The canon of enduring questions

The turning point where Plato subjects the middle-period Forms to their gravest criticism; its baffling second half became, for the Neoplatonists, the supreme metaphysical text in the whole corpus.

Plato's one work of systematic cosmology, and by far his most influential in the Latin Middle Ages — for centuries the only dialogue available in the West, through Calcidius's partial translation.

The physics epitome of Epicurus's system, addressed to a pupil and preserved whole by Diogenes Laertius; it condenses the lost thirty-seven books of On Nature into a single letter.

Filed with the two other dialogues written for Annaeus Serenus — an attribution that rests on an inference, not on anything the text says.

Aimed at two opposite Christological heresies, this short tractate is remembered less for the quarrel that occasioned it than for a definition of person that medieval thought adopted as standard.

Argued from stated axioms rather than scripture, this is the most purely philosophical of Boethius's theological tractates, and important enough that Aquinas later wrote a commentary on it.

Doubted for centuries and restored to the set on the strength of its manuscript transmission and style, this is a plain confession of faith rather than one of the logical tractates.

Prompted by a sixth-century controversy over the Trinity, it brings the Aristotelian logic Boethius spent his life translating to bear on the doctrine, and drew close attention from later medieval schools.

Written in prison as Boethius awaited execution, this dialogue of alternating prose and verse became the most widely read book of the Latin Middle Ages after the Bible, translated by kings and poets for a thousand years.

The unfinished masterwork of Aquinas's last decade, the Summa was meant as an introductory teaching text and became the central summation of medieval theology, later made normative for the Catholic church.

One of the essays Bacon added only in the final 1625 collection, and the one place in that worldly book where he sets practical counsel aside for the pleasure of a thing well made.

Begun as lessons for a private pupil and published in 1663 at his friends' urging, this Cartesian exposition — with its Cogitata Metaphysica appended — was the only work to carry Spinoza's name while he lived.

Fragments of an apology for the faith, left unfinished at Pascal's death and first shaped into a book by the editors of Port-Royal in 1670; the order of the pieces has been disputed ever since.

The nearest thing to a notebook Spinoza left: his exchanges with scientists, critics, and friends, printed among his posthumous works with the private matter cut out by wary editors.

Cast as letters to a young woman rather than as a treatise, this is Holbach turning his irreligion toward a single ordinary believer's formation; quieter and more intimate than the systematic books, and aimed at readers they were not.

The centrepiece of Holbach's output and the fullest statement Enlightenment atheism produced: where the shorter books indict religion, this one lays down the whole materialist system — no God, no design, only matter in motion — that the rest assume.

The popular abridgement of the System of Nature, written to carry the same atheism to readers who would never open the larger book; lighter, blunter, and the one of Holbach's works that reached furthest.

Second of Schelling's nature-philosophy books, following the Ideen of 1797; its organic conception of force is what carried him from Fichtean idealism toward a philosophy of nature in its own right.

A Jena lecture course from Schelling's identity-philosophy years, addressed to students rather than to fellow philosophers; its idea of the university as an organic unity of the sciences anticipates Humboldt's Berlin model.

The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.

The hinge between Schelling's early identity-philosophy and the "positive philosophy" of his final decades, delivered at Erlangen in the winter of 1820–21 and unpublished in his lifetime.

The capstone of Schelling's positive philosophy, delivered in Berlin from 1841; an unauthorised transcript appeared in 1843, the authorised text only posthumously in the collected works of 1858. Its critique of purely rational system is the historical seed of later existential thought.

The book that turned the Young Hegelians, and the young Marx, against Hegel by recasting theology as disguised anthropology — Feuerbach's most consequential work, and the one that named a moment.

A shorter work of 1846 that turns the earlier book's question from human nature to nature itself — whether it extends that argument or replaces it is disputed — and seeds the Heidelberg lectures Feuerbach delivered two years later.

Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.

The aesthetics of Schelling's identity-philosophy, spoken at Jena and Würzburg between 1802 and 1805 and unpublished until the collected works of 1859; it treats art as the supreme presentation of the absolute.

Composed around 1660 and shown only to Spinoza's friends, it is his earliest systematic work — the seed of the Ethics, and it stayed unpublished until a manuscript surfaced in the nineteenth century.

A fragment from the unfinished Dialectics of Nature, in which Engels turned his materialism on natural science and human origins; the rest of that project went unpublished until 1925.

The 1888 book edition carried the first printing of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach; Engels had written the essay in 1886 to review a study of Feuerbach and retrace his and Marx's exit from Hegel.

A modern gathering of Eckhart's vernacular preaching, not a book he issued; these German sermons are the most-read part of his work and the chief source of the propositions condemned in 1329.

Short sayings and sermon fragments carrying Eckhart's name, of uncertain date and, in part, uncertain authenticity; the marginalia of a body of work that lived by being spoken and remembered rather than published.

Form, matter and cause are argued out in the Physics, not here, and the works on animals and the soul are built on the framework it lays down; what this book asks is what it takes for anything to be at all. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas each built a commentary on it.

