Work Classification Layer
Works
Foundational texts located on the same six-dimensional grid as the schools and personas — but cited at chapter-and-verse precision. The works layer captures what personas cannot: author-stage shifts (early Wittgenstein vs late), anonymous and composite corpora (the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching), and passage-level evidence for ontological readings.
1888 of 1888 classified · 2277 total cited
The Open Society and Its Enemies
The closed society of tribal traditions vs the open society of critical inquiry — and the historicist enemies that produce totalitarianism
On the Genealogy of Morality (Late)
Good/evil as slave-revolt in morality; bad conscience as turned-in cruelty; the ascetic ideal as the human will's defence against its own meaninglessness
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Truth is subjectivity — and an objective approach to Christianity is precisely how one misses it
On Free Choice of the Will (Early)
God is not the author of evil — free will is; and yet the will's very freedom is itself a divine gift
Meno (Early)
Can virtue be taught? — and the slave-boy who, asked questions, recovers geometric truth he never learned
A History of Western Philosophy (Late)
Two millennia of Western philosophy narrated by a Nobel-laureate philosopher with strong opinions and clear English
The Courage to Be
Anxiety of fate, guilt, and meaninglessness is overcome by the courage to be — grounded in the God who appears when the God of theism has disappeared
After Virtue
Modern moral disagreement is interminable because we have inherited fragments of a tradition we no longer understand — recovery requires returning to Aristotle
Theory of Communicative Action
Rationality is built into the structure of communication itself — and the lifeworld of democratic discourse is being colonised by instrumental system imperatives
Discipline and Punish (Late)
The body of the condemned moves from spectacular torture to disciplinary surveillance — and the panopticon's gaze becomes the modern soul
The Abolition of Man
Without the natural law, "man's power over nature" becomes some men's power over other men — and the conditioners abolish the very humanity they claim to perfect
Commentary on Romans (Early)
God is in heaven, and you are on the earth — the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity, recovered against liberal Protestantism
Physics
The four causes, place and void, time as the number of motion — the founding text of Western natural philosophy for two millennia
Theological-Political Treatise (Early)
Scripture's meaning is to be sought by historical-critical reading; freedom of philosophising is necessary for the state — anonymous and immediately banned
The Brothers Karamazov (Late)
If God does not exist, everything is permitted — and the great theological-philosophical novel that takes the question with full seriousness
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Existence precedes essence — we are nothing until we make ourselves; man is condemned to be free
Opticks (Late)
The corpuscular theory of light, Newton's rings, the spectrum — and the famous Queries that speculatively probe gravity, ether, life, and the nature of God
Theaetetus (Late)
What is knowledge? — three definitions (perception, true belief, true belief with logos) examined and found inadequate; the dialogue ends in aporia
Crito (Early)
The Laws of Athens speak: by remaining and accepting their benefits, the citizen has tacitly agreed to be bound by them — even unto death
Laws (Latest)
Plato's late political philosophy — no longer the philosopher-king but the rule of law, with extensive religious legislation and a Nocturnal Council
A Letter Concerning Toleration (Late)
The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate — and toleration of religious difference is the fundamental Christian and civic virtue
The Natural History of Religion (Late)
Religion arose not from rational argument but from fear of natural events — and polytheism, not monotheism, is the natural human starting-point
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Late)
Newman's account of his journey from Evangelical Anglican to Catholic — written in seven weeks under attack, becoming one of the great Victorian autobiographies
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Early)
Religion is neither metaphysics nor morality but the feeling and intuition of the infinite — a defence to Romantic intellectuals who had outgrown orthodox doctrine
The Cost of Discipleship (Early)
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die — and the distinction between cheap grace and costly grace
Pragmatism (Late)
Truth happens to an idea — and pragmatism is the philosophical method of evaluating beliefs by their practical consequences
Political Liberalism (Late)
How a free society can be just under the permanent fact of reasonable disagreement about comprehensive doctrines — public reason, overlapping consensus, and the political conception of justice
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Two dogmas of empiricism — the analytic/synthetic distinction and reductionism — are untenable; all our beliefs face the tribunal of experience as a corporate body
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Early)
Alienated labour — workers estranged from their products, their activity, their species-being, and each other; the philosophical foundation of mature Marxism
Beyond Good and Evil (Late)
Will to power as the basic drive of life — and the philosophers' "free spirits" who have moved beyond the moral dichotomies their tradition imposed
The Birth of Tragedy (Early)
Apollonian individuation and Dionysian dissolution — and the death of tragedy at the hands of Socratic rationalism
Cur Deus Homo (Late)
Sin is an infinite offence against God's honour requiring infinite satisfaction — which only the God-man can offer
