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
Sourced and shelved.
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.
Discourse on Metaphysics
1686 · 84 pages
Leibniz answers Descartes and Spinoza with a universe of self-contained substances, each carrying its whole history and future inside its own concept and mirroring the world from where it stands.
★ 6.3
Hebrew Torah
Author unknown
400 BC · 400 pages
These five books make the world, drown it, and follow one family from Abraham to the law given at Sinai. Four billion people now worship the God who speaks in them.
★ 6.7
Discourse on Method
1637 · 207 pages
Good sense is the most equally distributed thing in the world, Descartes begins, then shows how to use it: doubt all you can, divide each problem, and rebuild only on what survives.
★ 7.1
Theogony and Works and Days
700 BC · 79 pages
Chaos comes first, then gods who overthrow their fathers in turn until Zeus wins and holds. Hesiod then turns to his idle brother to explain when to plow and why work is holy.
★ 7.2
Ethics
1667 · 208 pages
Spinoza proves, in numbered propositions, that God and nature are one substance and that everything follows from it as necessarily as a theorem. Freedom is understanding that necessity, not escaping it.
★ 7.4
The Holy Bible (King James Version)
Various
1611 · 1728 pages
God makes the world, loses the people in it, and spends the rest of the book getting them back. The English of this translation is the English later writers have had to answer.
★ 9.8