A companion to the Philosophical Thoughts from Diderot's deist years, disowned by silence as his materialism took hold; it reached print only in 1770, and only under a dead man's name.

The prose treatises, as against the sermons — among them the early "Talks of Instruction," "On Detachment," and the "Book of Divine Consolation" whose lay-directed teaching helped trigger the 1325 proceedings at Cologne.

A compilation, not a composition: the recorded sayings and dialogues of Confucius, assembled by disciples over generations and canonized under the Han, and for centuries the first book of the Confucian curriculum.

Alone among Plato's works it is a courtroom monologue rather than a dialogue, and with the Euthyphro, Crito and Phaedo it forms the quartet dramatising Socrates' trial and death — the events that turned Plato toward philosophy.

Set in the prison between the Apology's verdict and the Phaedo's execution, it is the shortest of the four last-days dialogues and the one that turns from Socrates' own fate to the citizen's duty toward the state.

One of the short definitional dialogues, in which Socrates hunts a single concept — here holiness — and comes away empty-handed; it opens the tetralogy that runs through the trial to the execution.

Generally judged spurious — a post-Platonic imitation carried under his name in the corpus — this short exercise on prayer is useful mainly as a specimen of how the school later wrote in Plato's manner.

Plato's fullest dramatic contest between Socratic questioning and sophistic display, staged among the age's leading intellectuals; its question of teachable virtue passes straight into the Meno and Gorgias.

The bridge from the early ethical dialogues to the Republic: its confrontation with Callicles over whether injustice pays sets up the question the Republic devotes its whole length to answering.

One of the shortest early dialogues, and Plato's only sustained treatment of friendship as such; the questions it cannot answer are the ones Aristotle later organises in the Nicomachean Ethics.

A middle-period masterpiece built as a sequence of set speeches rather than a cross-examination; with the Phaedrus it is Plato's great treatment of erôs, and the source, through Ficino, of the phrase 'Platonic love.'

Classed among the spurious works and doubted since antiquity, this short dialogue on wealth is carried in the corpus under Plato's name but is very unlikely to be his.

The ethical counterpart to the letter to Herodotus: where that letter treats nature, this treats conduct — death, the gods, desire and pleasure — the same four concerns later gathered into the tetrapharmakos, the four-line Epicurean creed.

Marcus Aurelius's only book, and one he never meant as a book: a private Stoic diary kept on military campaign, unpublished in his lifetime and first printed in 1559.

Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.

Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.

The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.

Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.

Written for his brother Gallio, and unfinished: twenty-eight chapters that stop before the argument closes.

The brother it addresses appears elsewhere here under another name — adopted, Novatus became the Gallio to whom On a Happy Life is written.

The longest thing he wrote on a single subject, written during his years of power under Nero and finished before 64, when he refers back to it in a letter to Lucilius.

It opens in another man's voice: Serenus lays out his own case at length, and Seneca does not answer a word of it until he has finished.

Closest in spirit to On the Firmness of the Wise Person, which argues the same immunity on a smaller scale. The one dialogue addressed to Lucilius.

Where On Peace of Mind treats a man who wobbles, this one — the hardest of the three dialogues for Serenus — denies that the wise man can wobble at all.

From Corsica went a second consolation too, to a man at Claudius's court, in terms that made exile sound insupportable.

The larger of the two surviving records of Epictetus, taken down in his classroom by Arrian; four of its original eight books remain, and the Enchiridion is its condensed digest.

Arrian condensed Epictetus's Discourses into this handbook of about fifty rules; its portability carried it further than the full record — into monasteries, Neostoic libraries and, much later, prison camps.

The most inward of Augustine's early philosophical dialogues, written at the Cassiciacum retreat before he took orders — the one that invented the form, and the word, for talking with oneself.

The largest of Augustine's works, written across his late maturity as a bishop, turns a defence against one accusation — that Christianity doomed Rome — into a theology of history that shaped Western political thought for a thousand years.

The moral theory of the Treatise's third book, rebuilt for the readers who were never going to open the original.

Kant's runner-up entry in the Berlin Academy's prize contest, and the sharpest of the pre-critical essays: it already sets philosophy's method against mathematics', the problem the first Critique would finally resolve.

A semi-autobiographical dialogue rather than a treatise, staging Diderot's own family in Langres to weigh law against conscience; one of the moral fictions he sent out through Grimm's private newsletter rather than into print.

The short, deliberately preliminary book that isolates the categorical imperative before building anything on it; three years later the Critique of Practical Reason would give the same moral law its fuller grounding.

Her first published book, and the one that works from inside the conduct-book trade rather than against it. The arguments about reasoning, dependence and a girl's prospects come back radicalised five years later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Edmund Burke handed her a political subject not long after it appeared, and the argument moved from a schoolroom to a nation.

The book that got Kant ordered to stop writing on religion: four essays, from 1793, rebuilding Christian doctrine on reason and consigning revelation and clergy to what Kant called counterfeit service.

Published posthumously in 1795, these are the fragments Smith allowed to survive the burning of his papers; the history of astronomy among them is early work he kept back for decades.

