back into Europe. For the most part, he finds these “savages’” society ethically equal, if not far superior, to that of war-torn France’s — a perspective that Voltaire and Rousseau would echo nearly 200 years later.

We are horrified at the prospect of eating our ancestors. Yet Montaigne imagines that from the Indians’ perspective, Western practices of cremating our deceased, or burying their bodies to be devoured by the worms must seem every bit as callous.

And while we are at it, Montaigne adds that consuming people after they are dead seems a good deal less cruel and inhumane than torturing folk we don’t even know are guilty of any crime whilst they are still alive …

A gay and sociable wisdom

“So what is left then?”, the reader might ask, as Montaigne undermines one presumption after another, and piles up exceptions like they had become the only rule.

A very great deal , is the answer. With metaphysics, theology, and the feats of godlike sages all under a “ suspension of judgment ”, we become witnesses as we read the Essays to a key document in the modern revaluation and valorization of everyday life.

There is, for instance, Montaigne’s scandalously demotic habit of interlacing words, stories and actions from his neighbours, the local peasants (and peasant women) with examples from the greats of Christian and pagan history. As he writes :

I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much rather have resembled.

By the end of the Essays, Montaigne has begun openly to suggest that, if tranquillity, constancy, bravery, and honour are the goals the wise hold up for us, they can all be seen in much greater abundance amongst the salt of the earth than amongst the rich and famous:

I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one … To enter a breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to … laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse with our own families and with ourselves … not to give our selves the lie, that is rarer, more difficult and less remarkable …

And so we arrive with these last Essays at a sentiment better known today from another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of A Gay Science (1882) .

Montaigne’s closing essays repeat the avowal that: “ I love a gay and civil wisdom … .” But in contrast to his later Germanic admirer, the music here is less Wagner or Beethoven than it is Mozart (as it were), and Montaigne’s spirit much less agonised than gently serene.

It was Voltaire, again, who said that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Montaigne adopts and admires the comic perspective . As he writes in “Of Experience”:

It is not of much use to go upon stilts , for, when upon stilts, we must still walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are still perched on our own bums.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Welcome to 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology , an ever-growing set of over 180 original 1000-word essays on philosophical questions, theories, figures, and arguments. 

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Kant’s Theory of the Sublime by Matthew Sanderson

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On Karl Marx’s Slogan “From Each According to their Ability, To Each According to their Need” by Sam Badger

Philosophy as a Way of Life by Christine Darr

Philosophy of Mysticism: Do Mystical Experiences Justify Religious Beliefs? by Matthew Sanderson

Ancient Cynicism: Rejecting Civilization and Returning to Nature by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

“Properly Basic” Belief in God: Believing in God without an Argument by Jamie B. Turner

Philosophy of Time: Time’s Arrow by Dan Peterson

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Aristotle on Friendship: What Does It Take to Be a Good Friend? by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: the Journey Out of Ignorance by Spencer Case

Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long

The Doctrine of Double Effect: Do Intentions Matter to Ethics? by Gabriel Andrade

The Buddhist Theory of No-Self (Anātman/Anattā) by Daniel Weltman

Self-Knowledge: Knowing Your Own Mind by Benjamin Winokur

The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point? and Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? by Matthew Pianalto

The Philosophy of Humor: What Makes Something Funny? by Chris A. Kramer

Karl Marx’s Theory of History by Angus Taylor

Saving the Many or the Few: The Moral Relevance of Numbers by Theron Pummer

Philosophy of Space and Time: What is Space? and Philosophy of Space and Time: Are the Past and Future Real ? by Dan Peterson

What Is Misogyny? by Odelia Zuckerman and Clair Morrissey

Philosophy and Race: An Introduction to Philosophy of Race by Thomas Metcalf

“Can They Suffer?”: Bentham on our Obligations to Animals  by Daniel Weltman

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas”: Would You Walk Away? by Spencer Case

Indoctrination: What is it to Indoctrinate Someone? by Chris Ranalli

Agnosticism about God’s Existence by Sylwia Wilczewska

African American Existentialism: DuBois, Locke, Thurman, and King by Anthony Sean Neal

Conspiracy Theories by Jared Millson

Philosophical Inquiry in Childhood by Jana Mohr Lone

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Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” by Charles Miceli and  Descartes’ Meditations by Marc Bobro

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Philosophy and Its Contrast with Science : Comparing Philosophical and Scientific Understanding  by Thomas Metcalf

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Is it Wrong to Believe Without Sufficient Evidence? W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” by Spencer Case. 

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41 Bertrand Russell–two essays

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell , 1872 – 1970 CE, was a British philosopher, writer, social critic and political activist. In the early 20th century, Russell led the British “revolt against idealism”.  He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy.  Russell was an anti-war activist and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.    He did conclude that the war against Adolf Hitler was a necessary “lesser of two evils”  He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 “”in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

In “Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday” (“Postscript” in his  Autobiography ), Russell wrote: “I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social.

Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times.

Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken”.

You might find it interesting to see the two things that he believed he would like to say to a future generation.  It takes less than 2 minutes, but in 1959, this is what Bertrand Russell had to say:

Message to Future Generations

From  Bertrand Russell’s: The Problems of Philosophy: Chapter XV: The Value of Philosophy

This is a short interview with Woodrow Wyatt in 1960, when Russell was 87 years old.

Mankind’s Future and Philosophy

The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests : family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins.

Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.

One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad—it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.

The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense organs distort as much as they reveal.

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thralldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Key Takeaway

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied , not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE

FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA

Delivered at south place institute on march 24, 1922, by the hon. bertrand russell, m.a., f.r.s., (professor graham wallas in the chair), watts & co., johnson’s court, fleet street, e.c.4 1922.

Moncure Conway, in whose honor we are assembled to-day, devoted his life to two great objects: freedom of thought and freedom of the individual.

“In regard to both these objects, something has been gained since his time, but something also has been lost. New dangers, somewhat different in form from those of past ages, threaten both kinds of freedom, and unless a vigorous and vigilant public opinion can be aroused in defense of them, there will be much less of both a hundred years hence than there is now. My purpose in this address is to emphasize the new dangers and to consider how they can be met.

Let us begin by trying to be clear as to what we mean by “free thought.” This expression has two senses.

In its narrower sense it means thought which does not accept the dogmas of traditional religion. In this sense a man is a “free thinker” if he is not a Christian or a Mussulman or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a member of any of the other bodies of men who accept some inherited orthodoxy. In Christian countries a man is called a “free thinker” if he does not decidedly believe in God, though this would not suffice to make a man a “free thinker” in a Buddhist country.

I do not wish to minimize the importance of free thought in this sense. I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.

But there is also a wider sense of “free thought,” which I regard as of still greater importance. Indeed, the harm done by traditional religions seems chiefly traceable to the fact that they have prevented free thought in this wider sense. The wider sense is not so easy to define as the narrower, and it will be well to spend some little time in trying to arrive at its essence.

To begin with the most obvious. Thought is not “free” when legal penalties are incurred by the holding or not holding of certain opinions, or by giving expression to one’s belief or lack of belief on certain matters. Very few countries in the world have as yet even this elementary kind of freedom.

In England, under the Blasphemy Laws , it is illegal to express disbelief in the Christian religion, though in practice the law is not set in motion against the well-to-do. It is also illegal to teach what Christ taught on the subject of non-resistance. Therefore, whoever wishes to avoid becoming a criminal must profess to agree with Christ’s teaching, but must avoid saying what that teaching was.

In America no one can enter the country without first solemnly declaring that he disbelieves in anarchism and polygamy; and, once inside, he must also disbelieve in communism.

In Japan it is illegal to express disbelief in the divinity of the Mikado . It will thus be seen that a voyage round the world is a perilous adventure.

A Mohammedan, a Tolstoyan, a Bolshevik, or a Christian cannot undertake it without at some point becoming a criminal, or holding his tongue about what he considers important truths. This, of course, applies only to steerage passengers; saloon passengers are allowed to believe whatever they please, provided they avoid offensive obtrusiveness.

Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts . The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search. Both these obstacles exist in every large country known to me, except China, which is the last refuge of freedom. It is these obstacles with which I shall be concerned—their present magnitude, the likelihood of their increase, and the possibility of their diminution.

We may say that thought is free when it is exposed to free competition among beliefs —i.e., when all beliefs are able to state their case, and no legal or pecuniary advantages or disadvantages attach to beliefs. This is an ideal which, for various reasons, can never be fully attained. But it is possible to approach very much nearer to it than we do at present.

Three incidents in my own life will serve to show how, in modern England, the scales are weighted in favor of Christianity. My reason for mentioning them is that many people do not at all realize the disadvantages to which avowed Agnosticism still exposes people.

• The first incident belongs to a very early stage in my life. My father was a Freethinker, but died when I was only three years old. Wishing me to be brought up without superstition, he appointed two Freethinkers as my guardians. The Courts, however, set aside his will, and had me educated in the Christian faith. I am afraid the result was disappointing, but that was not the fault of the law. If he had directed that I should be educated as a Christadelphian or a Muggletonian or a Seventh-Day Adventist, the Courts would not have dreamed of objecting. A parent has a right to ordain that any imaginable superstition shall be instilled into his children after his death, but has not the right to say that they shall be kept free from superstition if possible.
• The second incident occurred in the year 1910 . I had at that time a desire to stand for Parliament as a Liberal, and the Whips recommended me to a certain constituency. I addressed the Liberal Association, who expressed themselves favorably, and my adoption seemed certain. But, on being questioned by a small inner caucus, I admitted that I was an Agnostic. They asked whether the fact would come out, and I said it probably would. They asked whether I should be willing to go to church occasionally, and I replied that I should not. Consequently, they selected another candidate, who was duly elected, has been in Parliament ever since, and is a member of the present Government.
• The third incident occurred immediately afterwards. I was invited by Trinity College, Cambridge, to become a lecturer, but not a Fellow. The difference is not pecuniary; it is that a Fellow has a voice in the government of the College, and cannot be dispossessed during the term of his Fellowship except for grave immorality. The chief reason for not offering me a Fellowship was that the clerical party did not wish to add to the anti-clerical vote. The result was that they were able to dismiss me in 1916, when they disliked my views on the War. If I had been dependent on my lectureship, I should have starved.

These three incidents illustrate different kinds of disadvantages attaching to avowed freethinking even in modern England. Any other avowed Freethinker could supply similar incidents from his personal experience, often of a far more serious character. The net result is that people who are not well-to-do dare not be frank about their religious beliefs.

It is not, of course, only or even chiefly in regard to religion that there is lack of freedom. Belief in communism or free love handicaps a man much more than Agnosticism. Not only is it a disadvantage to hold those views, but it is very much more difficult to obtain publicity for the arguments in their favor. On the other hand, in Russia the advantages and disadvantages are exactly reversed: comfort and power are achieved by professing Atheism, communism, and free love, and no opportunity exists for propaganda against these opinions. The result is that in Russia one set of fanatics feels absolute certainty about one set of doubtful propositions, while in the rest of the world another set of fanatics feels equal certainty about a diametrically opposite set of equally doubtful propositions. From such a situation war, bitterness, and persecution inevitably result on both sides.

