Darshana & Itihasa: The Civilizational Gaze

Leonardo Bruni (1370 – 1444), the Renaissance humanist, historian and statesman points out that Rome attained great success in politics a...

Christian Garve published his book  Philosophical Remarks and Essays on Cicero’s Books on Duties  in 1783. In the same year, Kant started...

Immanuel Kant purchased a house of his own at the age of 59 (on December 30, 1783). Renting a house meant occasional moves, at times at t...

In his essay, “ Cicero on Aristotle and Aristotelians ,” Walter Nicgorski says that Cicero had more of Aristotle’s work available to him th...

In his essay, “The Textual History of Spinoza’s Ethics” (Chapter 1,  The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics ), Piet Steenbakkers off...

In 1770, Immanuel Kant was appointed as the professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. To celebrate Kant’s promo...

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer  is the only book for which Immanuel Kant came close to apologizing. The book was published anonymously, but event...

In his essay, “ The Art of Controversy ,” Arthur Schopenhauer says that the word “dialectic” was first used by Plato. By “dialectic,” Pla...

Immanuel Kant gives three requirements for the discipline of reason—reason must be negative, nonderivative, and lawlike. He says in the  C...

Immanuel Kant’s early biographers focused only on his philosophical works and not his personal life; this led to the impression that Kant w...

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction to Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings , edited by P...

The  Enneads , the collection of writings by Plotinus, was edited and published by his pupil Porphyry in 270 C.E. In his Preface to the w...

Plato and Aristotle are seen as the contrasting poles of western philosophy, but there is a significant amount of Platonism in Aristotle....

Atheism means skepticism about God's existence, but when this position is taken seriously, it leads to a dogmatic belief in God’s non...

"The philosophy of Hegel... is not something simply invented out of nothing by himself and flung at random into an astonished world....

In January 1782, the  Göttingen Learned Notices  published a review of  Immanuel Kant’s  Critique of Pure Reason  (1781). The review was by...

For Immanuel Kant, it was difficult to stay out of the Pantheism controversy, when both sides in the dispute were maneuvering to enlist him...

Giacomo (Jacopo) Zabarella, the sixteenth-century philosopher known for his Aristotelian commitments, believed that the highest form of k...

In her book  Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution , Gertrude Himmelfarb says that there is similarity in not only the philosophical intent o...

I recently posted an article, “ Immanuel Kant’s Open Letter to Ayn Rand .” Roger Bissell has taken on the mantle of writing Ayn Rand’s en...

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismiss Kant as a bourgeois moralist in their book  The German Ideology :  "The state of affairs in G...

The German Empiricists, who were loyal to the tradition of John Locke, were alarmed by the appearance of Immanuel Kant’s  The Critique of P...

The task of a philosopher is to grapple with the “big questions” regarding mankind, the universe, and mankind's place in the universe...

In her essay, “ Modern Moral Philosophy ,” Elizabeth Anscombe argues that the secular approaches to moral theory, like Mill’s utilitarian...

“Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whor...

Frederick Copleston in A History of Philosophy  (Volume III, Ockham to Suarez): “The assertion that the most important philosophical even...

Here's the link to the Copleston's further commentary on Schopenhauer: Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer: Section 2 Frederi...

"That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind...

John Stuart Mill's 175-word sentence in  The Subjection of Women : "If the authority of men over women, when first established, ...

A long sentence in Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”: "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change th...

A beautiful long sentence in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby : "Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s ...

Jeremy Bentham's 164-word sentence: “But partial as the effects of this remedy have been — partial as the effects of this, together w...

A 309-word sentence in Locke's Second Treatise of Government : “It having been shewn in the foregoing discourse, 1. That Adam had no...

A 330-word sentence in Søren Aabye Kierkegaard's  Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “If a poor thinker, who is a private practition...

Immanuel Kant's 174-word marathon in the  Critique of Pure Reason : “Just as for the cognition of an object distinct from me I also n...

A 469-word marathon in Herman Melville's Moby Dick : "Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as i...