The third part of Kant's late Conflict of the Faculties (1798), written as a reply to the physician Hufeland — a philosopher's dietetics, and his most personal page on governing the body through the mind.

A satirical dialogue between a level-headed philosopher and a brilliant scoundrel — the most unsettling and least classifiable thing Diderot wrote, and the one he kept out of print entirely.

A dialogue on whether a useful faith can also be a false one, heading a cluster of essays on religion and art that Saunders drew from the 1851 Parerga.

The pessimism most readers know him by, stated without the metaphysics — Saunders' selection of the shortest, bluntest essays from the 1851 Parerga.

Not from the Parerga at all: a manual of thirty-eight debating tricks that Schopenhauer drafted around 1830, left unpublished, and that reached print only in 1864, from his posthumous papers.

One of the topical selections Saunders carved from the Parerga for English readers, this one on writing, reading, and style; published in 1891.

His last book, a self-portrait written weeks before the collapse and kept from print by his sister until 1908.

One of three ethical treatises transmitted under Aristotle's name, alongside the Nicomachean Ethics and the Magna Moralia — the last of the three being the one whose authenticity is disputed.

Not a single work but the gleanings of a lost body of writing: sayings from a medieval Vatican manuscript, quotations left by hostile authors, and text still emerging from the burned papyri of Herculaneum.

Three treatises, written quickly in 1887 as a "supplement" to Beyond Good and Evil — his most sustained argument and his most studied book.

Long read as a mere appendix to the Groundwork, this ethical half of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals is where Kant spells out the duties of virtue; later Kantians recovered it as his theory of character.

The fullest of Aristotle's ethical treatises, and the one the tradition kept: it shares three books with the Eudemian Ethics, which covers the same ground. Its last page hands the subject over to the Politics.

A brief, aporetic early piece whose deliberately perverse conclusion has kept it a standing puzzle — and whose authenticity a few scholars still question, though Aristotle already treated it as Plato's.

Among the shortest dialogues, and the first place Plato treats poetry as divine possession rather than craft — a theme he takes up again, far more harshly, in the Republic's quarrel with the poets.

Its authenticity is disputed — unquestioned in antiquity, doubted since Schleiermacher — which is now the salient fact about it; the longer of the two Alcibiades dialogues attached to Plato's name.

An early inquiry into a single virtue, pairing naturally with the Charmides on temperance; the question it leaves open — whether courage is really a form of knowledge — points ahead to the Protagoras.

A pivot in the corpus, standing between the aporetic early dialogues and the middle-period metaphysics: the theory of recollection and the knowledge/true-belief distinction first surface here, on the road to the Phaedo and Republic.

The early companion to the Laches: where that dialogue fails to pin down courage, this one fails to pin down temperance — set just after Socrates' return from Potidaea, among relatives of Plato who became tyrants.

The longest and most doctrinally ambitious of the last-days group, and the point where Socrates' conversations give way to Plato's own metaphysics: the theory of Forms stated outright, at the deathbed.

Pairs with the Symposium as Plato's second great study of love, but reaches further — into rhetoric, dialectic and a famous closing critique of writing; unusually, it is set in the countryside outside Athens.

Plato's central inquiry into knowledge, and the first of a late trilogy continued in the Sophist and Statesman; famously it reaches no definition at all, ending in deliberate impasse.

Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.

Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.

On the earlier of the two datings it belongs to the years just after Corsica, which puts the advice about squandered time in the mouth of a man lately deprived of eight years of his own.

Composed in Augustine's first years as a bishop, the Confessions looks back on the conversion his early Cassiciacum dialogues had just followed, and turns a private reckoning into a form no one had written before.

Bacon's opening move in a lifelong campaign, addressed to James I in 1605, and later rebuilt and enlarged as the Latin De Augmentis Scientiarum of 1623.

The first of Descartes's books to reach print, and the only one he wrote in French for a general reader; it sketches in a few pages the metaphysics the Meditations would expand four years later in Latin.

Cast as six days of solitary meditation and issued in Latin with six sets of Objections and Replies, this is Descartes's central metaphysical work; it deepens into radical doubt the method the Discourse had only announced.

Where the Meditations argues, the Principles teaches: Part I condenses that metaphysics, and Parts II–IV build it out into a mechanical physics of the heavens and the earth — Descartes's bid to become the standard university text.

The work the others point toward: the finished system Spinoza spent some fifteen years building and never dared publish, where his God, his psychology, and his account of freedom are proved as a single chain of reasoning.

Before the Ethics found its geometrical form, Spinoza sketched its theory of knowledge here and then abandoned the draft — one of his earliest surviving works, and one he left unfinished.

Written at twenty-four out of the optics Berkeley studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and the least contested of his works — the theory of vision was taken up where his metaphysics was refused.

The head-on statement of Berkeley's immaterialism, aimed at Locke and Descartes — and, because he never wrote the second part he promised, the whole of it that survives.

Berkeley's second attempt at the case of the Principles, put into dialogue to win over the general reader whom the first book had only estranged.