Russell was an atheist.  He has specific reasons for this.  Listen to it in his own words:

  Bertrand Russell on Religion

William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practiced in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.

Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.

In religion and politics, on the contrary, though there is as yet nothing approaching scientific knowledge , everybody considers it  de rigueur  to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war, and to be carefully guarded from argumentative competition with any different opinion. If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured. War would become impossible, because each side would realize that both sides must be in the wrong. Persecution would cease. Education would aim at expanding the mind, not at narrowing it. Men would be chosen for jobs on account of fitness to do the work, not because they flattered the irrational dogmas of those in power. Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the millennium.

We have had in recent years a brilliant example of the scientific temper of mind in the theory of relativity and its reception by the world. Einstein, a German-Swiss-Jew pacifist, was appointed to a research professorship by the German Government in the early days of the War; his predictions were verified by an English expedition which observed the eclipse of 1919, very soon after the Armistice. His theory upsets the whole theoretical framework of traditional physics; it is almost as damaging to orthodox dynamics as Darwin was to  Genesis . Yet physicists everywhere have shown complete readiness to accept his theory as soon as it appeared that the evidence was in its favor. But none of them, least of all Einstein himself, would claim that he has said the last word. He has not built a monument of infallible dogma to stand for all time. There are difficulties he cannot solve; his doctrines will have to be modified in their turn as they have modified Newton’s. This critical un-dogmatic receptiveness is the true attitude of science.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.

If it is admitted that a condition of rational doubt would be desirable , it becomes important to inquire how it comes about that there is so much irrational certainty in the world. A great deal of this is due to the inherent irrationality and credulity of average human nature. But this seed of intellectual original sin is nourished and fostered by other agencies, among which three play the chief part—namely, education, propaganda, and economic pressure .

Let us consider these in turn.

The committee which framed these laws, as quoted by the  New Republic , laid it down that the teacher who “does not approve of the present social system……must surrender his office,” and that “no person who is not eager to combat the theories of social change should be entrusted with the task of fitting the young and old for the responsibilities of citizenship.”

Thus, according to the law of the State of New York, Christ and George Washington were too degraded morally to be fit for the education of the young . If Christ were to go to New York and say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” the President of the New York School Board would reply: “Sir, I see no evidence that you are eager to combat theories of social change. Indeed, I have heard it said that you advocate what you call the  kingdom  of heaven, whereas this country, thank God, is a republic. It is clear that the Government of your kingdom of heaven would differ materially from that of New York State, therefore no children will be allowed access to you.” If he failed to make this reply, he would not be doing his duty as a functionary entrusted with the administration of the law.

The effect of such laws is very serious. Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the government and the social system in the State of New York are the best that have ever existed on this planet; yet even then both would presumably be capable of improvement. Any person who admits this obvious proposition is by law incapable of teaching in a State school. Thus the law decrees that the teachers shall all be either hypocrites or fools.

Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party. The persecution of opinion in Russia is more severe than in any capitalist country. I met in Petrograd an eminent Russian poet, Alexander Block, who has since died as the result of privations. The Bolsheviks allowed him to teach æsthetics, but he complained that they insisted on his teaching the subject “from a Marxian point of view.” He had been at a loss to discover how the theory of rhythmics was connected with Marxism, although, to avoid starvation, he had done his best to find out. Of course, it has been impossible in Russia ever since the Bolsheviks came into power to print anything critical of the dogmas upon which their regime is founded.

The examples of America and Russia illustrate the conclusion to which we seem to be driven—namely, that so long as men continue to have the present fanatical belief in the importance of politics free thought on political matters will be impossible, and there is only too much danger that the lack of freedom will spread to all other matters, as it has done in Russia. Only some degree of political skepticism can save us from this misfortune.

It must not be supposed that the officials in charge of education desire the young to become educated. On the contrary, their problem is to impart information without imparting intelligence. Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge—reading and writing, languages and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence. The utility of information is admitted practically as well as theoretically; without a literate population a modern State is impossible. But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians, in Plato’s language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national systems of education.

Definite mis-statements of fact can be legitimately objected to, but they are by no means necessary. The mere words “Pear’s Soap,” which affirm nothing, cause people to buy that article. If, wherever these words appear, they were replaced by the words “The Labour Party,” millions of people would be led to vote for the Labour Party, although the advertisements had claimed no merit for it whatever. But if both sides in a controversy were confined by law to statements which a committee of eminent logicians considered relevant and valid, the main evil of propaganda, as at present conducted, would remain.

Suppose, under such a law, two parties with an equally good case, one of whom had a million pounds to spend on propaganda, while the other had only a hundred thousand . It is obvious that the arguments in favor of the richer party would become more widely known than those in favor of the poorer party, and therefore the richer party would win. This situation is, of course, intensified when one party is the Government. In Russia the Government has an almost complete monopoly of propaganda, but that is not necessary. The advantages which it possesses over its opponents will generally be sufficient to give it the victory, unless it has an exceptionally bad case.

There are two simple principles which, if they were adopted, would solve almost all social problems.

The first is that education should have for one of its aims to teach people only to believe propositions when there is some reason to think that they are true.

The second is that jobs should be given solely for fitness to do the work.

To take the second point first . The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral, and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution, and it is likely to become quite as efficient as the Inquisition ever was. The old liberties can be legally retained without being of the slightest use. If, in practice, certain opinions lead a man to starve, it is poor comfort to him to know that his opinions are not punishable by law. There is a certain public feeling against starving men for not belonging to the Church of England, or for holding slightly unorthodox opinions in politics. But there is hardly any feeling against the rejection of Atheists or Mormons, extreme communists, or men who advocate free love. Such men are thought to be wicked, and it is considered only natural to refuse to employ them. People have hardly yet waked up to the fact that this refusal, in a highly industrial State, amounts to a very rigorous form of persecution.

If this danger were adequately realized, it would be possible to rouse public opinion , and to secure that a man’s beliefs should not be considered in appointing him to a post. The protection of minorities is vitally important; and even the most orthodox of us may find himself in a minority some day, so that we all have an interest in restraining the tyranny of majorities. Nothing except public opinion can solve this problem. Socialism would make it somewhat more acute, since it would eliminate the opportunities that now arise through exceptional employers. Every increase in the size of industrial undertakings makes it worse, since it diminishes the number of independent employers.

The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case might be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, though not to the theory, of toleration.

And this brings me to my other point, which concerns the aims of education.  If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true.

History should be taught in the same way. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1813 and 1814, for instance, might be studied in the  Moniteur , leading up to the surprise which Parisians felt when they saw the Allies arriving under the walls of Paris after they had (according to the official bulletins) been beaten by Napoleon in every battle. In the more advanced classes, students should be encouraged to count the number of times that Lenin has been assassinated by Trotsky, in order to learn contempt for death. Finally, they should be given a school history approved by the Government, and asked to infer what a French school history would say about our wars with France. All this would be a far better training in citizenship than the trite moral maxims by which some people believe that civic duty can be inculcated.

If I am asked how the world is to be induced to adopt these two maxims—namely

(1) that jobs should be given to people on account of their fitness to perform them;

(2) that one aim of education should be to cure people of the habit of believing propositions for which there is no evidence—

I can only say that it must be done by generating an enlightened public opinion . And an enlightened public opinion can only be generated by the efforts of those who desire that it should exist. I do not believe that the economic changes advocated by Socialists will, of themselves, do anything towards curing the evils we have been considering. I think that, whatever happens in politics, the trend of economic development will make the preservation of mental freedom increasingly difficult, unless public opinion insists that the employer shall control nothing in the life of the employee except his work.

Freedom in education could easily be secured, if it were desired , by limiting the function of the State to inspection and payment, and confining inspection rigidly to the definite instruction. But that, as things stand, would leave education in the hands of the Churches, because, unfortunately, they are more anxious to teach their beliefs than Freethinkers are to teach their doubts. It would, however, give a free field, and would make it possible for a liberal education to be given if it were really desired. More than that ought not to be asked of the law.

My plea throughout this address has been for the spread of the scientific temper , which is an altogether different thing from the knowledge of scientific results. The scientific temper is capable of regenerating mankind and providing an issue for all our troubles. The results of science, in the form of mechanism, poison gas, and the yellow press, bid fair to lead to the total downfall of our civilization. It is a curious antithesis, which a Martian might contemplate with amused detachment. But for us it is a matter of life and death. Upon its issue depends the question whether our grandchildren are to live in a happier world, or are to exterminate each other by scientific methods, leaving perhaps to Negroes and Papuans the future destinies of mankind.

If you would like to hear a more thorough interview with Russell, you can find it here at:

  Face to Face Interview with the BBC

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The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world’s foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics—including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

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Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays

Colin McGinn, Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays , MIT Press, 2017, 317pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262036191.

Reviewed by Simon Blackburn, University of Cambridge

As should be expected, Colin McGinn's collection of essays displays many virtues. It is bold, original, intelligent, and the product of many years of deep acquaintance with a wide range of philosophical problems and their recent treatments. It is beautifully clear, and a good advertisement for the short, self-contained, jargon-free essay. It is also, as the title promises, provocative, both in the bland sense of provoking thought, which anyone writing as a philosopher would hope to do, and in the spicier sense of being unafraid of treading on many peoples' toes, or even, perhaps, hoping to do so. At any rate, its author emerges as a large-scale contrarian, impatiently opposed to many movements in contemporary philosophical thought, and quite happy to suppose that it does not take much to show that they are largely wrong-headed. Many of the essays are self-standing pieces of excellent, thought-provoking philosophy (those on modality and color being especially noteworthy). Others are more casual, more like jeux d'esprit .

The fifty-five essays are presented under seven headings: Mind (12 essays), Language (8), Knowledge (8), Metaphysics (11), Biology (5), Ethics (8), and Religion (3). The longest is 'Knowing and Necessity' at 20 pages, and the shortest is 'Physical Noncognitivism' at one and a half pages.

When he kicked a stone to refute Berkeley, Dr. Johnson saw himself as a robust common-sense realist rebutting a wholly fantastical idealism. McGinn is something of a Johnsonian: he too has strong views about things being real. His realities include the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, the private world, the noumenal world as well as the phenomenal world, real properties and causal relations, universals, and facts themselves, including moral facts. He knows, of course, that such doctrines involve mysteries, but he is hospitable to mysteries: he is perhaps best known for his 'mysterian' philosophy of mind, holding that there is indeed a 'hard problem' of consciousness but it is likely to be a problem that we are cognitively unequipped to resolve. He has little sympathy with the mid-twentieth century optimism of Wittgenstein, Strawson, Austin, Ryle, Sellars or Quine, dismissing the 'hard problem' as a mirage. He holds instead that any mind-brain identity theory, or any functionalism, or indeed any view according priority to what is public, succumbs to the well-known assaults of Nagel, Jackson, Kripke, Putnam, Chalmers, and Block. He is constitutionally a protector of hard problems, and it is their would-be solvers that he particularly hopes to provoke.