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Early)
The ambiguity of the human condition — radically free yet always situated, oriented to its own freedom yet realised only through commitment to the freedom of others
The Subjection of Women (Late)
The legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and one of the chief hindrances to human improvement
The Rebel (Late)
I rebel — therefore we exist. The metaphysical and historical analysis of rebellion as the proper response to absurdity, drawing the limits against totalitarian revolution
The Question Concerning Technology (Late)
Modern technology's essence is "enframing" — a mode of revealing that reduces all that is to standing-reserve, including humanity itself
Categories
Ten kinds of being — substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action, passion — the basic types under which everything that is falls
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Early-to-late (he revised it throughout his life))
How sympathy and the impartial spectator construct moral judgment — the moral-philosophical foundation underneath the economics of The Wealth of Nations
Principia Mathematica (Early (both authors))
The logicist programme in its most ambitious form — three volumes deriving arithmetic, set theory, and analysis from a small set of logical primitives
The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Late (post-crisis))
Forty books reviving Islamic worship and ethics from the inside out — orthodox law transfigured by Sufi inwardness
Deliverance from Error (Late)
A short philosophical autobiography — doubt undermines kalam, philosophy, and Ismailism in turn, until Sufi experience grants the certainty doctrinal reasoning could not
On Interpretation
Names, verbs, propositions, opposition, and the famous sea-battle argument that haunted Western philosophy for two thousand years
Gettysburg Address (Mature (Civil War))
"Of the people, by the people, for the people" — the founding text of an American civic religion in which the Civil War becomes a re-founding of the nation on the ground of equality
Second Inaugural Address (Late (six weeks before assassination))
"With malice toward none, with charity for all" — Lincoln's most theologically searching speech: the war as divine judgment on both North and South for the offence of slavery
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Mid-late (the second of the After Virtue trilogy))
There are no traditionless standards of rationality — only tradition-constituted enquiries. Four traditions of practical rationality, with the Aristotelian-Thomistic the most adequate
Why I Am Not a Christian (Mid-late)
Russell's atheism in its most popular form — the classical arguments for God dismantled, traditional Christian morality criticised, the religion of free inquiry defended
The Problem of Pain (Mid (post-conversion, pre-Narnia))
A theodicy in ten chapters — the goodness and omnipotence of God reconciled with suffering through human fallenness, the necessity of moral freedom, and divine love as deeper than divine kindness
Discourse on the Method (Mid (1637, in mature middle age; preceding the Meditations of 1641))
"I think, therefore I am" — Descartes's first public statement of the cogito and of the method of doubt that founds modern philosophy
Theodicy (Late)
This is the best of all possible worlds — Leibniz's rationalist theodicy, written for Princess Sophie Charlotte, that gave the genre its name
Logical Investigations (Early (the breakthrough work that founds phenomenology))
The Prolegomena destroys psychologism in logic; the six Investigations begin to lay out the descriptive phenomenology of meaning, perception, and intentional consciousness
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (Mid (the transcendental turn))
The phenomenological reduction (epoché) and the constitution of the world by transcendental consciousness — Husserl's explicit turn to transcendental idealism
The Gay Science (Middle (between Daybreak and Zarathustra))
The "death of God" announced; eternal recurrence first formulated; the experimental "gay science" between Daybreak and Zarathustra
The Concept of Anxiety (Mid (the productive year of 1844 — Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, etc.))
Anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom" — the existential-theological analysis of the human condition between possibility and actuality
A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Mid (Northampton pastorate; the major work of evangelical reflection))
True religion consists chiefly in holy affections — Edwards's twelve signs distinguishing genuine spiritual experience from its counterfeits
The History of Sexuality (Late (his last major project))
The "repressive hypothesis" inverted: sexuality is not what power represses but what power produces — and the genealogy of the modern sexual subject through Greek, Roman, and early Christian practices of the self
Divine Comedy: Inferno (Late (Dante's exile years))
"In the middle of the journey of our life" — Dante's descent through nine circles of Hell, guided by Virgil, in the first canticle of the Divine Comedy
A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Late)
Wesley's defining doctrine — the Christian's call to entire sanctification or "perfect love" in this present life
I and Thou (Mid (the foundational statement of dialogical philosophy))
The two basic word-pairs — I-Thou and I-It — and the eternal Thou that meets us through every finite Thou
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))
The "banality of evil" — Eichmann not as a monster but as a bureaucratically thoughtless functionary, raising the most disturbing question of twentieth-century ethics
Walden (Mid (Thoreau's major prose statement))
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" — Thoreau's two-year experiment in simple living and his philosophical-naturalistic reflection on its meaning