The quarry from which nearly everything else on this shelf was cut, and now the most read of Hume's books — which is the opposite of what he wanted.

Diderot's first substantial book, from before his turn to materialism: a deist still arguing here for a God nature might warrant. The form — numbered fragments — is lifted from Pascal and pointed against him.

Shorter, sharper and re-argued: the first part of the Treatise remade for a general reader, and carrying two sections on religion that the earlier book had deliberately left out.

Written for a volume that lost two of its essays to a threatened prosecution, this one asks where religion came from rather than whether any of it is true — the historical half of a question the Dialogues take up philosophically.

Rousseau's longest book and the one he valued most, published in 1762 the same season as the Social Contract and condemned with it. Read now as a founding text of modern child-centred education.

The popular essay of Kant's pre-critical years, twenty-six years before the Critique of Judgement gave taste a rigorous grounding; its remarks on race and sex now drive much of the scholarship on him.

The anonymous, ironic book of 1766 in which Kant's faith in speculative metaphysics visibly collapses — the clearing of the ground that the first Critique, fifteen years later, would build on.

The bestseller that made Mendelssohn "the German Socrates" — a rational defence of the soul's immortality, modelled on Plato, that Kant would later single out to refute.

A line-by-line rebuttal of another man's pamphlet, and the piece that converted Burke from a literary reputation into the Rockingham Whigs' pen.

A conversation in three voices that its author kept by him for a quarter of a century, revising it three times and letting nobody print it while he lived.

The book at the centre of everything after it: the first of the three Critiques, revised almost past recognition for its 1787 second edition, and the work the Prolegomena was written to explain.

The essay where Kant first treats history as more than chronicle — nine propositions arguing it has a hidden rational shape; the seed of Perpetual Peace, and a device Hegel later took over.

An intervention in the pantheism controversy that split the German Enlightenment: written months after Mendelssohn's death, it stakes out a rational faith between dogmatic proof and Jacobi's leap.

The second of the three Critiques, and Kant's reply to those who doubted the Groundwork's freedom; it introduces the fact of reason and the postulates of God and immortality.

For two centuries her name has meant this title alone, and the rest of the shelf has been read, when read at all, as approach or aftermath. Behind it stand two books on the schooling of girls; ahead of it, a history of the French Revolution written in France under the Terror.

Burke fronting somebody else's book — an English translation of a Girondin's self-defence, published the year after its author had been executed by his own revolution.

An early work, written while Schelling was still a theology student and read at first as pure Fichteanism; it opens the identity-philosophy that his Naturphilosophie would soon complicate.

The late essay whose plan for a league of free states reached the twentieth century intact; Kant, past seventy, wrote it as Prussia pulled out of the war against revolutionary France.

The framing section of the Doctrine of Right, the legal half of Kant's 1797 Metaphysics of Morals; it defines a right through freedom alone and ties every right to a power to coerce.

One of the last books to appear under Kant's name (1803), though his editor Rink built it from lecture notes; the fullest record of Kant on education, and of his debt to Rousseau.

Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.

Schopenhauer's 1813 doctoral dissertation, and the book he told readers to finish before opening his masterwork; the 1836 essay bound with it hunts for the same metaphysics in natural science.

Part three of the Encyclopaedia, the one-volume outline of Hegel's whole system; the English text fills his terse paragraphs with additions his editors drew from student notes.

Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.

The work in which Bentham's utilitarianism turns to demolish the doctrine of natural, imprescriptible rights; written in the 1790s against the French revolutionary declarations and first published, in French, by Dumont in 1816.

Bentham's satirical catalogue of the fallacies used to resist reform, edited from his manuscripts and published in English in 1824 after Dumont's French version of 1816; the most quotable and least systematic of his major works.

Two ethics essays written for academic prize contests — one crowned in Norway, one famously denied the Danish medal though it stood alone — issued together in 1841 as The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.

A short Berlin Academy address of 1850, from Schelling's final years and published posthumously; it applies his late doctrine of God as the ground of possibility to the classical problem of the eternal truths.

An excursion into the paranormal — ghosts, second sight, animal magnetism — explained through his own metaphysics of will; the fifth of the six long essays in the 1851 Parerga.

His first book fixed the political position he defended for the next half-century, and the evolutionary reasoning he tried out here on the poor law grew into a philosophy of the universe.

Essays on ethics and politics that Saunders gathered — some from the 1851 Parerga, some from manuscripts unpublished at his death — under a title Schopenhauer never gave them.

His most cheerful book, a guide to happiness that opens the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life; the pages John Oxenford's 1853 essay singled out when he introduced Schopenhauer to English readers.

Notorious far beyond its length: a few hostile pages on women from the second volume of the 1851 Parerga, an embarrassment to his admirers and a standing charge against him.

Fifteen years on it returned, much enlarged, as a volume of the Synthetic Philosophy — so the edition that carried his psychology to readers is not the one that broke him.

Read against the Synthetic Philosophy, this is where several of its positions were first stated at magazine length — and where he wrote about music, manners and laughter, which the system had no room for.

