The modern schools and their quarrel — Hegel to Nietzsche, then pragmatism, Wittgenstein and the analytic turn against both.
13 topics · 22 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Wisdom of Life
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1851
Argues that what a person is matters more to their happiness than what they have or how others see them, and that most unhappiness comes from…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The World as Will and Representation
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1818
Behind the world as we represent it in space, time and causation lies a single blind, striving will with no ultimate goal, which makes desire itself,…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886
Attacks the assumption that moral categories are given rather than made, and asks whose interests each morality has served.
+11 more at this level
12 of 22 works
Arthur Schopenhauer
Argues that what a person is matters more to their happiness than what they have or how others see them, and that most unhappiness comes from mistaking the second two for the first.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William James
An idea is true just in case believing it works — pays out usefully in experience — which turns philosophical disputes that make no practical difference into disputes not worth having.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Will Durant
Introduces Western philosophy as a sequence of biographies, arguing that each thinker's ideas are best understood as an answer to the problems of the life and age that produced them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean-Paul Sartre
Argues that because existence precedes essence, a person has no given nature to fall back on and is condemned to be free, wholly responsible for what they make of themselves.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Behind the world as we represent it in space, time and causation lies a single blind, striving will with no ultimate goal, which makes desire itself, and so most of life, a form of suffering.
about 13 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026G. W. F. Hegel
Argues that world history is the rational unfolding of freedom's self-consciousness, in which each civilisation's rise and fall is a necessary stage rather than an accident.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Miguel de Unamuno
Argues that the conflict between reason, which finds no ground for believing in personal immortality, and the will, which cannot stop craving it, is the permanent and irresolvable condition of a thinking person.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank Thilly
Traces Western philosophy from the Greeks to the nineteenth century as a series of connected problems about knowledge and reality, each system built in response to the failures of the last.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Dewey
Argues that philosophy should stop chasing timeless certainty inherited from Greek metaphysics and instead treat ideas as tools for solving the actual problems of a changing social and scientific world.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath & Rudolf Carnap
Sets out the Vienna Circle's programme of unifying science on a basis of logical analysis and verifiable statements, and rejecting metaphysics as meaningless rather than merely false.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Attacks the assumption that moral categories are given rather than made, and asks whose interests each morality has served.
Assumes some prior philosophy, since Nietzsche mostly attacks positions he does not stop to explain
about 4 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026G. W. F. Hegel
Traces consciousness through a sequence of shapes, each collapsing under its own internal contradictions into a more adequate one, until spirit comes to know itself as the whole process rather than as one more object within it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026