John Stuart Mill published “Utilitarianism” in 1863, originally as a series of three articles in Fraser’s Magazine, and the short book that resulted has been required reading in moral philosophy ever since. At roughly sixty pages of main text, it is one of the most efficient introductions to a major ethical theory in the philosophical…
Friedrich Nietzsche published “Beyond Good and Evil” in 1886, the same year he completed the final revision of “The Birth of Tragedy” and wrote new prefaces to several of his earlier works. He was forty-two and had fewer than three productive years of writing left. The book he produced that year is his most systematic…
Hegel’s “Lectures on Fine Art,” known in German as the “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik,” represent the most ambitious attempt in the history of philosophy to think systematically about every major art form: their origins, their internal logic, their historical development, and their relationship to the deepest questions about truth, freedom, and human self-understanding. Compiled posthumously…