McGinn also holds that as well as the conscious mind there is a domain of unconscious mental states. Memories, for instance, persist through time as unconscious mental states, and not just as modifications of the brain that determine what, on occasion, we can bring to consciousness. Again, though, he agrees that we have 'no adequate concept of unconscious mental states'. Causal necessity, as well, is 'as real as anything in nature,' but here too we are inevitably totally baffled as to how it works: realistic mysterianism is once more the answer. This is the view that we know that there is something whose nature we shall never know, although McGinn remains relatively silent about the good that this piece of knowledge is supposed to do for us. Not for McGinn the thought that nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said, nor even Hume's view that if we deal in such things 't'will be of little consequence to the world'.

McGinn poses for himself the problem that his view of philosophy leaves him. He holds both that philosophy is exhausted by conceptual analysis, and that there are problems of philosophy that might be forever insoluble by us. I am much readier to agree that there are philosophical problems insoluble by conceptual analysis, as that is usually understood, than that there are problems insoluble by philosophy taken more generously. Moore's impasse when faced with ethics is enough of a warning, compared with the tradition of Hume and Smith, which worked via an understanding of our psychologies and their genealogy rather than narrow conceptual analysis.

McGinn's own solution, presented in the chapter 'Analysis and Mystery', is that the right concepts may be unavailable to us. Were a species to form the right concepts, it would not have our problems, but that species is not us, either as we are, or even as we might become. Both the families of concepts that might be innate to us, and the family arising from the way we think about empirical experience, fail to contain the keys that turn the locks. This is itself, of course, a possibility described de dicto rather than de re -- we can say that 'there might be concepts which would provide solutions' but we can never say of any concept that it provides a solution, since we can have no way of framing such a concept to ourselves. We cannot even know in which direction to look for coming nearer to such concepts; not only are there are no strategies for unlocking philosophical mysteries, in the way there are for unlocking scientific mysteries, there are not even strategies for getting any closer to doing so.

Bertrand Russell wrote that his grandmother despised his interest in metaphysics, telling him that the whole subject could be summed up in the saying: "What is mind? No matter; what is matter? Never mind." Russell added 'on the fifteenth or sixteenth repetition of this remark it ceased to amuse me' and one might sympathise, but McGinn follows Grannie. She was right about the central concepts of metaphysics: mind, body, causation, time, freedom, and in fact reality in general. Grannie however was ridiculing poor Bertie's interest in the subject, and I do not think McGinn intends to do that. He has, after all, pursued a long and distinguished career in it. Nevertheless, the worry persists that perhaps Grannie was right, and the best policy is not to think about these things at all.

Although this depressing view of the possibilities for philosophy forms a central theme in the book, it by no means exhausts its contents. Once McGinn leaves heavy-duty metaphysics, he becomes distinctly more sprightly, dancing elegantly around issues in the philosophy of biology, ethics, and religion.

In the section on biology, McGinn is at his best in an essay ('The Language of Evolution') pointing out the pitfalls in Darwin's analogy between the kind of selection that breeders of animals or plants go in for, and anything that happens in nature. He suggests that instead of natural selection Darwin should have contented himself with saying that while human beings purposely select, animals and plants reproductively compete, with some more successful at generating heirs than others. There is nothing but metaphor involved in reifying 'nature' as an intentional agent. I agree that this is a useful point to make. I am not so clear how it fits with another essay ('Selfish Genes and Moral Parasites'). In this essay McGinn takes very seriously Richard Dawkins's problem of how to reconcile apparent human altruism with our selfish genes, and expounds an answer drawing on the example of the cuckoo parasitizing prey species, such as the reed warbler. The reed warbler is not being altruistic as it raises a cuckoo chick. It has been hoodwinked. Similarly, McGinn thinks, we are manipulative and manipulated into such altruism as we manage. We parasitize each other without realizing it, or rather our genes do: 'the gene that manipulates the mind-brain of others the best is the one that makes the target enjoy what is in fact manipulation'. I am afraid I am myself no happier with the idea of genes manipulating people than I am with nature selecting survivors: the underlying literal truth seems to be, roughly, that we reinforce any altruistic tendencies we find in each other, which is no doubt true, but not very shocking. McGinn goes on to talk of the central role of language in manipulation, but he can scarcely credit those manipulative genes with linguistic powers. But then I do not take Dawkins's problem seriously either, and I don't think the kinds of symbiotic relationships that are found through biology are well conceptualized either in terms of selfishness or of manipulation.

'God and the Devil' is the penultimate, and second shortest, essay in the collection. It suggests the possibility that God and the Devil are in fact identical, rather like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. To the obvious objection that the religious conception of God involves His being perfectly good, which would not be the case if He is identical with the Devil, McGinn breezily replies that 'this argument begs the question against the identity claim, since that is precisely what we should abandon if we accept identity'. Here, as elsewhere, one may be left spluttering that more needs to be said: if somebody suffers from the delusion that Paris is the same city as London, it scarcely begs the question to point out that Paris is in France and London is not, although 'that is precisely what we should abandon if we accept identity'. I do not think that McGinn would be much troubled by this riposte: perhaps he is satisfied to have provoked the splutter. This essay leads to the final flourish, in which the coat that McGinn is trailing gets even longer as he recommends and defends a religion not of love, but of hate. 'You must hate everyone (with the possible exception of yourself, but even then) . . . '. Wisely, he does not dwell on the results we might expect if his religion of hate were followed, engendering more hate in the world than we already have. I try not to splutter again when I suggest that we already have enough.

Obviously there are many other essays than the ones I have been able to mention, and many of them repay serious attention. I do not think the collection could be recommended to students without a fair amount of assistance, since quite often positions are simply indicated by the names of people who hold them (Quine, Wittgenstein, Putnam, and so on) without further elaboration. But they could certainly form a spicy addition to courses that are already up and running. They would serve as good fuel for people coming new to philosophy, and it is no bad thing to have someone else to get one's students to splutter.

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Same as It Ever Was?: Eternal Recurrence in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various shades of this idea in ancient philosophy, from Pythagorean metempsychosis to Stoic predictions about a cosmological reset. more

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On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

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Aspiring to a Higher Plane

By Ian Stewart

In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions , perhaps the first ever book that could be described as "mathematical fiction". Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland , introduces the strange tale of the geometric adventures of A. Square. more

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Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.

1. Plato’s central doctrines

2. plato’s puzzles, 3. dialogue, setting, character, 4. socrates, 5. plato’s indirectness, 6. can we know plato’s mind, 7. socrates as the dominant speaker, 8. links between the dialogues, 9. does plato change his mind about forms, 10. does plato change his mind about politics, 11. the historical socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues, 12. why dialogues, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Many people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that are advocated in his writings: The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses. Among the most important of these abstract objects (as they are now called, because they are not located in space or time) are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. (These terms—“goodness”, “beauty”, and so on—are often capitalized by those who write about Plato, in order to call attention to their exalted status; similarly for “Forms” and “Ideas.”) The most fundamental distinction in Plato’s philosophy is between the many observable objects that appear beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) and the one object that is what beauty (goodness, justice, unity) really is, from which those many beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics. Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or dependent on this distinction. Many of them explore the ethical and practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated way. We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object from the body—so much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal. In a few of Plato’s works, we are told that the soul always retains the ability to recollect what it once grasped of the forms, when it was disembodied prior to its possessor’s birth (see especially Meno ), and that the lives we lead are to some extent a punishment or reward for choices we made in a previous existence (see especially the final pages of Republic ). But in many of Plato’s writings, it is asserted or assumed that true philosophers—those who recognize how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing that goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many things that are called good or virtuous or courageous )—are in a position to become ethically superior to unenlightened human beings, because of the greater degree of insight they can acquire. To understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are not interested in such questions, how can we become good?), we must investigate the form of good.

Although these propositions are often identified by Plato’s readers as forming a large part of the core of his philosophy, many of his greatest admirers and most careful students point out that few, if any, of his writings can accurately be described as mere advocacy of a cut-and-dried group of propositions. Often Plato’s works exhibit a certain degree of dissatisfaction and puzzlement with even those doctrines that are being recommended for our consideration. For example, the forms are sometimes described as hypotheses (see for example Phaedo ). The form of good in particular is described as something of a mystery whose real nature is elusive and as yet unknown to anyone at all ( Republic ). Puzzles are raised—and not overtly answered—about how any of the forms can be known and how we are to talk about them without falling into contradiction ( Parmenides ), or about what it is to know anything ( Theaetetus ) or to name anything ( Cratylus ). When one compares Plato with some of the other philosophers who are often ranked with him—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, for example—he can be recognized to be far more exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive, and playful than they. That, along with his gifts as a writer and as a creator of vivid character and dramatic setting, is one of the reasons why he is often thought to be the ideal author from whom one should receive one’s introduction to philosophy. His readers are not presented with an elaborate system of doctrines held to be so fully worked out that they are in no need of further exploration or development; instead, what we often receive from Plato is a few key ideas together with a series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas are to be interrogated and deployed. Readers of a Platonic dialogue are drawn into thinking for themselves about the issues raised, if they are to learn what the dialogue itself might be thought to say about them. Many of his works therefore give their readers a strong sense of philosophy as a living and unfinished subject (perhaps one that can never be completed) to which they themselves will have to contribute. All of Plato’s works are in some way meant to leave further work for their readers, but among the ones that most conspicuously fall into this category are: Euthyphro , Laches , Charmides , Euthydemus , Theaetetus , and Parmenides .

There is another feature of Plato’s writings that makes him distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author. Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue. (There is one striking exception: his Apology , which purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his defense—the Greek word apologia means “defense”—when, in 399, he was legally charged and convicted of the crime of impiety. However, even there, Socrates is presented at one point addressing questions of a philosophical character to his accuser, Meletus, and responding to them. In addition, since antiquity, a collection of 13 letters has been included among his collected works, but their authenticity as compositions of Plato is not universally accepted among scholars, and many or most of them are almost certainly not his (see Burnyeat and Frede 2015). Most of them purport to be the outcome of his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, a heavily populated Greek city located in Sicily and ruled by tyrants.)

We are of course familiar with the dialogue form through our acquaintance with the literary genre of drama. But Plato’s dialogues do not try to create a fictional world for the purposes of telling a story, as many literary dramas do; nor do they invoke an earlier mythical realm, like the creations of the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Nor are they all presented in the form of a drama: in many of them, a single speaker narrates events in which he participated. They are philosophical discussions—“debates” would, in some cases, also be an appropriate word—among a small number of interlocutors, many of whom can be identified as real historical figures (see Nails 2002); and often they begin with a depiction of the setting of the discussion—a visit to a prison, a wealthy man’s house, a celebration over drinks, a religious festival, a visit to the gymnasium, a stroll outside the city’s wall, a long walk on a hot day. As a group, they form vivid portraits of a social world, and are not purely intellectual exchanges between characterless and socially unmarked speakers. (At any rate, that is true of a large number of Plato’s interlocutors. However, it must be added that in some of his works the speakers display little or no character. See, for example, Sophist and Statesman —dialogues in which a visitor from the town of Elea in Southern Italy leads the discussion; and Laws , a discussion between an unnamed Athenian and two named fictional characters, one from Crete and the other from Sparta.) In many of his dialogues (though not all), Plato is not only attempting to draw his readers into a discussion, but is also commenting on the social milieu that he is depicting, and criticizing the character and ways of life of his interlocutors (see Blondell 2002). Some of the dialogues that most evidently fall into this category are Protagoras , Gorgias , Hippias Major , Euthydemus , and Symposium .