The essays are of the 1850s; the book is of 1911, and Charles W. Eliot, not Spencer, chose its contents — the four on education, set beside pieces on progress, science, manners, laughter and music.

Assembled for America out of the same magazine pieces Spencer was collecting at home in his own Essays, with which it overlaps heavily. It was often the first Spencer an American reader owned.

Not a book he wrote but a volume his editors gathered from his early papers — prefaces to books he never actually wrote among them.

An essay he left in manuscript in 1873; its picture of truth as forgotten metaphor did its real work a century later.

It stands in front of the three volumes of the sociology as their introduction, arguing that the science is difficult before any of it was attempted. Much the shortest of his sociological writing.

Ethics was where the whole system was meant to arrive, and this is its opening division — issued alone, ahead of the volumes it was supposed to rest on, and later bound in as Part I of The Principles of Ethics.

The book Nietzsche later marked as the start of his campaign against morality — the least read of the mature works, and the seed of the Genealogy.

Aphorism 125 gives us the madman and "God is dead"; aphorism 341, the eternal return — the most personal of the mature books.

A short, savage précis of his whole philosophy, written in a week in 1888 as his last lucid year ran out.

The book American psychology grew up on, and the one everything after it came out of: the chapters on habit, will and belief carry his pragmatism and his radical empiricism in embryo.

For most people who studied psychology in America in the 1890s, this was James: The Principles of Psychology cut down for undergraduate courses two years after it appeared.

Ten years separate this collection from the book that made the label famous: platform lectures on chance, faith and the moral life, gathered the year before he first called himself a pragmatist in public.

Theologians, mystics and anthropologists have been arguing with this casebook ever since — his only sustained book on religion, and the widest-read thing he wrote. The test it applies to a religious state, judge it by what it does, is the one he would soon be calling pragmatism.

What the Principles had been carrying since 1890 arrives here as a short public statement, spoken to general audiences in Boston and New York before it was printed. The Meaning of Truth exists because of the way this one was received.

Aimed squarely at the absolute idealism then governing philosophy in Britain and America, and the fullest metaphysics he lived to publish. Its technical counterpart is Essays in Radical Empiricism, which nobody assembled until after he was dead.

The companion to Pragmatism, and mostly older than it: back numbers reprinted alongside fresh answers to its critics. It carries the technical version of the theory of truth that the 1907 lectures had handed to the public.

Radical empiricism is defined here and nowhere in the books he saw through the press: papers written for other philosophers in 1904 and 1905, not talks written for a room.

Undated notes from his literary remains, engaging Locke, Kant, and the post-Kantian idealists; manuscript material sorted by his editors after his death, never a book he wrote.

The 1886 prelude to his late assault on morality, arguing in the open what Zarathustra had delivered in parable.

The book the Romantics and the German Idealists built on: Kant's 1790 account of beauty and of purpose in nature, written to bridge the gulf that had opened between his first two Critiques.

His inaugural lecture at Basel, given at twenty-four — the philologist's public debut, and already the argument that would raise art above scholarship.

The turn from Wagnerian metaphysics to the cool aphorist — the book in which the "free spirit" first speaks in his own voice.

A late and technically demanding dialogue on whether pleasure or wisdom makes a life good; its exact place in the late group is unusually uncertain, and it is Plato's fullest ethics of pleasure.

Written to salvage the Critique of Pure Reason after its baffled reception, this shorter 1783 restatement runs the same argument in reverse, and became most readers' first encounter with Kant.

Intended as the first book of the "revaluation of all values" he did not live to finish — his fiercest word on Christianity, held back until 1895.

His first book, and the one that cost him his standing among classicists; its discursive prophecy he would spend the next decade outgrowing.

The most notorious book under his name, and one he never assembled: his sister and Peter Gast made it from his notebooks after his collapse.

The masterwork, and the whole of his philosophy: one argument he refused to recast, only enlarge, across three editions between 1819 and 1859. Every other title on this shelf leads toward it or away from it.

The scholar's turn against his own discipline: notes for an "untimely meditation" on philology that he abandoned around 1875.

Almost entirely a set-piece funeral oration rather than a dialogue; its authenticity is backed by Aristotle's references, and it reads as Plato's deliberately ambiguous parody of Athenian patriotic rhetoric.

The centre of the corpus and the fullest statement of the middle-period philosophy — the Forms, the tripartite soul, the ideal city — gathering into one work the ethical and political threads of the Gorgias, Meno and Phaedo.

An unfinished late dialogue, broken off in mid-sentence and intended as the sequel to the Timaeus; its importance is almost entirely as the ancient origin of the Atlantis story.

The direct sequel to the Sophist, and the corpus's bridge from late metaphysics toward the legislation of the Laws; its claim that expert knowledge outranks written law reconsiders the Republic.

Plato's longest and last dialogue, left unfinished at his death and the only one without Socrates; a practical, law-by-law counterpart to the ideal city of the Republic.

Historians use it as a source rather than as a text to interpret, which is true of nothing else under Aristotle's name. It belongs beside the Politics, as the surviving piece of the survey that fed it.

