Philosophical Essays
1710 · 366 pages
Reality is made of monads, mind-like simple substances with no windows, whose perceptions God synchronized in advance. His conclusion that ours is the optimal world drew Voltaire's ridicule in Candide.
★ 6.3
The Books canon
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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
1779 · 125 pages
Three friends argue over whether the order of the world proves a designer. Philo grants the comparison, then dismantles it, asking why a competent god would build this much suffering into the machine.
★ 7.2
Pensees
1669 · 333 pages
You are already betting on whether God exists, Pascal says, since refusing to choose is a choice. Around that wager sit fragments on why no one can sit alone in a room.
★ 7.4
Meditations on First Philosophy
1641 · 59 pages
Descartes sits by a fire and doubts everything, down to whether a demon feeds him the world. What survives is the thinking, and philosophy has argued from there ever since.
★ 7.5
The Brothers Karamazov
1880 · 832 pages
Old Karamazov is murdered and each of his three sons had reason. Around the crime Dostoevsky stages the fiercest argument fiction has ever made about God and the suffering of children.
★ 9.7