Faust, Part One
1808 · 176 pages
Having learned everything and felt nothing, a scholar bets the devil that no moment will ever satisfy him. Then Mephistopheles introduces him to a girl named Gretchen, and Goethe follows the damage down.
★ 9.2
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.
Critique of Pure Reason
1781 · 784 pages
Western thought divides at this book. Kant argues that space, time, and cause belong to the mind doing the looking rather than to the world, and marks the boundary reason cannot cross.
★ 8.8
The Phenomenology of Spirit
1807 · 595 pages
Hegel tracks the mind from bare sensation to full self-knowledge, each stage collapsing under its own contradictions into the next. His fight between master and slave has been argued over ever since.
★ 8.2
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1690 · 416 pages
Nothing is in the mind at birth, Locke says. It is blank paper, and everything you know arrives through the senses or through watching your mind work. British empiricism runs out from there.
★ 7.1
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
1785 · 130 pages
Nothing is good except a good will. From that Kant derives two commands: act only on a principle you could will everyone to follow, and treat persons as ends, never merely as means.
★ 7.1
The Postmodern Condition
A Report on Knowledge
1979 · 110 pages
Grand stories that once justified science, progress, and human emancipation have lost their credibility, Lyotard argues. His phrase for the condition, incredulity toward metanarratives, carried postmodernism from the arts into philosophy.
★ 6.6