Not a finished book but lectures, with shorter pieces and marginal notes worked in — and the place where the Nicomachean Ethics was heading when it closed by saying that the study of character runs on into the study of constitutions.

Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.

Three treatises that Cicero wrote as separate books, each with a life of its own; the single volume that holds them is a Victorian publisher's construction, not a shape he gave them.

Harper's American gathering of Bohn's cheap English classics: the Tusculan Disputations for a second time, standing at the front of a volume that goes on into theology and politics.

The one work here written for the emperor Seneca served — instruction handed upward, from a tutor with everything to lose to a pupil with nothing to restrain him.

Machiavelli's most famous and shortest book, written in 1513 and published in 1532. Read for centuries as a tyrant's manual — a reading its republican companion, the Discourses on Livy, complicates.

Longer, later and far less read than The Prince, this republican commentary on Livy is the work that makes Machiavelli's real politics a genuine question. Published, like The Prince, only after he died.

The book Bacon grew across three editions and thirty years, and the one that kept his name in ordinary readers' hands while his philosophy waited for a later age to take it up.

Written in the years around 1670 to defend Dutch toleration and answer the Calvinist clergy, it was the one polemic Spinoza put into print — and its scandal is much of why the Ethics waited until after his death.

Spinoza's last work, and the only one he wrote as a practical manual of governing; he was still at it, on the chapter about democracy, when he died in 1677.

Not one book but a collection under a single title, and the place on this shelf where Hume writes for the general reader — on politics, trade, taste and manners — rather than for philosophers.

Twelve essays on money, trade, taxes, public credit and population, published in 1752 and later folded into his collected essays — economics before there was a word for it.

Rousseau's second and more ambitious Discourse, written for the Academy of Dijon and published in 1755. It lays the account of natural man and the origin of property on which the Social Contract would later build a politics.

Two short pieces from Rousseau's engagement with the Abbé de Saint-Pierre's peace project: the Abstract of 1761 and the Judgment published only in 1782, with the fragment The State of War. Slight beside his major books, but the seed of his thinking on war between states.

Published anonymously when its author was twenty-seven, and still argued over: a joke that a good many readers, then and since, have declined to take as one.

The one sustained work of philosophy in Burke's output, written before Parliament took him and revised only once.

The opening work in the run of anonymous antireligious books Holbach produced with his circle; the System of Nature and Good Sense that followed would build the philosophy out, where this one simply indicts the religion.

An application of the Enquiry's aesthetics to a working art, abandoned after a few pages.

Published the same year as Emile and burned beside it, this short treatise sets out Rousseau's positive politics where the Discourse on Inequality had only diagnosed the disease. Ignored in his lifetime, it became the most contested book of the French Revolution.

Not a work Smith published but a student's notes from his Glasgow course, found and printed in 1896 — the seedbed of the Wealth of Nations and of a theory of justice he never finished.

Begun in Ireland in the early 1760s from inside the administration that enforced the penal code, then set aside unfinished for the sake of a career in England.

Where Christianity Unveiled indicts the religion and the System of Nature builds the philosophy, this one goes at the source texts, applying to the Gospels the historical scrutiny Holbach's circle applied to everything held sacred.

The Rockingham Whigs' creed rather than one man's essay, circulated in draft for the party's approval.

The retrospective half of Burke's American case: where Conciliation proposes a settlement, this one explains how the quarrel was manufactured and by whom.

Two speeches from one contested election in 1774 — the first on arriving mid-poll, the second on being declared elected — printed together ever since as a single statement.

Set as a school text in the United States for generations — and the speech where Burke stakes his whole case on describing a people rather than on a principle.

The book that founded political economy as a system, and the one for which Smith is now chiefly remembered — though he set as much store by his moral philosophy.

A constituency letter as much as a constitutional one, addressed to the officers of the city whose poll Burke would decline three years later.

Written in the weeks after the Gordon Riots for the ministers deciding how many rioters to hang, and never intended for publication.

The far end of the story begun at Bristol in 1774: the same doctrine of representation, restated by a man who was about to give up the seat for having acted on it.

The high point of Burke's career as a practical reformer, and the rare instance of a proposal of his that became law — two years late, and in a smaller form than he moved.

Prompted by the partial relief then before the Irish Parliament and addressed to the Catholic peer most inclined to be satisfied with it.

Mendelssohn's answer to a pamphlet daring him to square his liberalism with his Judaism — a plea for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state that Kant called irrefutable.

Where the case Burke had spent two years assembling was first made in public — the argument of his remaining years, delivered in support of somebody else's bill.

A parliamentary address rather than a speech, drafted for a party that had just been destroyed at the polls, and published once the House declined to hear it out.

The most quoted thing Kant wrote, and among the shortest: a 1784 magazine answer to a question a Berlin pastor had left hanging, and the defining slogan of the German Enlightenment.

A short occasional essay for a Berlin discussion society — the twin and forerunner of Kant's more famous answer to the same question, and the one that reached print first.

The labour of Burke's last fifteen years: a prosecution he lost, in a case that has outlasted its own verdict.

