Descartes\' enormously influential Meditations seeks to prove a number of theses: that God is a necessary existent; that our minds are equipped to track truth and avoid error; that the external world exists and provides us with information to preserve our embodiment; and that minds are immaterial substances....

This volume meets the increasing interest in a range of philosophical issues connected with the nature and significance of life and death, and the ethics of killing. What is it to be alive and to die? What is it to be a person? What must time be like if we are to persist? What makes one life better than another?...

This wide-ranging introduction to the study of philosophy in the ancient world surveys the period\'s developments and evaluates a comprehensive series of major thinkers, ranging from Pythagoras to Epicurus....

Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was an influential and provocative twentieth-century thinker who developed and presented an alternative to the image of thought found in traditional philosophy. This volume offers an extensive survey of Deleuze\'s philosophy by some of his most influential interpreters....

Adam Smith is best known as the founder of scientific economics and as an early proponent of the modern market economy. Political economy, however, was only one part of Smith\'s comprehensive intellectual system....

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) occupies a position of pivotal importance in many domains: philosophy, mathematics, physics, religious polemics and apologetics. A team of leading scholars surveys the range of his achievement and intellectual background as well as the reception of his work....

A remarkable thinker, Gottfried Leibniz made fundamental contributions not only to philosophy, but also to the development of modern mathematics and science. At the center of Leibniz\'s philosophy stands his metaphysics, an ambitious attempt to discover the nature of reality through the use of unaided reason....

Since its publication in 1677, Spinoza’s Ethics has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and scientists alike. It is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and contested works of Western philosophy....

This is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date surveys of the philosophy of Sartre, by some of the foremost interpreters in the United States and Europe....

For Michel Foucault, philosophy was a way of questioning the allegedly necessary truths that underpin the practices and institutions of modern society. The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Foucault\'s major themes and texts, from his early work on madness through his history of sexuality....

Few thinkers are more controversial in the history of philosophy than Hegel, dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist as well as praised as one of modern philosophy\'s greatest thinkers. Special attention is devoted to interpretation problems in this compilation of his work....

Plato stands as the fount of our philosophical tradition, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing that touches upon a wide range of topics still discussed by philosophers today....

John Stuart Mill was one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century. His impact on modern culture and thought has been immense, and his continuing importance for contemporary philosophy and social thought is widely recognized....

Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is something of a maverick figure in the history of philosophy. He produced a unique theory of the world and human existence based on his notion of will....

Aristotle is one of the greatest thinkers in the Western tradition, but also one of the most difficult. The contributors to this volume do not attempt to disguise the nature of that difficulty, but at the same time they offer a clear exposition of the central philosophical concerns in his work....