Leighton Pugh

These three vibrant texts show different sides of the Roman historian Tacitus (c56–c102 CE), best known for his principal (and much longer) legacies of The Annals and The Histories. Agricola was a successful general and governor of Britain (77-83CE), a task which he carried out with firmness and probity - in contrast to much of the corruption and repression in place during the reign of Emperor Domitian. Included in his account are the prebattle...

As philosophy professor Taylor Carman explains in his helpful introduction, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of modern phenomenology, one of the most important and influential movements of the 20th century. Ideas, published in 1913 – its full title is Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy – was the key work. It is arguably 'the most fundamental and comprehensive statement of the fundamental principles of Husserl's...

Zola's Money (L'Argent, 1891) shows the corrupting effect of untrammelled stock-market speculation. While some seek redemption through philanthropic and evangelical ventures, others - such as the main protagonist, Saccard - embrace their own avarice. Speculators illegally push up share prices so that ordinary citizens are feverishly swept up in an epidemic of small-scale investment. After unsustainable growth, there follows the inevitable crash, unleashing...

The essays in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics have a rather special place in Schopenhauer's work, both being written as entries to Scandinavian philosophy competitions, one in Norway and one in Sweden. 'Essay on the Freedom of the Will' was Schopenhauer's response to the question posed by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839: 'Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?' In a clear and confident response,...

Though it first aroused anger and controversy rather than admiration and acceptance, A Theologico-Political Treatise was a landmark in the analysis of theology (with particular reference to the Bible and its Jewish and Christian interpretations) and its relationship to philosophy and politics. Spinoza's scholarly analysis, based on careful study, demonstrated that the Bible was composed by many writers over the centuries - and that even the Pentateuch,...

Iceland. In the winter it gets light at 10am and dark at 2pm. The daily announcement of the Chill Factor allows you to calculate how quickly you could die from exposure... Iceland is erupting — and not just its volcano. It is 1971, the height of the Cold War, and anti-American feeling among Icelanders is running high. When a teenager is found dead after a drunken night out, her clothes torn and face bruised, anger is directed towards the military...

Pliny the Younger (61 CE-c. 113 CE) was a well-connected official in the Rome of the first century, and it is through his ten Books of Letters that we have one of the liveliest and most informal pictures of the period. As a lawyer and magistrate, he rose through the senate to become consul in AD 100 and therefore corresponded with leading figures including the historian Tacitus, the biographer Suetonius, the philosophers Artemidorus and Euphrates...

The two sizeable volumes of Parerga and Paralipomena hold a special place in the output of Arthur Schopenhauer. Parerga means 'supplementary to a main work', and Paralipomena suggests a further supplement, but these two books were anything but a casual addition to his major opus, The World as Will and Idea. For a start, it was the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 which brought Schopenhauer to the attention of the general public, decades...