Acumen Publishing

CENTRAL WORKS OF PHILOSOPHY is a multi-volume set of essays on the core texts of the western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to the present day, the volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work and clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas.

Volume 3 explores some of the most important philosophical works of the nineteenth century. The volume begins with Kant's magnum opus, Critique of Pure Reason, which in arguing for transcendental idealism began one of the most significant and turbulent periods of philosophical activity in modern times and determined much of the course of nineteenth-century philosophy. Following on from Kant's Critique, the volume examines two central texts of the post-Kantian idealists, Fichte's Science of Knowledge, and Hegel's monumental Phenomenology of Spirit. The volume includes chapters on Schopenhauer's masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, which hoped to rectify deficiencies in Kant's philosophy, and a major philosophical text by Kierkegaard, the Philosophical Fragments. Marx's Capital, one of the most influential books of the modern age, and Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, his most philosophically systematic and accessible work on ethics, are also examined. In addition the moral and political philosophy of John Stuart Mill, perhaps the only philosopher in this volume to evade Kant's influence, is discussed in a chapter on his classic essay On Liberty.