151 Great Works of Philosophy

What puts a book in this section

A work is here because of what it answered. The spine of the section is the reply structure: every entry names the work it was written against and the work written against it, and where a reply exists the interval between them is given in years. Nozick answers Rawls in three. Ibn Rushd answers al-Ghazali in eighty-five. Kant answers Hume in forty-two. Wittgenstein answers himself in thirty-two.

That test was chosen over greatness because it is checkable. A claim that a book is among the greatest cannot be verified or refuted; a claim that one book was written against another can be, and the date arithmetic either works or it does not.

The five positions

Every entry carries one of five positions, and the numbers are what they are rather than what would look tidiest. Eighty-four works are replies. Twenty-nine are exchanges, answered within the author's own lifetime. Twenty are answered later by someone else. Eight open a line of argument that nothing before them prompted.

Ten are solitary, and they are named as such rather than quietly filed elsewhere. A section built on replies has to be able to say when there was not one. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius asks everything of the self and nothing of the world, and nobody wrote back. Recording that is more honest than inventing an influence for the sake of a full column.

The longest reply in the section

Sextus Empiricus set out the sceptical arguments around the year 200. Descartes answered them in the Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 — fourteen hundred and forty-one years later, and by then the Outlines of Pyrrhonism had been printed in Latin and was being read across Europe. It is the widest gap here, and it is not a curiosity: it is what a written tradition makes possible, and it is the reason the interval is recorded on every entry rather than left as an impression.

The twelve groups

Greek foundations · Classical India · Classical China and Japan · Medieval, Christian, Islamic and Jewish · Early modern · Moral and political · German idealism and the nineteenth century · Pragmatism · Analytic · Phenomenology and continental · Modern Asia · Africana, decolonial and Latin American.

Pragmatism stands alone deliberately. Filed under any of the others it distorts them, and every attempt to place James, Dewey and Rorty inside a neighbouring group put them somewhere different and equally wrong.

What the section does not claim

It is a selection, not an inventory. One hundred and fifty-one works cannot be the complete record of philosophy, and where a tradition is thin here that is worth saying rather than disguising.

Twenty-two entries have no single or known author — the Upanishads, the Gita, the Analects, the Daodejing, the Platform Sutra and the sutras among them — and those are marked as compiled, attributed or anonymous rather than credited to a convenient name.

There is no woman in this section before 1792. That is a fact about what was written, preserved and transmitted, not a judgement about what was worth reading, and it is stated here rather than papered over.

The book also stops being philosophy's natural unit somewhere around 1900. From that point the argument moves into papers, and a section of books cannot follow it there without becoming something else. One paper is admitted — Peirce's How to Make Our Ideas Clear, because Pragmatism otherwise opens with James popularising a paper this section does not carry, and saying so. The others are described inside the entries that answer them.

Dates, and why some of them are hedged

Many of these dates are scholarly reconstruction rather than record. Every entry states the basis for its date, and where that basis is disputed or traditional the date never appears on its own. A reply gap is only ever printed where both ends of it are firm enough to bear the arithmetic.

Reading, and the copyright line

Each entry carries a plain reading note: roughly how long the work is in a named edition, how hard it is, and how easily it can be found. Difficulty is a statement about the reading and never about the reader — open, demanding, hard, or normally read with a commentary.

The texts are described here and not reprinted. Most of the originals are centuries out of copyright. Most of the English translations are not, and that is a different fact about a different book: Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Derrida, Rawls and Parfit exist in English only under copyright. Where a passage is quoted it is because the edition it comes from permits it.