There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato’s dialogues, being completely absent only in Laws , which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: that figure is Socrates. Like nearly everyone else who appears in Plato’s works, he is not an invention of Plato: there really was a Socrates just as there really was a Crito, a Gorgias, a Thrasymachus, and a Laches. Plato was not the only author whose personal experience of Socrates led to the depiction of him as a character in one or more dramatic works. Socrates is one of the principal characters of Aristophanes’ comedy, Clouds ; and Xenophon, a historian and military leader, wrote, like Plato, both an Apology of Socrates (an account of Socrates’ trial) and other works in which Socrates appears as a principal speaker. Furthermore, we have some fragmentary remains of dialogues written by other contemporaries of Socrates besides Plato and Xenophon (Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, Phaedo), and these purport to describe conversations he conducted with others (see Boys-Stone and Rowe 2013). So, when Plato wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which he was involved. Aristophanes’ comic portrayal of Socrates is at the same time a bitter critique of him and other leading intellectual figures of the day (the 420s B.C.), but from Plato, Xenophon, and the other composers (in the 390’s and later) of “Socratic discourses” (as Aristotle calls this body of writings) we receive a far more favorable impression.

Evidently, the historical Socrates was the sort of person who provoked in those who knew him, or knew of him, a profound response, and he inspired many of those who came under his influence to write about him. But the portraits composed by Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato are the ones that have survived intact, and they are therefore the ones that must play the greatest role in shaping our conception of what Socrates was like. Of these, Clouds has the least value as an indication of what was distinctive of Socrates’ mode of philosophizing: after all, it is not intended as a philosophical work, and although it may contain a few lines that are characterizations of features unique to Socrates, for the most part it is an attack on a philosophical type—the long-haired, unwashed, amoral investigator into abstruse phenomena—rather than a depiction of Socrates himself. Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates, whatever its value as historical testimony (which may be considerable), is generally thought to lack the philosophical subtlety and depth of Plato’s. At any rate, no one (certainly not Xenophon himself) takes Xenophon to be a major philosopher in his own right; when we read his Socratic works, we are not encountering a great philosophical mind. But that is what we experience when we read Plato. We may read Plato’s Socratic dialogues because we are (as Plato evidently wanted us to be) interested in who Socrates was and what he stood for, but even if we have little or no desire to learn about the historical Socrates, we will want to read Plato because in doing so we are encountering an author of the greatest philosophical significance. No doubt he in some way borrowed in important ways from Socrates, though it is not easy to say where to draw the line between him and his teacher (more about this below in section 12). But it is widely agreed among scholars that Plato is not a mere transcriber of the words of Socrates (any more than Xenophon or the other authors of Socratic discourses). His use of a figure called “Socrates” in so many of his dialogues should not be taken to mean that Plato is merely preserving for a reading public the lessons he learned from his teacher.

Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato’s works. He makes no appearance in Laws , and there are several dialogues ( Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus ) in which his role is small and peripheral, while some other figure dominates the conversation or even, as in the Timaeus and Critias , presents a long and elaborate, continuous discourse of their own. Plato’s dialogues are not a static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do his speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never the same from one dialogue to another. ( Symposium , for example, is a series of speeches, and there are also lengthy speeches in Apology , Menexenus , Protagoras , Crito , Phaedrus , Timaeus , and Critias ; in fact, one might reasonably question whether these works are properly called dialogues). But even though Plato constantly adapted “the dialogue form” (a commonly used term, and convenient enough, so long as we do not think of it as an unvarying unity) to suit his purposes, it is striking that throughout his career as a writer he never engaged in a form of composition that was widely used in his time and was soon to become the standard mode of philosophical address: Plato never became a writer of philosophical treatises, even though the writing of treatises (for example, on rhetoric, medicine, and geometry) was a common practice among his predecessors and contemporaries. (The closest we come to an exception to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief section in which the author, Plato or someone pretending to be him, commits himself to several philosophical points—while insisting, at the same time, that no philosopher will write about the deepest matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion with selected individuals. As noted above, the authenticity of Plato’s letters is a matter of great controversy; and in any case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the writing of philosophical books. Whether Plato wrote it or not, it cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not wish it to be so regarded.) In all of his writings—except in the letters, if any of them are genuine—Plato never speaks to his audience directly (see Frede 1992) and in his own voice. Strictly speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues; rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on. Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly.

This feature of Plato’s works raises important questions about how they are to be read, and has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings. Since he does not himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in attributing a philosophical doctrine to him (as opposed to one of his characters)? Did he himself have philosophical convictions, and can we discover what they were? Are we justified in speaking of “the philosophy of Plato”? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato himself, are we being unfaithful to the spirit in which he intended the dialogues to be read? Is his whole point, in refraining from writing treatises, to discourage the readers of his works from asking what their author believes and to encourage them instead simply to consider the plausibility or implausibility of what his characters are saying? Is that why Plato wrote dialogues? If not for this reason, then what was his purpose in refraining from addressing his audience in a more direct way (see Griswold 1988, Klagge and Smith 1992, Press 2002)? There are other important questions about the particular shape his dialogues take: for example, why does Socrates play such a prominent role in so many of them, and why, in some of these works, does Socrates play a smaller role, or none at all?

Once these questions are raised and their difficulty acknowledged, it is tempting, in reading Plato’s works and reflecting upon them, to adopt a strategy of extreme caution. Rather than commit oneself to any hypothesis about what he is trying to communicate to his readers, one might adopt a stance of neutrality about his intentions, and confine oneself to talking only about what is said by his dramatis personae . One cannot be faulted, for example, if one notes that, in Plato’s Republic , Socrates argues that justice in the soul consists in each part of the soul doing its own. It is equally correct to point out that other principal speakers in that work, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accept the arguments that Socrates gives for that definition of justice. Perhaps there is no need for us to say more—to say, for example, that Plato himself agrees that this is how justice should be defined, or that Plato himself accepts the arguments that Socrates gives in support of this definition. And we might adopt this same “minimalist” approach to all of Plato’s works. After all, is it of any importance to discover what went on inside his head as he wrote—to find out whether he himself endorsed the ideas he put in the mouths of his characters, whether they constitute “the philosophy of Plato”? Should we not read his works for their intrinsic philosophical value, and not as tools to be used for entering into the mind of their author? We know what Plato’s characters say—and isn’t that all that we need, for the purpose of engaging with his works philosophically?

But the fact that we know what Plato’s characters say does not show that by refusing to entertain any hypotheses about what the author of these works is trying to communicate to his readers we can understand what those characters mean by what they say. We should not lose sight of this obvious fact: it is Plato, not any of his dramatis personae , who is reaching out to a readership and trying to influence their beliefs and actions by means of his literary actions. When we ask whether an argument put forward by a character in Plato’s works should be read as an effort to persuade us of its conclusion, or is better read as a revelation of how foolish that speaker is, we are asking about what Plato as author (not that character) is trying to lead us to believe, through the writing that he is presenting to our attention. We need to interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is saying. Similarly, when we ask how a word that has several different senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato means to communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word. We should not suppose that we can derive much philosophical value from Plato’s writings if we refuse to entertain any thoughts about what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say. Penetrating the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors mean by what they say are not two separate tasks but one, and if we do not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they say, and what the dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we will not profit from reading his dialogues.

Furthermore, the dialogues have certain characteristics that are most easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for inducing his readers to become convinced (or more convinced than they already are) of certain propositions—for example, that there are forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired only by means of a study of the forms, and so on. Why, after all, did Plato write so many works (for example: Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , Phaedrus , Theaetetus , Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Philebus , Laws ) in which one character dominates the conversation (often, but not always, Socrates) and convinces the other speakers (at times, after encountering initial resistance) that they should accept or reject certain conclusions, on the basis of the arguments presented? The only plausible way of answering that question is to say that these dialogues were intended by Plato to be devices by which he might induce the audience for which they are intended to reflect on and accept the arguments and conclusions offered by his principal interlocutor. (It is noteworthy that in Laws , the principal speaker—an unnamed visitor from Athens—proposes that laws should be accompanied by “preludes” in which their philosophical basis is given as full an explanation as possible. The educative value of written texts is thus explicitly acknowledged by Plato’s dominant speaker. If preludes can educate a whole citizenry that is prepared to learn from them, then surely Plato thinks that other sorts of written texts—for example, his own dialogues—can also serve an educative function.)

This does not mean that Plato thinks that his readers can become wise simply by reading and studying his works. On the contrary, it is highly likely that he wanted all of his writings to be supplementary aids to philosophical conversation: in one of his works, he has Socrates warn his readers against relying solely on books, or taking them to be authoritative. They are, Socrates says, best used as devices that stimulate the readers’ memory of discussions they have had ( Phaedrus 274e-276d). In those face-to-face conversations with a knowledgeable leader, positions are taken, arguments are given, and conclusions are drawn. Plato’s writings, he implies in this passage from Phaedrus , will work best when conversational seeds have already been sown for the arguments they contain.

If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors (or to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents), we can easily explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in his dialogues. Presumably the contemporary audience for whom Plato was writing included many of Socrates’ admirers. They would be predisposed to think that a character called “Socrates” would have all of the intellectual brilliance and moral passion of the historical person after whom he is named (especially since Plato often makes special efforts to give his “Socrates” a life-like reality, and has him refer to his trial or to the characteristics by which he was best known); and the aura surrounding the character called “Socrates” would give the words he speaks in the dialogue considerable persuasive power. Furthermore, if Plato felt strongly indebted to Socrates for many of his philosophical techniques and ideas, that would give him further reason for assigning a dominant role to him in many of his works. (More about this in section 12.)

Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of explaining why Plato so often makes Socrates his principal speaker. For example, we could say that Plato was trying to undermine the reputation of the historical Socrates by writing a series of works in which a figure called “Socrates” manages to persuade a group of naïve and sycophantic interlocutors to accept absurd conclusions on the basis of sophistries. But anyone who has read some of Plato’s works will quickly recognize the utter implausibility of that alternative way of reading them. Plato could have written into his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them. But there are many signs in such works as Meno , Phaedo , Republic , and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction. (And the great admiration Plato feels for Socrates is also evident from his Apology .) The reader is given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is successful in persuading his interlocutors (on those occasions when he does succeed) is that his arguments are powerful ones. The reader, in other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and deserving of careful and full positive consideration. When we interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers present to each other.

