The Central Works of Philosophy: John Shand’s List


1  Plato: Republic
2  Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
3  Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe
4  Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Pyrrhonism
5  Plotinus: The Enneads

6  Augustine: City of God
7  Anselm: Proslogion
8  Aquinas: Summa Theologiae
9  Duns Scotus: Ordinatio
10  William of Ockham: Summa Logicae

1 Rene? Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy
2 Baruch Spinoza: Ethics
3 G. W. Leibniz: Monadology
4 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
5 John Locke: An Essay concerning Human Understanding
6 George Berkeley: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
7 David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

1 Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
2 Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge
3 G. W. F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit
4 Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation
5 John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
6 Søren Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments
7 Karl Marx: Capital
8 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals

1. G. E. Moore: Principia Ethica
2. Edmund Husserl: The Idea of Phenomenology
3. William James: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5. Martin Heidegger: Being and Time
6. Rudolf Carnap: The Logical Structure of the World
7. Bertrand Russell: An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
8. Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness
9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception
10. A. J. Ayer Language, Truth and Logic
11. Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
13. Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery

1.W. V. Quine: Word and Object
2. P. F. Strawson: Individuals
3. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
4. Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia
5. Michael Dummett: Truth and Other Enigmas
6. Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
7. Donald Davidson: Essays on Actions and Events
8. Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity
9. Hilary Putnam: Reason, Truth and History
10. Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
11. Thomas Nagel: The View From Nowhere
12. David Lewis: On the Plurality of Worlds
13. Charles Taylor: Sources of the Self
14. John McDowell: Mind and World


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