What is morally permissible, and what is morally obligatory? These questions form the core of a vast amount of philosophical reasoning. In his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant developed a basis for the answers. In this landmark work, the German philosopher asks what sort of maxim might function as a guide to appropriate action under a given set of circumstances. By universalizing such a maxim, would morally permissible...

First published posthumously in 1779, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" is Scottish philosopher David Hume's classic work of religious philosophy. This detailed and exhaustive examination of the nature and existence of God was begun by Hume in 1750, but not completed until shortly before his death in 1776. Hume was an important and influential English Empiricist, along with other English philosophers such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Thomas...

Disappointed by the public reception to "A Treatise of Human Nature", published anonymously between 1739 and 1740, David Hume decided to produce a shorter more polemic version of that work nearly ten years later. That revision, which was published in 1748, would be entitled "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding". Dispensing with much of the extraneous material from the "Treatise", Hume focuses on his more vital propositions in the "Enquiry"....

After kicking open the doors to twentieth-century philosophy in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche refined his ideal of the superman with the 1886 publication of Beyond Good and Evil. Conventional morality is a sign of slavery, Nietzsche maintains, and the superman goes beyond good and evil in action, thought, and creation. Nietzsche especially targets what he calls a "slave morality" that fosters herd like quiescence and stigmatizes the...

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity;...

The suicidal proclivity of our time, writes the acclaimed philosopher J. Budziszewski, is to deny the obvious. Our hearts are riddled with desires that oppose their deepest longings, because we demand to have happiness on terms that make happiness impossible. Why? And what can we do about it? Budziszewski addresses these vital questions in his brilliantly persuasive new book, The Line Through the Heart. The answers can be discovered in an exploration...

How do we decide what is "good" and what is "bad"? According to the ethical theory of Utilitarianism, to do good is to "always perform that act, of those available, that will bring the most happiness or the least unhappiness." By far the most widely read introduction to this theory, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is one of the most important and controversial works of moral philosophy ever written. In this major contribution to ethical history,...

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He is an important figure in Western philosophy, and in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume first gained recognition and respect as a historian, but academic interest in Hume's work has in recent years centered on his philosophical writing. His "History of England" was the standard work on English history for many years, until Macaulay's "The History of England from the Accession...

Bushido, which literally means "the way of warriors" is a code of conduct, based upon a set of honors and ideals associated with the samurai way of life, that has greatly influenced the culture and people of Japan. The origin of bushido likely dates to sometime between the 16th and 20th century in Japan, though some scholars argue that it may have been built upon much earlier traditions. Born from the Neo-Confucianism of the Edo period, bushido emphasizes...

First published in 1903, this volume revolutionized philosophy and forever altered the direction of ethical studies. It clarifies some of moral philosophy's most common confusions and redefines the science's terminology. 6 chapters explore: the subject matter of ethics, naturalistic ethics, hedonism, metaphysical ethics, ethics in relation to conduct, and the ideal.