Scholasticism through the rationalist-empiricist divide.
12 topics · 36 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love
Augustine of Hippo · 422
A short handbook written for a layman who asked what to believe, hope for and love, condensing Augustine's theology of grace and sin into one…
+8 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes · 1641
Doubts everything doubtable to find one certainty, and hands modern philosophy both its starting point and its mind-body problem.
+14 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Incoherence of the Philosophers
Al-Ghazali · 1095
Attacks twenty theses of the Aristotelian philosophers, including the eternity of the world and the denial of bodily resurrection, arguing that even…
+11 more at this level
12 of 36 works
Augustine of Hippo
A short handbook written for a layman who asked what to believe, hope for and love, condensing Augustine's theology of grace and sin into one accessible statement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Boethius
Written in prison awaiting execution, a dialogue with a personified Philosophy arguing that fortune's turns cannot touch a good genuinely possessed, because true goods are internal rather than granted by chance.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Anselm of Canterbury
Defines God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and argues that a being meeting this definition must exist in reality and not only in the mind — the first ontological argument.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bahya ibn Paquda
Argues that Jewish law obliges inner devotion as much as outer observance, and works through ten 'gates' of the soul — beginning with recognising God's unity — meant to be practised rather than merely affirmed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ibn Tufail
A boy raised alone on a desert island reasons his way from observing nature to mystical knowledge of God without any teacher or revealed text, arguing that philosophical and religious truth arrive at the same destination by different roads.
link checked 17 Sept 2026René Descartes
Descartes narrates his own search for a method of reasoning modelled on mathematics, arriving at 'I think, therefore I am' as the one certainty from which everything else must be rebuilt.
about 1.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Benedict de Spinoza
An unfinished early treatise ranking four kinds of knowledge from hearsay to intuitive insight, and setting out a method for reforming the understanding so it can reliably reach the highest of the four.
about 65 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John Locke
Argues civil government exists to protect property and person, not souls, so the state has no business enforcing religious belief and should tolerate any church that does not itself threaten the state.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Berkeley
Restates the argument of the Principles as a dialogue between a sceptic and an idealist, arguing that everything we can coherently mean by 'matter' turns out, on examination, to be nothing but ideas.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026René Descartes
Doubts everything doubtable to find one certainty, and hands modern philosophy both its starting point and its mind-body problem.
Assumes no prior philosophy; six short meditations, written to be read in order and once each
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Augustine of Hippo
Lays out rules for interpreting scripture, arguing that any reading which fails to build love of God and neighbour has missed the point regardless of how literally accurate it is.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Augustine of Hippo
Written after Rome's sack in 410, argues earthly empires rise and fall by a logic that has nothing to do with the true City of God, so Rome's fall is no evidence against Christianity.
link checked 17 Sept 2026