The seed of the Reflections, written a year earlier and at a fraction of the temperature — a private answer to the correspondent that famous book is still addressed to.

Burke's Reflections turned a writer on education into a political author. The pamphlet war it opened went on to produce Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and William Godwin's Political Justice.

The book the rest of this shelf is now read through, and the one that cost Burke his party, his closest friendship, and nearly every ally he had.

The first of the French pamphlets: spoken in a supply debate that had nothing to do with France, nine months ahead of the Reflections.

The Reflections carried one step further — the same diagnosis, now with Rousseau named as the author of the disease and foreign armies proposed as the cure.

The companion to the Reflections: where that book made the case, this one defends the man who made it — out of the Whigs' own precedents, and in the third person.

One of three memorials on France composed for the government rather than for readers, and printed by Burke's executors in the year he died.

Timed for a relief bill coming before the Dublin Parliament and addressed to the member who would carry it, in the hope of enlarging the bill before it passed.

Not an argument but a covering letter with a draft statute attached — written around 1780, sent to a Home Secretary twelve years later, and never introduced anywhere.

The Irish argument compressed into a single phrase — a companion to the Langrishe letters, and the one that goes after the vocabulary of the settlement rather than its law.

The last of the three memorials Burke wrote for ministers on France, addressed to a government that took none of its advice, and printed after both the writer and the coalition were gone.

Where A Vindication of the Rights of Men answered Burke in a pamphlet, this answers him again four years later at the length of a history.

The trial run for A Letter to a Noble Lord — the same posture at a smaller target, and not printed until after his death.

A letter rather than a pamphlet, and the most compact statement of his religious settlement Burke ever managed — written while he still believed the Irish question would be settled in his lifetime.

Numbered fourth and written first: a private version, addressed to a correspondent sacked that spring, of the case the Three Letters would put publicly a year later.

Second thoughts to the recipient of a famous first letter, three years on, after Earl Fitzwilliam's recall had killed the measure it argued for.

The nearest thing to a treatise on economics Burke ever wrote, produced as advice to a prime minister during a famine and printed three years after his death.

A personal answer to a personal attack, written eighteen months after his son's death, and the most admired single piece of writing in Burke's output.

One of the philosophical dialogues Diderot wrote late and kept for private circulation, appearing only after his death; here the frame is a real Pacific voyage, and the question is whether Europe's morals are nature's or its own.

Burke's last public argument, issued while the negotiation it attacked was under way, and in an eleventh edition before the year was out.

Comte's foundational work and the origin of positivism as a system — six volumes assembled from lectures begun in 1826. Everything in his later, religious writings departs from the science laid out here.

For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.

The theoretical foundation under all of Bentham's legislative projects, printed in 1780 but withheld until 1789; the penal code it was written to introduce was never completed, and the book outgrew the code it served.

One half of the penal–civil pairing at the core of Bentham's science of legislation; assembled and published in French by Étienne Dumont in 1802, and reaching English readers only through later retranslation from the French.

The source of Bentham's doctrine that security of expectation outranks the other ends of law, and the civil-law counterpart to his penal theory; published in French by Dumont in 1802 and carried into English only by later retranslation.

A short pamphlet provoked by the Irish budget of 1793 — printed that year, published in 1795, extended in 1816 — and one of the political-economy tracts in which Bentham argued that taxing legal proceedings shuts the poor out of the courts.

A work his own century treated as utopian: four essays from the late 1780s, printed only after Bentham's death, in which he coined the term "international" and set out an early plan for perpetual peace.

Bentham's theory of how courts should operate, drawn from manuscripts he worked on for over thirty years and published only posthumously; his fullest case against legal technicality and the exclusion of evidence.

A minor scheme from Bentham's 1794 review of possible taxes, proposing to soften a tax by pairing it with a monopoly; unpublished in his lifetime, like almost all of his political economy.

Bentham's principal treatise on political economy, written in the 1790s, first printed in the collected Works of 1843, and given an authoritative edition by Werner Stark in the 1950s; the source of his "be quiet" rule for the state.

A rival judicial blueprint Bentham drew up in 1790 against the French Assembly's own reform draft and sent unbidden to Paris; an early mark of his turn toward democracy, and left unfinished.

The 1822 pamphlet in which the ageing Bentham offered his services as codifier to any liberal government; it opens his "legislator of the world" years and points toward the unfinished Constitutional Code.

An early argument for shedding colonies that his own age passed over: written in 1793 for the French National Convention, held back while Britain and France were at war, and printed only in 1830.

A late unfinished fragment, printed in the posthumous Works, on the craft of drafting legislation — Bentham's catalogue of the faults of legal style and their cures, with an appendix on his own methods.

The unbuilt goal of Bentham's whole legislative project: fragments, published posthumously, toward the foundations of his Pannomion — the single complete code he projected for decades and never finished.

A collection of Bentham's 1811–15 correspondence with American and Russian authorities, published in 1817; the working papers behind his later Codification Proposal and among the beginnings of the Constitutional Code.

Part of Bentham's late assault on the Anglican establishment: an 1817 tract against the swearing of oaths, above all the religious subscription forced on students at Oxford and Cambridge.

