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William James reflects on scientists, education, human energy and peace in essays combining personal recollection with psychological inquiry.

Essays on law, power, statecraft, political authority, and the incentives that govern rulers and officials.

An English rendering of Wang Guowei’s poetics of artistic experience.

Wang Yangming’s conversations and letters on conscience, knowledge, action, self-cultivation, and moral practice.

A Neo-Confucian anthology on self-cultivation, learning, moral discipline, and the ordering of everyday conduct.

Public-domain classic by Mencius: Mencius, a Chinese philosophy first published in -300.

A foundational collection of sayings on learning, humaneness, ritual, leadership, character, and the conduct of an educated person.

Writings of a Wei-Jin thinker on music, freedom, self-cultivation, friendship, and refusal.

A foundational transcendentalist essay on nature, spirit, perception, and self-reliant thought.

A major poetic meditation on human nature, providence, reason, order, and moral limitation.

A meditative prose classic on burial, mortality, memory, antiquity, and the fragile ambition of human fame.

A Victorian synthesis of philosophy, science, evolution, knowledge, and social thought.

American transcendentalist essays on self-culture, independence, moral courage, nature, society, and individual thought.

Bacon’s utopian vision of science, research, experiment, knowledge, and an organized society of learning.

Nitobe’s influential English account of samurai ethics, honor, courage, loyalty, and moral education.

A key pragmatist text on truth, experience, belief, verification, reality, and philosophical method.

A compact English classic on mortality, burial customs, memory, antiquity, and metaphysical prose.

Emerson studies Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe as cultural types.

Carlyle’s strange philosophical satire on clothes, belief, symbols, and spiritual crisis.

A focused Emerson essay collection on intellect, character, friendship, heroism, nature, poetry, prudence, and moral independence.

A mature Emerson essay collection on fate, power, wealth, culture, behavior, beauty, and illusion.

A philosophical tale in which Prince Rasselas searches for happiness, wisdom, vocation, solitude, power, and human limits.

An English edition of the Daoist classic on freedom, transformation, language, dreams, usefulness, and wandering beyond fixed distinctions.

Adam Smith’s moral philosophy of sympathy, conscience, virtue, and social judgment.