"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in h...

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianit...

Edited and with an Introduction by Gordon MarinoBasic Writings of Existentialism, unique to the Modern Library, presents the writings of key nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers broadly united by their belief that because life h...

An entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise, based on the popular blog of the same name.  Whether you're deciding which smartphone to purchase or which politician to believe, you think you are a rational...

A BOLD NEW VISION FOR A NEW WORLD Our way of life isn't working anymore. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their neighborhoods—and even their hope for a just society. We urgently need a new story to live by, based on fairne...

A radical call for solidarity between humans and non-humansWhat is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more ...

Identity: Fragments, Frankness is a rich and powerful essay on the notion of identity and on how it operates in our contemporary world. In contrast to the various attempts to cling to established identities or to associate identity wi...

Optimize joy, overcome obstacles―discover the calm of stoicismBeing a stoic means embracing positivity and self-control through the ability to accept the uncertainty of outcomes. With this stoicism guide, the beginner stoic will lea...

People demand authentic participation in decisions that affect their lives.  ToP? methods answer that call because they reflect how humans think, growing out of reflective inquiry into what works in real life, and the study of phenom...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 - 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual hist...

Although dour in appearance and formidable in reputation, Friedrich Nietzsche was an ardent practitioner of the art of poetry--known in twelfth-century Proven al as "the gay science." This extensive collection of prose and v...

A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the will to power (der Wille zur Macht), which provides a basis for understanding human behavior — more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for a...

There is often thought, by theists, to be a void in humanist and atheist lives; a god-shaped hole. For many atheists, though, that void is amply filled with meaning and purpose, nobly and morally built up out of philosophy and living ...

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERTRANSLATED INTO 23 LANGUAGES, WITH MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD What is truth? What is love? Does life have meaning? Bestselling author Richard David Precht, "the Mick Jagger of the nonfiction boo...

In a culture obsessed with happiness, this wise, stirring book points the way toward a richer, more satisfying life.Too many of us believe that the search for meaning is an esoteric pursuit—that you have to travel to a distant monas...

Between the end of World War II in 1945 and his death in 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre was the most famous French writer, as well as one of the best-known living philosophers. Introducing Sartre explains the basic ideas inspiring his world v...

You have been told that there is an objective morality to which you must submit. An objective reason to which you must conform. An objective reality to which you must yield.  But if you are reading this then I suspect that you h...

Writers on human dignity roughly divide between those who stress the social origins of this concept and its role in marking rank and hierarchy, and those who follow Kant in grounding dignity in an abstract and idealized philosophical ...

Existentialism is one of few philosophical terms that pervades modern culture, cropping up in movies such as the Matrix and Fight Club, and yet most people don't really know exactly what it means. Using key concepts--including Freedom...