One of three linked fragments on logic, language and metaphysics that Bentham wrote around 1813–15 and never published; the metaphysical root of his theory of legal fictions and the home of his method of paraphrasis.

A compact case against excluding any relevant testimony — Bentham's own digest of the argument the young J.S. Mill drew out of his manuscripts as the five-volume Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827).

Written around 1813–16 with his essays on logic and ontology and unpublished until the posthumous Works; Bentham's attempt at a universal grammar, built on the claim that the sentence, not the word, is the true unit of meaning.

One of the linked essays of the mid-1810s, printed only after his death; here Bentham recasts logic as the art of thinking toward a purpose, and it lays bare the classifying method underlying his whole system.

Constitutional writings Bentham produced in 1822 for Tripoli, at a Tripolitan reformer's request, adapting his checks on misrule — above all a free press and public opinion — to a Muslim state; printed only after his death.

His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.

Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.

Engels's first major book, written at twenty-four before he had properly met Marx; its documentary materialism fed the partnership and the histories that followed.

Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.

The gateway to Comte's second system, published in 1848 after the death of Clotilde de Vaux. Where the Course built a science, this builds a church — and Comte's readers have divided over it ever since.

Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.

An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.

Nowhere else did his individualism go so far in print. A chapter rather than a book — which is why it now travels without the treatise that produced it.

Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.

It sits between his first book and the psychology that broke his health, and it is a single essay of October 1852, printed in a quarterly.

Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.

Everything else in the Synthetic Philosophy was written to demonstrate the formula set out here, and every later volume argues back to it. Spencer issued it first, when none of what it was meant to govern had yet been written.

A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.

The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.

Three volumes over twenty years, resting on an apparatus Spencer had to build and pay for before he could write them: the Descriptive Sociology tables, which he abandoned before the last volume appeared.

Provoked by a rival socialist's rising influence in the German party, this two-year polemic doubled as Marxism's first systematic textbook; three of its chapters became the widely read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Late, and on its own, it argues directly for the mechanism his psychology, his ethics and his sociology all quietly depend on.

Aristotle treats the same ground himself in the household economics of Politics I. These three books keep their place in his corpus on the strength of the name alone; scholarship removed them without settling on anyone else.

Notes and unfinished passages that Burke preserved for a book he never wrote, printed after his death by his executors from the papers he left.

Forty numbered sayings, most no longer than a sentence, that condense Epicurus's ethics into a form his followers could memorize and a scattered school could carry and share.

A comic dialogue framed as Socrates' report to Crito, and the corpus's fullest exhibition of sophistical fallacy — much the same material Aristotle would later systematise in the Sophistical Refutations.

Plato's only dialogue given wholly to language and the correctness of names; hard to date and unusual in the corpus, it stands at the head of a debate the philosophy of language has never closed.

The technical heart of the late trilogy, led by the Eleatic Stranger rather than Socrates; its solution to the puzzle of not-being is Plato's most sustained piece of pure logic and ontology.

The medieval schools came at these six through Porphyry's Isagoge. The rest of the corpus simply uses them: the Physics, the Metaphysics and the biological works take the syllogism and the ten kinds as given.

The Rhetoric is its nearest neighbour in the corpus: nowhere else does Aristotle take an art apart from the maker's side, and nowhere else does he discuss poetry at any length.

Bentham's first published book, carved out of a larger unfinished attack on Blackstone; the 1776 debut that brought him to the notice of reformers and set the course of everything he wrote after.

An early essay, written about 1782 and left unpublished, testing his science of legislation against the hard case of colonial Bengal; it reached readers first through Dumont's French edition and only later in English.

Transmitted to print through Dumont like his other early legislative writing, this short piece insists that publishing a law — together with its reasons — is a condition of its authority rather than a favour to the governed.

A short 1823 statement, published in The Pamphleteer, of the principles behind Bentham's unfinished Constitutional Code; the clearest brief version of the representative democracy his final years argued for.

A late sign of Bentham's codifying cause gaining ground: his 1826 Westminster Review response to James Humphreys' proposal to codify English real-property law, welcoming it while pressing it further.

Half of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, the companion to The Wisdom of Life; Saunders split the two for English readers. Practical maxims for living, drawn from the 1851 collection.

The published title keeps the quotation marks around Art from Freese's 1926 Loeb edition. Its subject is public life — the assembly, the court, the funeral oration — but its form is the school's, like everything else of his that survives.

A translator's extract rather than a work Comte composed: an American engineer's 1851 English rendering of the mathematical opening of the Course, and one of the first pieces of Comte to reach English readers.

The dating has been argued over in the journals and nothing inside the text settles it; this may be the earliest of his surviving works.

The last of the three consolations to survive, written to a man with access to the emperor.

His one work of fiction and his most famous, written across 1883–85; the fourth part he withheld from the public entirely.

A montage of passages taken from his own earlier books, put together at the very end to show he had judged Wagner rightly all along.

His settling of accounts with the composer he had idolised, written in the same 1888 burst as Twilight of the Idols.