Expounds upon consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion and absolute knowing and also supports Kant, denounces skepticism and hails idealism. . For more options...

No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating and ultimately disabling questions. For more options...

First published in the 1920s, this book attempts to provide the reader with an inspirational, allegorical guide to living. Gibran has his protagonist, called simply the prophet, deliver spiritual, yet practical, homilies on a wide variety of topics central to daily life: love, marriage and children, work and play, possessions, beauty, truth, joy and sorrow, and death.. For more options...

"It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be" is a handbook of how to succeed in the world - a pocket "bible" for the talented and timid to help make the unthinkable and the impossible possible. Advertising guru Paul Arden offers up his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem solving, responding to a brief, communicating, playing your cards right, making mistakes and creativity, all endeavours that can be applied to aspects of modern life. For more options...

This is a punchy, humorous, and probing look at the nature of religious belief, by the author of the massively successful "Whatever You Think Think the Opposite". In a series of brilliant visual episodes, Paul Arden investigates the questions that have persisted since our earliest days. For more options...

Plato's "Republic" is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of Western philosophy. Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, it is an enquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. For more options...

Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sell-out lectures. For more options...

Best known for his revolutionary free-market economics treatise "The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher. In his first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", he investigated the flip side of economic self-interest: the interest of the greater good. For more options...

One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writings on religion, ethics, politics, women, suicide, books and many other themes is taken from Schopenhauer's last work, "Parerga and Paralipomena", which he published in 1851. For more options...

The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfilment. The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture. For more options...

"The God Delusion" caused a sensation when it was published in 2006. Within weeks it became the most hotly debated topic, with Dawkins himself branded as either saint or sinner for presenting his hard-hitting, impassioned rebuttal of religion of all types. For more options...

Why do people work hard, and take pride in what they do? This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the 'skills society' and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. For more options...

Music at the Limits brings together three decades of Edward W. Said's essays on music. For more options...

Malcolm Gladwell is the master of playful yet profound insight. His ability to see underneath the surface of the seemingly mundane taps into a fundamental human impulse: curiosity. For more options...

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466 1536) is one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance humanist movement, which abandoned medieval pieties in favour of a rich new vision of the individual's potential. For more options...

We spend most of our waking lives at work - in occupations often chosen by our unthinking sixteen-year-old selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what it might mean for us. For more options...