There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other. When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed. Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors: typically, Socrates encounters a group of people many of whom do not appear in any other work of Plato, and so, as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their character and social circumstances. But often Plato’s characters make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other works. For example, in Phaedo (73a-b), Socrates says that one argument for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already read Meno . Several pages later, Socrates tells his interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself (the form of equality) applies no less to other forms—to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions (75d). This reference to asking and answering questions would not be well understood by a reader who had not yet encountered a series of dialogues in which Socrates asks his interlocutors questions of the form, “What is X?” ( Euthyphro : what is piety? Laches : what is courage? Charmides : What is moderation? Hippias Major : what is beauty? see Dancy 2004). Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of Phaedo have already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them. In some of his writings, Plato’s characters refer ahead to the continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to conversations they had recently: thus Plato signals to us that we should read Theaetetus , Sophist , and Statesman sequentially; and similarly, since the opening of Timaeus refers us back to Republic , Plato is indicating to his readers that they must seek some connection between these two works.

These features of the dialogues show Plato’s awareness that he cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes. He will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with the conversations held by the interlocutors of other dialogues—even when there is some alteration among those interlocutors. (Meno does not re-appear in Phaedo ; Timaeus was not among the interlocutors of Republic .) Why does Plato have his dominant characters (Socrates, the Eleatic visitor) reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as provocations to thought—mere exercises for the mind—there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine. For example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are such things as forms—and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers. Furthermore, when Socrates is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea (in Sophist and Statesman ), the existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms. The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both characters—Socrates and the Eleatic visitor—as devices for the presentation and defense of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well.

This way of reading Plato’s dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration. It is, in fact, a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other. One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and, if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows him to respond to that criticism (see Meinwald 2016). In Parmenides , the principal interlocutor (not Socrates—he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training—but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides) subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms. Does the discussion of oneness (a baffling series of contradictions—or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the surface, to be contradictions) in some way help address the problems raised about forms? That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier dialogues? Can we find dialogues in which we encounter a “new theory of forms”—that is, a way of thinking of forms that carefully steers clear of the assumptions about forms that led to Parmenides’ critique? It is not easy to say. But we cannot even raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that truth to the attention of others. If we find Timaeus (the principal interlocutor of the dialogue named after him) and the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist and Statesman talking about forms in a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about forms in Phaedo and Republic , then there is only one reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly supported by powerful considerations. If, on the other hand, we find that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of these entities. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato himself had no convictions about forms, and merely wants to give his readers mental exercise by composing dialogues in which different leading characters talk about these objects in discordant ways.

The same point—that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes his mind—can be made in connection with the politics of Plato’s works (see Bobonich 2002).

It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a political philosopher. For he gives expression, in several of his writings (particular Phaedo ), to a yearning to escape from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. (Similarly, he evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty pales in comparison with that of the forms.) Because of this, it would have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical questions. Some of his works— Parmenides is a stellar example—do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life. But it is remarkable how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract questions raised in Sophist about the nature of being and not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of sophistry; and thus they call to mind the question whether Socrates should be classified as a sophist—whether, in other words, sophists are to be despised and avoided. In any case, despite the great sympathy Plato expresses for the desire to shed one’s body and live in an incorporeal world, he devotes an enormous amount of energy to the task of understanding the world we live in, appreciating its limited beauty, and improving it.

His tribute to the mixed beauty of the sensible world, in Timaeus , consists in his depiction of it as the outcome of divine efforts to mold reality in the image of the forms, using simple geometrical patterns and harmonious arithmetic relations as building blocks. The desire to transform human relations is given expression in a far larger number of works. Socrates presents himself, in Plato’s Apology , as a man who does not have his head in the clouds (that is part of Aristophanes’ charge against him in Clouds ). He does not want to escape from the everyday world but to make it better (see Allen 2010). He presents himself, in Gorgias , as the only Athenian who has tried his hand at the true art of politics.

Similarly, the Socrates of Republic devotes a considerable part of his discussion to the critique of ordinary social institutions—the family, private property, and rule by the many. The motivation that lies behind the writing of this dialogue is the desire to transform (or, at any rate, to improve) political life, not to escape from it (although it is acknowledged that the desire to escape is an honorable one: the best sort of rulers greatly prefer the contemplation of divine reality to the governance of the city). And if we have any further doubts that Plato does take an interest in the practical realm, we need only turn to Laws . A work of such great detail and length about voting procedures, punishments, education, legislation, and the oversight of public officials can only have been produced by someone who wants to contribute something to the improvement of the lives we lead in this sensible and imperfect realm. Further evidence of Plato’s interest in practical matters can be drawn from his letters, if they are genuine. In most of them, he presents himself as having a deep interest in educating (with the help of his friend, Dion) the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, and thus reforming that city’s politics.

Just as any attempt to understand Plato’s views about forms must confront the question whether his thoughts about them developed or altered over time, so too our reading of him as a political philosopher must be shaped by a willingness to consider the possibility that he changed his mind. For example, on any plausible reading of Republic , Plato evinces a deep antipathy to rule by the many. Socrates tells his interlocutors that the only politics that should engage them are those of the anti-democratic regime he depicts as the paradigm of a good constitution. And yet in Laws , the Athenian visitor proposes a detailed legislative framework for a city in which non-philosophers (people who have never heard of the forms, and have not been trained to understand them) are given considerable powers as rulers. Plato would not have invested so much time in the creation of this comprehensive and lengthy work, had he not believed that the creation of a political community ruled by those who are philosophically unenlightened is a project that deserves the support of his readers. Has Plato changed his mind, then? Has he re-evaluated the highly negative opinion he once held of those who are innocent of philosophy? Did he at first think that the reform of existing Greek cities, with all of their imperfections, is a waste of time—but then decide that it is an endeavor of great value? (And if so, what led him to change his mind?) Answers to these questions can be justified only by careful attention to what he has his interlocutors say. But it would be utterly implausible to suppose that these developmental questions need not be raised, on the grounds that Republic and Laws each has its own cast of characters, and that the two works therefore cannot come into contradiction with each other. According to this hypothesis (one that must be rejected), because it is Socrates (not Plato) who is critical of democracy in Republic , and because it is the Athenian visitor (not Plato) who recognizes the merits of rule by the many in Laws , there is no possibility that the two dialogues are in tension with each other. Against this hypothesis, we should say: Since both Republic and Laws are works in which Plato is trying to move his readers towards certain conclusions, by having them reflect on certain arguments—these dialogues are not barred from having this feature by their use of interlocutors—it would be an evasion of our responsibility as readers and students of Plato not to ask whether what one of them advocates is compatible with what the other advocates. If we answer that question negatively, we have some explaining to do: what led to this change? Alternatively, if we conclude that the two works are compatible, we must say why the appearance of conflict is illusory.

Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked on his career as a philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to his Apology of Socrates, a number of short ethical dialogues that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical doctrine, but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which Socrates punctured the pretensions of his interlocutors and forced them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory definitions of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their moral beliefs. According to this way of placing the dialogues into a rough chronological order—associated especially with Gregory Vlastos’s name (see especially his Socrates Ironist and Moral Philosopher , chapters 2 and 3)—Plato, at this point of his career, was content to use his writings primarily for the purpose of preserving the memory of Socrates and making plain the superiority of his hero, in intellectual skill and moral seriousness, to all of his contemporaries—particularly those among them who claimed to be experts on religious, political, or moral matters. Into this category of early dialogues (they are also sometimes called “Socratic” dialogues, possibly without any intended chronological connotation) are placed: Charmides , Crito , Euthydemus , Euthyphro , Gorgias , Hippias Major , Hippias Minor , Ion , Laches , Lysis , and Protagoras , (Some scholars hold that we can tell which of these come later during Plato’s early period. For example, it is sometimes said that Protagoras and Gorgias are later, because of their greater length and philosophical complexity. Other dialogues—for example, Charmides and Lysis —are thought not to be among Plato’s earliest within this early group, because in them Socrates appears to be playing a more active role in shaping the progress of the dialogue: that is, he has more ideas of his own.) In comparison with many of Plato’s other dialogues, these “Socratic” works contain little in the way of metaphysical, epistemological, or methodological speculation, and they therefore fit well with the way Socrates characterizes himself in Plato’s Apology : as a man who leaves investigations of high falutin’ matters (which are “in the sky and below the earth”) to wiser heads, and confines all of his investigations to the question how one should live one’s life. Aristotle describes Socrates as someone whose interests were restricted to only one branch of philosophy—the realm of the ethical; and he also says that he was in the habit of asking definitional questions to which he himself lacked answers ( Metaphysics 987b1, Sophistical Refutations 183b7). That testimony gives added weight to the widely accepted hypothesis that there is a group of dialogues—the ones mentioned above as his early works, whether or not they were all written early in Plato’s writing career—in which Plato used the dialogue form as a way of portraying the philosophical activities of the historical Socrates (although, of course, he might also have used them in other ways as well—for example to suggest and begin to explore philosophical difficulties raised by them, see Santas 1979, Brickhouse and Smith 1994).

But at a certain point—so says this hypothesis about the chronology of the dialogues—Plato began to use his works to advance ideas that were his own creations rather than those of Socrates, although he continued to use the name “Socrates” for the interlocutor who presented and argued for these new ideas. The speaker called “Socrates” now begins to move beyond and depart from the historical Socrates: he has views about the methodology that should be used by philosophers (a methodology borrowed from mathematics), and he argues for the immortality of the soul and the existence and importance of the forms of beauty, justice, goodness, and the like. (By contrast, in Apology Socrates says that no one knows what becomes of us after we die.) Phaedo is often said to be the dialogue in which Plato first comes into his own as a philosopher who is moving far beyond the ideas of his teacher (though it is also commonly said that we see a new methodological sophistication and a greater interest in mathematical knowledge in Meno ). Having completed all of the dialogues that, according to this hypothesis, we characterize as early, Plato widened the range of topics to be explored in his writings (no longer confining himself to ethics), and placed the theory of forms (and related ideas about language, knowledge, and love) at the center of his thinking. In these works of his “middle” period—for example, in Phaedo , Cratylus , Symposium , Republic , and Phaedrus —there is both a change of emphasis and of doctrine. The focus is no longer on ridding ourselves of false ideas and self-deceit; rather, we are asked to accept (however tentatively) a radical new conception of ourselves (now divided into three parts), our world—or rather, our two worlds—and our need to negotiate between them. Definitions of the most important virtue terms are finally proposed in Republic (the search for them in some of the early dialogues having been unsuccessful): Book I of this dialogue is a portrait of how the historical Socrates might have handled the search for a definition of justice, and the rest of the dialogue shows how the new ideas and tools discovered by Plato can complete the project that his teacher was unable to finish. Plato continues to use a figure called “Socrates” as his principal interlocutor, and in this way he creates a sense of continuity between the methods, insights, and ideals of the historical Socrates and the new Socrates who has now become a vehicle for the articulation of his own new philosophical outlook. In doing so, he acknowledges his intellectual debt to his teacher and appropriates for his own purposes the extraordinary prestige of the man who was the wisest of his time.

