Greece to nineteenth-century America, it traces the history of our civilization through the seminal works of its most influential thinkers. Each philosopher in this volume made intellectual history; each created a revolution in ideas; each reaffirmed man’s view of himself as a sentient being capable of creating order out of the baffling contradictions of existence. And the most powerful reflections and speculations of each are represented here.

Plato: Apology, Crito and the Death of Socrates, from Phado
Aristotle: Poetics
St. Ansem: The ontological Proof of St. Ansem, from Proslogium
St. Thomas Aquinas: St. Thomas’ Proofs of God’s Existence, from the Summa Theologica
René Descartes: Meditations on the First Philosophy
David Hume: An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism
William James: The Will to Believe