Entertaining and insightful, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion are considered to be among the most important philosophical works on the topic of religion. Each investigates the formation and consequences of religious belief.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, subtitled "A Polemic", Nietzsche furthers his pursuit of a clarity that is less tainted by imposed prejudices. He looks at the way attitudes towards 'morality' evolved and the way congenital ideas of morality were heavily colored by the Judaic and Christian traditions.

From the perspective of an unbeliever, Fear and Trembling explores the paradox of faith, the nature of Christianity, and the complexity of human emotion. Kierkegaard examines the biblical story of Abraham, who was instructed to sacrifice his son Isaac, and forces us to consider Abraham's state of mind. What drove Abraham, and what made him carry out such an absurd and extreme request from God? Kierkegaard argues that Abraham's agreement to sacrifice Isaac, and his suspension of reason, elevated him to the highest level of faith.

Written in the form of a letter to a Frenchman, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is an impassioned attack on the French Revolution and its hasty destruction of the Church, the old elites, and the Crown. Burke tackles the new republic and its allegiance to principles such as liberty and equality, as well as its failure to recognize the complexities of human nature, society, and wisdom accumulated over time, contending that gradual change and adjustment is far better than immediate upheaval.

A Treatise of Human Nature is the first work ever published by David Hume, a man who revolutionized our understanding of philosophy. Hume was an advocate of the skeptical school of philosophy and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He looks at the nature of human experience and cognition, showing that philosophy and reason can only be reflections of our nature.

The Republic poses questions that endure: What is justice? What form of community fosters the best possible life for human beings? What is the nature and destiny of the soul? What form of education provides the best leaders for a good republic? What are the various forms of poetry and the other arts, and which ones should be fostered and which ones should be discouraged? How does knowing differ from believing?

In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of ‘woke’ culture and the rise of identity politics. In lively, razor-sharp prose he examines the most controversial issues of our moment: sexuality, gender, technology and race, with interludes on the Marxist foundations of ‘wokeness’, the impact of tech and how, in an increasingly online culture, we must relearn the ability to forgive.

Plagued with doubt and uncertainty in sensory knowledge, Descartes is struck with the idea that everything he knows is false. He considers the possibility that he has been deceived by an 'evil demon' and is left with nothing to lean on, until he arrives at the phrase 'cogito ergo sum' ('I think, therefore I am'). Among the most quoted philosophical works in history, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method together display the full workings of Descartes' skeptical method and the formation of his famous phrase.

Composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most famous and influential work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The work is a philosophical novel in which the character of Zarathustra, a religious prophet-like figure, delivers a series of lessons and sermons in a Biblical style that articulate the central ideas of Nietzsche's mature thought.

Lucretius was born in 99 BC, and On the Nature of Things is his only surviving work. His aim was to free the Roman world from its two great terrors - the gods and death. Lucretius argues that the gods are not actively involved in life, so need not be appeased; and that death is the end of everything human - body and soul - and therefore should not be feared. But On the Nature of Things is also a poem of striking imagery, intimate natural observation and touching pathos.

Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953, two years after the death of its author. In the preface written in Cambridge in 1945 where he was professor of philosophy he states: ‘Four years ago I had occasion to re-read my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking.’

Continuing where Thus Spoke Zarathustra left off, Nietzsche's controversial work Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most influential philosophical texts of the 19th century and one of the most controversial works of ideology ever written. Attacking the notion of morality as nothing more than institutionalised weakness, Nietzsche criticises past philosophers for their unquestioning acceptance of moral precepts. Nietzsche tried to formulate what he called "the philosophy of the future".

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a fascinating portrait of 19th-century Europe - disillusioned and ravaged by the wars of the postrevolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Our protagonist, whose breathtaking journey eerily echoes Byron's own life story, forgoes his destiny back home for the exciting unknown - the nature of humanity and the transformative effects of travel burst through the pages in four powerful cantos of Spenserian stanzas. Here is the poem that set Byron on his meteoric rise to fame in London society.

Werther, a sensitive young artist, finds himself in Wahlheim, a quiet, attractive village in Germany where he seeks solace from the turmoils of love. It is a young spring, and he hopes that arcadian solitude will prove a genial balm to his mind. But his romantic tendency rules otherwise, and he falls in love with Charlotte - Lotte - even though he knows she is affianced to another.

In A Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke sets out to define the nature of beauty and sublimity, and establish an objective criterion for discussing aesthetics. His definition of beauty as rooted in pleasure and sexuality, and the sublime in pain and survival, aligned him with the empiricists John Locke and David Hume, as he replaced the metaphysics of Plato's aesthetics with a psychological and physiological perspective.

Published in 1748, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume's distillation of his mature philosophy. Addressing themes including the limits of human understanding, the compatibility of free will with determinism, weaknesses in the foundations of religion, and the appeal of skepticism, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is Hume's attempt to revise and clarify the ideas of his earlier A Treatise of Human Nature.

Entertaining and insightful, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion are considered to be among the most important philosophical works on the topic of religion. Each investigates the formation and consequences of religious belief.

The Annals, written by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (56c-120 CE), is regarded as one of the great literary works of history in the Roman world. Tacitus is considered by many to be the greatest of Roman historians, and The Annals is his’ outstanding achievement. Originally comprising 18 volumes, books 7 to 10 and parts of books 5, 6, 11 and 16 have been lost, but those that remain, read here by Martyn Swain, tell the fascinating tale of the Julio Claudian emperors and their times.

In 1929, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) published his remarkable book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The Kantbuch, as Heidegger often called it, is regarded by many as a vital supplement to the unfinished second part of Heidegger’s most influential work, Being and Time, which was published two years earlier in 1927.

John Locke and his works - particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message - that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses - complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live.