This hypothesis about the chronology of Plato’s writings has a third component: it does not place his works into either of only two categories—the early or “Socratic” dialogues, and all the rest—but works instead with a threefold division of early, middle, and late. That is because, following ancient testimony, it has become a widely accepted assumption that Laws is one of Plato’s last works, and further that this dialogue shares a great many stylistic affinities with a small group of others: Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Critias , and Philebus . These five dialogues together with Laws are generally agreed to be his late works, because they have much more in common with each other, when one counts certain stylistic features apparent only to readers of Plato’s Greek, than with any of Plato’s other works. (Computer counts have aided these stylometric studies, but the isolation of a group of six dialogues by means of their stylistic commonalities was recognized in the nineteenth century. See Brandwood 1990, Young 1994.)

It is not at all clear whether there are one or more philosophical affinities among this group of six dialogues—that is, whether the philosophy they contain is sharply different from that of all of the other dialogues. Plato does nothing to encourage the reader to view these works as a distinctive and separate component of his thinking. On the contrary, he links Sophist with Theaetetus (the conversations they present have a largely overlapping cast of characters, and take place on successive days) no less than Sophist and Statesman . Sophist contains, in its opening pages, a reference to the conversation of Parmenides —and perhaps Plato is thus signaling to his readers that they should bring to bear on Sophist the lessons that are to be drawn from Parmenides . Similarly, Timaeus opens with a reminder of some of the principal ethical and political doctrines of Republic . It could be argued, of course, that when one looks beyond these stage-setting devices, one finds significant philosophical changes in the six late dialogues, setting this group off from all that preceded them. But there is no consensus that they should be read in this way. Resolving this issue requires intensive study of the content of Plato’s works. So, although it is widely accepted that the six dialogues mentioned above belong to Plato’s latest period, there is, as yet, no agreement among students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his philosophical development.

In fact, it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of Plato’s works into three periods—early, middle, late—does correctly indicate the order of composition, and whether it is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought (See Cooper 1997, vii–xxvii). Of course, it would be wildly implausible to suppose that Plato’s writing career began with such complex works as Laws , Parmenides , Phaedrus , or Republic . In light of widely accepted assumptions about how most philosophical minds develop, it is likely that when Plato started writing philosophical works some of the shorter and simpler dialogues were the ones he composed: Laches , or Crito , or Ion (for example). (Similarly, Apology does not advance a complex philosophical agenda or presuppose an earlier body of work; so that too is likely to have been composed near the beginning of Plato’s writing career.) Even so, there is no good reason to eliminate the hypothesis that throughout much of his life Plato devoted himself to writing two sorts of dialogues at the same time, moving back and forth between them as he aged: on the one hand, introductory works whose primary purpose is to show readers the difficulty of apparently simple philosophical problems, and thereby to rid them of their pretensions and false beliefs; and on the other hand, works filled with more substantive philosophical theories supported by elaborate argumentation. Moreover, one could point to features of many of the “Socratic” dialogues that would justify putting them in the latter category, even though the argumentation does not concern metaphysics or methodology or invoke mathematics— Gorgias , Protagoras , Lysis , Euthydemus , Hippias Major among them.

Plato makes it clear that both of these processes, one preceding the other, must be part of one’s philosophical education. One of his deepest methodological convictions (affirmed in Meno , Theaetetus , and Sophist ) is that in order to make intellectual progress we must recognize that knowledge cannot be acquired by passively receiving it from others: rather, we must work our way through problems and assess the merits of competing theories with an independent mind. Accordingly, some of his dialogues are primarily devices for breaking down the reader’s complacency, and that is why it is essential that they come to no positive conclusions; others are contributions to theory-construction, and are therefore best absorbed by those who have already passed through the first stage of philosophical development. We should not assume that Plato could have written the preparatory dialogues only at the earliest stage of his career. Although he may well have begun his writing career by taking up that sort of project, he may have continued writing these “negative” works at later stages, at the same time that he was composing his theory-constructing dialogues. For example although both Euthydemus and Charmides are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they might have been written around the same time as Symposium and Republic , which are generally assumed to be compositions of his middle period—or even later.

No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are such. But it is an open question which and how many of them are. At any rate, it is clear that Plato continued to write in a “Socratic” and “negative” vein even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his career: Theaetetus features a Socrates who is even more insistent upon his ignorance than are the dramatic representations of Socrates in briefer and philosophically less complex works that are reasonably assumed to be early; and like many of those early works, Theaetetus seeks but does not find the answer to the “what is it?” question that it relentlessly pursues—“What is knowledge?” Similarly, Parmenides , though certainly not an early dialogue, is a work whose principal aim is to puzzle the reader by the presentation of arguments for apparently contradictory conclusions; since it does not tell us how it is possible to accept all of those conclusions, its principal effect on the reader is similar to that of dialogues (many of them no doubt early) that reach only negative conclusions. Plato uses this educational device—provoking the reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the contradiction unresolved—in Protagoras (often considered an early dialogue) as well. So it is clear that even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is the presentation of unresolved difficulties. (And, just as we should recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple enough to have been early compositions: Ion , for example, affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and Crito sets out the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey civic commands. Neither ends in failure.)

If we are justified in taking Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Apology to constitute reliable evidence about what the historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato’s other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely attributed to Socrates. So understood, Socrates was a moralist but (unlike Plato) not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist. That fits with Aristotle’s testimony, and Plato’s way of choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates. The number of dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small: Phaedo , Republic , Phaedrus , and Philebus . All of them are dominated by ethical issues: whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of pleasure. Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to do with the ethical life of the individual. (The political aspects of Republic are explicitly said to serve the larger question whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be just.) When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea ( Sophist , Statesman ); when they become cosmological, he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in Laws , to a visitor from Athens (and he then eliminates Socrates entirely). In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological, or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from entering these domains. This may be part of the explanation why he has Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the theory advanced in Crito , which reaches the conclusion that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison. Perhaps Plato is indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by the conversation of Socrates.

Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write one kind of dialogue (negative, destructive, preparatory) and to write only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also question whether he went through an early stage during which he refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas (if he had any), but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist, representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates. It is unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato, who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties (he was around 28 when Socrates was killed), would have started his compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing himself to think for himself only later. (What would have led to such a decision?) We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues, even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic inventions—derived, no doubt, by Plato’s reflections on and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes to Socrates in Apology . That speech indicates, for example, that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too attributes this to his Socrates. But what of the various philosophical moves rehearsed in Euthyphro —the dialogue in which Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety is? We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it (changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court). It is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of Socrates’ conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it is to reach an understanding of the central concept that Socrates’ fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to death. The idea that it is important to search for definitions may have been Socratic in origin. (After all, Aristotle attributes this much to Socrates.) But the twists and turns of the arguments in Euthyphro and other dialogues that search for definitions are more likely to be the products of Plato’s mind than the content of any conversations that really took place.

It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading public (with the exception of Apology ) in the form of a dialogue. If the question, “why did Plato write dialogues?”, which many of his readers are tempted to ask, pre-supposes that there must have been some such once-and-for-all decision, then it is poorly posed. It makes better sense to break that question apart into many little ones: better to ask, “Why did Plato write this particular work (for example: Protagoras , or Republic , or Symposium , or Laws ) in the form of a dialogue—and that one ( Timaeus , say) mostly in the form of a long and rhetorically elaborate single speech?” than to ask why he decided to adopt the dialogue form.

The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight from the mouth of its author? This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato’s reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. For example, the use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous appeal of Plato’s writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Even treatise-like compositions— Timaeus and Laws , for example—improve in readability because of their conversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato’s evident interest in pedagogical questions (how is it possible to learn? what is the best way to learn? from what sort of person can we learn? what sort of person is in a position to learn?) to be pursued not only in the content of his compositions but also in their form. Even in Laws such questions are not far from Plato’s mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving upon each other’s social and political institutions.

In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the dialogue form is being used for this purpose. The Parmenides is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato relentlessly rubs his readers’ faces in a baffling series of unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions. But several of his other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for example, Protagoras (can virtue be taught?), Hippias Minor (is voluntary wrongdoing better than involuntary wrongdoing?), and portions of Meno (are some people virtuous because of divine inspiration?). Just as someone who encounters Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he means what he says (or whether he is instead speaking ironically), so Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to infer from the arguments that have been presented to us. But Socrates does not always speak ironically, and similarly Plato’s dialogues do not always aim at creating a sense of bafflement about what we are to think about the subject under discussion. There is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works. We will best understand Plato’s works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly. Rather than impose on our reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing (because he has done such a thing elsewhere), we should bring to each dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it. That would be the most fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy.

The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Further discussion of these and other issues regarding Plato’s philosophy, and far more bibliographical information, is available in the other entries on Plato.

• Cooper, John M. (ed.), 1997, Plato: Complete Works , Indianapolis: Hackett. (Contains translations of all the works handed down from antiquity with attribution to Plato, some of which are universally agreed to be spurious, with explanatory footnotes and both a general Introduction to the study of the dialogues and individual Introductory Notes to each work translated.)
• Burnyeat, Myles and Michael Frede, 2015, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter , Dominic Scott (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ahbel-Rappe, Sara, and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), 2006, A Companion to Socrates , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Allen, Danielle, S., 2010, Why Plato Wrote , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Annas, Julia, 2003, Plato: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Benson, Hugh (ed.), 2006, A Companion to Plato , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Blondell, Ruby, 2002, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bobonich, Christopher, 2002, Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Boys-Stone George, and Christopher Rowe (eds.), 2013, The Circle of Socrates: Readings in the First-Generation Socratics , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Brandwood, Leonard, 1990, The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brickhouse, Thomas C. & Nicholas D. Smith, 1994, Plato’s Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dancy, Russell, 2004, Plato’s Introduction of Forms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ebrey, David and Richard Kraut (eds.), 2022, The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Fine, Gail (ed.), 1999, Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 1999, Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essays by many scholars on a wide range of topics, including several studies of individual dialogues.)
• ––– (ed.), 2019, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Frede, Michael, 1992, “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , Supplementary Volume 1992, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 201–220.
• Griswold, Charles L. (ed.), 1988, Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings , London: Routledge.
• Guthrie, W.K.C., 1971, Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1975, A History of Greek Philosophy , Volume 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1978, A History of Greek Philosophy , Volume 5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Irwin, Terence, 1995, Plato’s Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kahn, Charles H., 1996, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2003, “On Platonic Chronology,” in Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe (eds.), New Perspectives on Plato: Modern and Ancient , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, chapter 4.
• Klagge, James C. and Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), 1992, Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogue , Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kraut, Richard (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2008, How to Read Plato , London: Granta.
• Ledger, Gerald R., 1989, Re-Counting Plato: A Computer Analysis of Plato’s Style , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McCabe, Mary Margaret, 1994, Plato’s Individuals , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2000, Plato and His Predecessors: The Dramatisation of Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Meinwald, Constance, 2016, Plato , London: Routledge.
• Morrison, Donald R., 2012, The Cambridge Companion to Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nails, Debra, 1995, Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy , Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• –––, 2002, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics , Indianapolis: Hackett. (An encyclopedia of information about the characters in all of the dialogues.)
• Nightingale, Andrea, 1993, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construction of Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Peterson, Sandra, 2011, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Press, Gerald A. (ed.), 2000, Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Prior, William J., 2019, Socrates , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Rowe, C.J., 2007, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rowe, Christopher, & Malcolm Schofield (eds.), 2000, Greek and Roman Political Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contains 7 introductory essays by 7 hands on Socratic and Platonic political thought.)
• Rudebusch, George, 2009, Socrates , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Russell, Daniel C., 2005, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Rutherford, R.B., 1995, The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Santas, Gerasimos, 1979, Socrates: Philosophy in Plato’s Early Dialogues , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Sayre, Kenneth, 1995, Plato’s Literary Garden , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Schofield, Malcolm, 2006, Plato: Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Silverman, Allan, 2002, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato’s Metaphysics , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Smith, Nicholas D. and Thomas C. Brickhouse, 1994, Plato’s Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• –––and John Bussanich (eds.), 2015, The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates , London: Bloomsbury.
• Taylor, C.C.W., 1998, Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Thesleff, Holger, 1982, Studies in Platonic Chronology , Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 70, Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
• Vander Waerdt, Paul. A. (ed.), 1994, The Socratic Movement , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Vasiliou, Iakovos, 2008, Aiming at Virtue in Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Vlastos, Gregory, 1991, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1995, Studies in Greek Philosophy (Volume 2: Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition), Daniel W. Graham (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• White, Nicholas P., 1976, Plato on Knowledge and Reality , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Young, Charles M., 1994, “Plato and Computer Dating,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , 12: 227–250.
• Zuckert, Catherine H., 2009, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Links to Original texts of Plato’s Dialogues (maintained by Bernard Suzanne)
• In Dialogue: the Life and Works of Plato , a short podcast by Peter Adamson (Philosophy, Kings College London).

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The Most Anthologized Essays of the Last 25 Years

In which joan didion appears more than once.

Depending on who you are, the word “essay” may make you squirm. After all, here in America at least, our introduction to the essay often comes complete with five paragraphs and “repeat but rephrase” and other soul-killing rules. But in actuality, essays are nothing like the staid, formulaic, boring things they make you write in high school. They’re all over the place. They’re wild. Or at least they can be. After all, the word essay comes from the French verb essayer , which means “to try.” Essays are merely attempts, at expression, or at proof; they claim to be nothing more. I’ve always thought that was lovely.

For this list, I looked at 14 essay anthologies, plus the three volumes of Lee Gutkind’s The Best Creative Nonfiction and John D’Agata’s three-part survey of the form ( The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay , and The Making of the American Essay ), for a total of 20 books published between 1991 and 2016. I ignored all themed anthologies, as well as any limited to a specific year or publication. This is the last survey of anthologies in a series—earlier this month, I looked at the most anthologized short stories and the most anthologized poems —and considering all three lists together affords the ability to compare the way the different forms are canonized and read in America.

Of the three, I was most surprised by the data here. The essay is perhaps the most ravenous of forms, but these anthologies included letters, speeches (notably, a fair number of presidential addresses), excerpts from longer, reported works of non-fiction, and a number of works that I consider stories (like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” which most agree is a short story, and some argue is a poem, but is certainly not an essay) or even actual poetry (John D’Agata, I know you’re a rebel and all, but “ For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey ,” while incredible, is not an essay). On the other hand, several essays that I consider top-notch classics didn’t make the cut (like Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” and Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which each appear only once in all the anthologies I surveyed). And Michel de Montaigne, who essentially coined the term, is only feebly represented. The better news is that five of the nine most anthologized essays are by writers of color, which is significantly better than either of the other lists do in that regard.

Below, I’ve separated my findings into four lists: the most anthologized essays (this should be self-explanatory), the most anthologized essayists (the authors with the most essays total across the anthologies), the most widely anthologized essayists (the authors with the most discrete essays across the anthologies), and the one hit wonders (those essays that were their authors only piece represented across the anthologies, albeit multiple times). At the end, there’s the full list, consisting of all duplicated essays and all essayists who had at least three pieces among the books I surveyed.

Most Anthologized Essays

Nine inclusions:

“Once More to the Lake,” E. B. White

Seven inclusions:

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Six inclusions:

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf

Five inclusions:

“Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell

Four inclusions:

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” N. Scott Momaday

Three inclusions:

“Graduation,” Maya Angelou “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss “Seeing,” Annie Dillard “Learning to Read,” Frederick Douglass “Of the Coming of John,” W.E.B. Du Bois from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America , Barbara Ehrenreich “On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner “The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould “Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr “Salvation,” Langston Hughes “The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson “The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch “Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton “Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace “Yeager,” Tom Wolfe

Two inclusions:

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa “Graven Images,” Saul Bellow “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady “Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicolas Carr “The Dream,” Winston Churchill “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” Hillary Rodham Clinton “Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer “Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum “The White Album,” Joan Didion “On Going Home,” Joan Didion “On Morality,” Joan Didion “Total eclipse,” Annie Dillard “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard from An American Childhood , Annie Dillard “Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early “The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich “Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson “Young Hunger,” M.F.K. Fisher “When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Atul Gawande “He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg “Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy “The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene “Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick “On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt “The Courage of Turtles,” Edward Hoagland “A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid “Dream Children: a Reverie,” Charles Lamb “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee “On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs “Of Some Verses on Virgil,” Michel de Montaigne “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee “Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Barack Obama “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders “The Men We Carry in our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders “Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?,” Peter Singer “A Century of Cinema,” Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth “Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker “Writing and Analyzing a Story,” Eudora Welty “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams “A Preface to Persius,” Edmund Wilson “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf

The Most Anthologized Essayists ( the authors with most essays published among the anthologies )

Sixteen essays: Joan Didion

Fourteen essays: Annie Dillard

Thirteen essays: Virginia Woolf

Eleven essays: James Baldwin George Orwell E. B. White

Nine essays: Richard Rodriguez Henry David Thoreau

Eight essays: Martin Luther King, Jr. Susan Sontag Jonathan Swift

Seven essays: Samuel Johnson Michel de Montaigne Mark Twain Eudora Welty

Six essays: Francis Bacon Barbara Ehrenreich Stephen Jay Gould Maxine Hong Kingston Zora Neale Hurston Charles Lamb John McPhee David Sedaris Amy Tan

Five essays: Maya Angelou Eula Biss M.F.K. Fisher Atul Gawande William Hazlitt Jamaica Kincaid Nancy Mairs H.L. Mencken N. Scott Momaday Adrienne Rich Lewis Thomas Alice Walker David Foster Wallace Tom Wolfe

The Most Widely Anthologized Essayists  ( authors with most discrete essays published among the anthologies )

Ten essays:

Joan Didion

Nine essays:

Annie Dillard

Seven essays:

Samuel Johnson Richard Rodriguez Virginia Woolf

Six essays:

Sir Francis Bacon Michel de Montaigne George Orwell David Sedaris Seneca Susan Sontag Mark Twain Eudora Welty

Five essays:

James Baldwin Charles Lamb H.L. Mencken Adrienne Rich Lewis Thomas Henry David Thoreau

Four essays:

Max Beerbohm G.K. Chesterton Barbara Ehrenreich M.F.K. Fisher Atul Gawande Stephen Jay Gould William Hazlitt Jamaica Kincaid Phillip Lopate Barry Lopez Nancy Mairs Cynthia Ozick Anna Quindlen Scott Russell Sanders Robert Louis Stevenson James Thurber Alice Walker

One Hit Wonders ( authors with a only single essay represented across the anthologies )

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan

“On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner “Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr “The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson “The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa “Graven Images,” Saul Bellow “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady “Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicolas Carr “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” Hillary Rodham Clinton “Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum “Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley “Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson “He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg “Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy “The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene “Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz “Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams

The Full List ( all essays by writers with at least one duplication or three disparate essays anthologized )

“The Great American Desert,” Edward Abbey “The Cowboy and his Cow,” Edward Abbey “Havasu,” Edward Abbey

“Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie “Indian Education,” Sherman Alexie “Captivity,” Sherman Alexie

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison (x 2)

“Graduation,” Maya Angelou (x 3) “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou “Champion of the World,” Maya Angelou

“How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa (x 2)

“Of Truth,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Revenge,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Boldness,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Innovations,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Masques and Triumphs,” Sir Francis Bacon “Antithesis of Things,” Sir Francis Bacon

“Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin (x 5) “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin (x 3) “Alas, Poor Richard,” James Baldwin “The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston,” James Baldwin “Equal in Paris,” James Baldwin

“Going Out for a Walk,” Max Beerbohm “Laughter,” Max Beerbohm “Something Defeasible,” Max Beerbohm “A Clergyman,” Max Beerbohm

“Graven Images,” Saul Bellow (x 2)

“What Reconciles Me,” John Berger “Photographs of Agony,” John Berger “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” John Berger

“The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss (x 3) “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss (x 2)

“Blindness,” Jorge Luis Borges “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus,” Jorge Luis Borges

“I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady (x 2)

“Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. (x 2)

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicholas Carr (x 2)

“The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson from Short Talks , Anne Carson “Kinds of Water,” Anne Carson

“Marginal world,” Rachel Carson “The Obligation to Endure,” Rachel Carson “A Fable for Tomorrow,” Rachel Carson

“A Piece of Chalk,” G.K. Chesterton “On Running After One’s Hat,” G.K. Chesterton “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls,” G.K. Chesterton “On Sandals and Simplicity,” G.K. Chesterton

“The Dream,” Winston Churchill (x 2) from “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Winston Churchill from “This Was Their Finest Hour,” Winston Churchill

“Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer (x 2) “More Room,” Judith Ortiz Cofer “Myth of the Latin Woman: I just met a girl named Maria,” Judith Ortiz Cofer

“Another Country,” Edwidge Danticat “Uncle Moïse,” Edwidge Danticat “Westbury Court,” Edwidge Danticat

“Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum (x 2)

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion (x 4) “The White Album,” Joan Didion (x 2) “On Going Home,” Joan Didion (x 2) “On Morality,” Joan Didion (x 2) “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion “In Bed,” Joan Didion “At the Dam,” Joan Didion “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Joan Didion from Salvador , Joan Didion “The Santa Ana,” Joan Didion

“Seeing,” Annie Dillard (x 3) “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard (x 2) “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard (x 2) rom An American Childhood , Annie Dillard (x 2) “Sight into Insight,” Annie Dillard “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley,” Annie Dillard from For the Time Being , Annie Dillard “The Chase,” Annie Dillard “The Stunt Pilot,” Annie Dillard

“Learning to Read,” Frederick Douglass (x 3) from “Fourth of July Oration,” Frederick Douglass

“Of the Coming of John,” W.E.B. Du Bois (x 3) “A Mild Suggestion,” W.E.B. Du Bois

“Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley (x 2)

“Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early (x 2) “Digressions,” Gerald Early

from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America , Barbara Ehrenreich (x 3) “Serving in Florida,” Barbara Ehrenreich “Cultural Baggage,” Barbara Ehrenreich “War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited,” Barbara Ehrenreich

“The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich (x 2) from the Journals, Gretel Ehrlich “Lijiang,” Gretel Ehrlich

“On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner (x 3)

“Brown Wasps,” Loren Eiseley “The Angry Winter,” Loren Eiseley “The Snout,” Loren Eiseley

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot “Marie Lloyd,” T.S. Eliot “The Dry Salvages,” T.S. Eliot

“The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Conservative,” Ralph Waldo Emerson “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson (x 2)

“Young Hunger,” M.F.K. Fisher (x 2) “Once a Tramp, Always,” M.F.K. Fisher “The Flaw,” M.F.K. Fisher “Paris Journal,” M.F.K. Fisher

“The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald (x 3) “Sleeping and Waking,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Learning to Write,” Benjamin Franklin from the Autobiography , Benjamin Franklin “The Levee,” Benjamin Franklin

“When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Atul Gawande (x 2) from “Overkill,” Atul Gawande “Final Cut,” Atul Gawande “Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready,” Atul Gawande

“He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg (x 2)

“Java Man,” Malcolm Gladwell “None of the Above: What I.Q. Doesn’t Tell You about Race,” Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell

“Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould (x 3) “Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” Stephen Jay Gould “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” Stephen Jay Gould “The Median Isn’t the Message,” Stephen Jay Gould

“Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy (x 2)

“The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene (x 2)

“Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick (x 2)

“No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston (x 5) “Tongue-Tied,” Maxine Hong Kingston

“On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt (x 2) “On Going a Journey,” William Hazlitt “The Fight,” William Hazlitt “Brummelliana,” William Hazlitt

“Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr (x 3)

“The Courage of Turtles,” Edward Hoagland (x 2) “The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain,” Edward Hoagland “Heaven and Nature,” Edward Hoagland

“Salvation,” Langston Hughes (x 3) “Bop,” Langston Hughes

“How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston (x 6)

“The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson (x 3)

“The Boarding house,” Samuel Johnson “The Solitude of the Country,” Samuel Johnson “Dignity and Uses of Biography,” Samuel Johnson “Conversation,” Samuel Johnson “Debtors’ Prisons (1),” Samuel Johnson “Debtors’ Prisons (2),” Samuel Johnson “To Reign Once More in Our Native Country,” Samuel Johnson

“A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid (x 2) “On Seeing England for the First Time,” Jamaica Kincaid “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid “Biography of a Dress,” Jamaica Kincaid

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. (x 7) “I Have a Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Dream Children: a Reverie,” Charles Lamb (x 2) “New Year’s Eve,” Charles Lamb “A Chapter on Ears,” Charles Lamb “The Superannuated Man,” Charles Lamb from “On Some of the Old Actors,” Charles Lamb

“Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee (x 2)

“Second Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln (x 3) “First Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln

“Against Joie de Vivre,” Phillip Lopate “Portrait of my Body,” Phillip Lopate “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” Phillip Lopate “The Dead Father: A Rememberance of Donald Barthelme,” Phillip Lopate

“Flight,” Barry Lopez “Grown Men,” Barry Lopez “The Raven,” Barry Lopez “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez

“The Fourth of July,” Audre Lorde “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Audre Lorde

“The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch (x 3)

“On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs (x 2) “Ron her Son,” Nancy Mairs “Body in Trouble,” Nancy Mairs “Disability,” Nancy Mairs

“My Confession,” Mary McCarthy “Artists in Uniform,” Mary McCarthy “Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?,” Mary McCarthy

“The Case for Single-Child Families,” Bill McKibben “Waste Not, Want Not,” Bill McKibben “Curbing Nature’s Paparazzi,” Bill McKibben

“The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee (x 4) “Under the Snow,” John McPhee from Annals of the Former World , John McPhee

“On Being an American,” H.L. Mencken “Hills of Zion,” H.L. Mencken “Reflections on Journalism,” H.L. Mencken “The Libido for the Ugly,” H.L. Mencken “Funeral march,” H.L. Mencken

“The Way to Rainy Mountain,” N. Scott Momaday (x 4) “An American Land Ethic,” N. Scott Momaday

“Of some verses on Virgil,” Michel de Montaigne (x 2) “Of books,” Michel de Montaigne “Of a monstrous child,” Michel de Montaigne from “On Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” Michel de Montaigne “Of Experience,” Michel de Montaigne

“Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee (x 2)

“This is Not Who We Are,” Naomi Shihab Nye “Thank You in Arabic,” Naomi Shihab Nye “One Village,” Naomi Shihab Nye

“Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Barack Obama (x 2) “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama

“Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell (x 5) “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell (x 2) “Such, Such were the Joys,” George Orwell “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell “The Moon under Water,” George Orwell “A Hanging,” George Orwell

“Drugstore in Winter,” Cynthia Ozick “The Lesson of the Master,” Cynthia Ozick “Highbrow Blues,” Cynthia Ozick “Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” Cynthia Ozick

“The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato (x 2)

“An Animal’s Place,” Michael Pollan “Why “Natural” Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore,” Michael Pollan “What’s Eating America,” Michael Pollan

“Future is Now,” Katherine Anne Porter “St. Augustine and the Bullfight,” Katherine Anne Porter “The Necessary Enemy,” Katherine Anne Porter

“Between the Sexes, a Great Divide,” Anna Quindlen “Stuff Is Not Salvation,” Anna Quindlen “The War We Haven’t Won,” Anna Quindlen “Homeless,” Anna Quindlen

“Split at the Root,” Adrienne Rich “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Adrienne Rich “Taking Women Students Seriously,” Adrienne Rich “Claiming an Education,” Adrienne Rich from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich

“Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez (x 3) “Late Victorians,” Richard Rodriguez “Going Home Again,” Richard Rodriguez from Crossing Borders , Richard Rodriguez from Darling , Richard Rodriguez “Private Language, Public Language,” Richard Rodriguez “‘Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans,” Richard Rodriguez

“Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz (x 2)

“Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders (x 2 ) “The Men we Carry in our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders (x 2) “The Singular First Person,” Scott Russell Sanders “The Inheritance of Tools,” Scott Russell Sanders

“Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle (x 2)

“Repeat After Me,” David Sedaris “Loggerheads,” David Sedaris “A Plague of Tics,” David Sedaris “Guy Walks into a Bar Car,” David Sedaris “The Drama Bug,” David Sedaris “Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa,” David Sedaris

“On Noise,” Seneca “Asthma,” Seneca “Scipio’s Villa,” Seneca “Slaves,” Seneca “Epistle 47,” Seneca “Sick,” Seneca

“Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko (x 2)

“What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?,” Peter Singer (x 2) from Animal Liberation , Peter Singer

“A Century of Cinema,” Susan Sontag (x 2) “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag (x 2) “Notes on ‘Camp,'” Susan Sontag from “Freak Show,” Susan Sontag “Unguided Tour,” Susan Sontag from “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” Susan Sontag.

“Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton (x 3) “Seneca Falls Keynote Address,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples (x 3) “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s,” Brent Staples

“Aes Triplex,” Robert Louis Stevenson “The Lantern-bearers,” Robert Louis Stevenson “An Apology for Idlers,” Robert Louis Stevenson “On Marriage,” Robert Louis Stevenson

“A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift (x 6) “Good Manners and Good Breeding,” Jonathan Swift “A Meditation upon a Broom-stick,” Jonathan Swift

“Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan (x 6)

“Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (x 2)

“Lives of a Cell,” Lewis Thomas “Notes on Punctuation,” Lewis Thomas “To Err is Human,” Lewis Thomas “Becoming a Doctor,” Lewis Thomas “The Medusa and the Snail,” Lewis Thomas

“Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau (x 3) “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau (x 2) “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau (x 2) “The Battle of the Ants,” Henry David Thoreau “Night and Moonlight,” Henry David Thoreau

“The Secret Life of James Thurber,” James Thurber “Sex Ex Machina,” James Thurber “My Own Ten Rules for a Happy Marriage,” James Thurber “Snapshot of a Dog,” James Thurber

“Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth (x 2)

“Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain (x 2) “Corn-pone Opinions,” Mark Twain “Italian without a master,” Mark Twain “Thoughts of God,” Mark Twain from Life on the Mississippi “Letters from the Earth,” Mark Twain

“In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker (x 2) “Looking for Zora,” Alice Walker “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” Alice Walker “Becoming What We’re Called,” Alice Walker

“Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace (x 3) “Ticket to the Fair,” David Foster Wallace “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,” David Foster Wallace

“Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White (x 9) “The Ring of Time,” E.B. White “About Myself,” E.B. White

“Writing and Analyzing a Story,” Eudora Welty (x 2) “Sweet Devouring,” Eudora Welty “Clamorous to Learn,” Eudora Welty “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Eudora Welty “The Little Store,” Eudora Welty “Listening,” Eudora Welty

“The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams (x 2)

“A Preface to Persius,” Edmund Wilson (x 2) “Old Stone House,” Edmund Wilson “Life is a Narrative,” Edmund Wilson

“Yeager,” Tom Wolfe (x 3) “Putting Daddy On,” Tom Wolfe “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” Tom Wolfe

The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf (x 6) “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf (x 2) “Leslie Stephen,” Virginia Woolf “Harriette Wilson,” Virginia Woolf “Ellen Terry,” Virginia Woolf “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf from Three Guineas , Virginia Woolf

Anthologies Surveyed:

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present , ed. Philip Lopate (1997); The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (2001);  Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present , ed. Lex Williford and Michael Martone (2007);  The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction , 14th edition, ed. Melissa Goldthwaite, Joseph Bizup, John Brereton, Anne Fernald, Linda Peterson (2015);  The Norton Book of Personal Essays , ed. Joseph Epstein (1997); The Best Creative Nonfiction , ed. Lee Gutkind, Volumes 1, 2, & 3 (2007); The Signet Book of American Essays , ed. M. Jerry Weiss and Helen Weiss (2006); The Oxford Book of Essays , ed. John Gross (1991); 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , Samuel Cohen (2011); The Eloquent Essay: An Anthology of Classic & Creative Nonfiction , ed. John Loughery (2000); The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose , Third Edition, ed. Laura Buzzard, Don LePan, Nora Ruddock, Alexandria Stuart (2016); The Next American Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2003) & The Lost Origins of the Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2009) & The Making of the American Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2016); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction , ed. B. Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve (2005); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth , ed. Bill Roorbach (2001); 40 Model Essays , Second edition, ed. Jane E. Aaron and Ellen Kuhl Repetto (2003); The Seagull Reader: Essays , Third Edition, ed. Joseph Kelly (2015)

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Essays in Philosophy

Essays first appeared in North British Review (1846–1855).

Contents [ edit ]

• Essay I Life and Philosophy of Leibnitz.
• Essay II Hamilton and Reid: Theory of Perception.
• Essay III Scottish Metaphysics: Theory of Causation.
• Essay IV The Insoluble Problem.
• Essay V The Metaphysics of Augustinianism.
• Essay VI Ferriers Theory of Knowing and Being.

This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

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