Discover works concerned with ideas, ethics, knowledge, reason, society, and the questions that shape philosophical thought. This collection currently contains 54 titles in Literra’s catalogue.
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Tolstoy records a crisis of meaning and examines why achievement, status and ordinary pleasures can fail to answer deeper questions about existence. The result is an unusually personal philosophical work about faith, mortality and purpose
John Bagnell Bury traces the history of a simple but revolutionary idea: that human beings should be free to investigate truth, question inherited beliefs, and express conclusions without coercion. Rather than treating freedom of thought as something societies naturally possess, Bury shows how
A Lie Never Justifiable makes a deliberately uncompromising argument about honesty. H
Hume examines human understanding, passions, and morality through an empiricist investigation of how the mind actually works
Socrates is presented defending his life of questioning in an Athenian courtroom. The work is a compact introduction to philosophical inquiry because the central drama is not an abstract system but a person asking what it means to live intelligently and examine one’s assumptions
Nietzsche attacks comfortable assumptions about morality, truth, philosophers and the motives behind human beliefs. It is provocative and aphoristic, so it is often better read in small sections than forced into a race to the final page
Thoreau argues that individuals may have obligations not to cooperate with unjust government, making it a compact text for studying conscience and resistance
Cicero’s treatise on duties and moral responsibility examines honorable conduct, practical advantage, and what to do when moral duty appears to conflict with self-interest
Machiavelli studies ancient Rome to draw lessons about republican government, civic virtue, institutions, faction, military power, and political survival
Thomas Taylor’s introduction to Plato provides a gateway into the Platonic philosophy of ideas, the soul, virtue, knowledge, metaphysics, and the nature of reality. Taylor approaches Plato through a strongly spiritual and philosophical lens, treating the dialogues as parts of a larger system
Hobbes constructs a theory of political authority from a pessimistic account of conflict and the need for a common power capable of maintaining peace
Thoreau argues that a meaningful life should not be reduced to labor for its own sake and urges people to align work with conscience, thought, and genuine living
This biographical work presents Ninon de Lenclos, the celebrated seventeenth-century French salon figure, through accounts of her life, letters, and supposed Epicurean philosophy. Ninon became famous for her beauty, intelligence, sexual independence, wit, and relationships with influential men
These private reflections move between character, judgment, duty, impermanence and the discipline of directing attention toward what one can actually control. It is philosophy written as self-examination rather than as a textbook
Aristotle treats happiness as the end of human action and develops an account of virtue, habit, practical judgment and a flourishing life
A bitter, self-contradictory narrator argues with the idea that human beings can be neatly explained by rational self-interest. The book is short, strange and psychologically intense, making it a strong bridge from philosophical argument into philosophical fiction
Mill argues for a strong presumption in favor of individual freedom while also testing where social pressure and legitimate harm might justify interference
Nietzsche traces the historical development of moral concepts and asks what psychological and social forces may lie behind them
The dialogue centres on Socrates’ final hours and uses that setting to explore the soul, death, knowledge and the relationship between philosophical practice and mortality. Its emotional setting gives difficult questions a human scale
Aristotle examines households, citizenship, constitutions, political communities, class, justice, and the different forms of government, asking what makes a political order stable and good
Locke presents a theory of political authority grounded in natural rights, consent and the limits of government power
Step by Step; or, Tidy’s Way to Freedom is a moral and domestic story built around the idea that real freedom is rarely achieved through one dramatic act. Tidy’s progress comes through a sequence of small choices, responsibilities, and changes in behavior that gradually alter what is possible
Schopenhauer develops his pessimistic view of human existence through essays on desire, suffering, self-interest, age, and the limits of happiness
Dostoevsky follows the ambitious and emotionally volatile Arkady Dolgoruky as he struggles with identity, money, status, family, and his dream of becoming independent
Thomas Paine argues for Deism and subjects organized religion and biblical authority to criticism based on reason, nature, and historical analysis
Nietzsche delivers a polemical critique of Christianity, questioning its moral values, institutions, and influence on European culture
This compact work catalogues argumentative tricks and the difference between genuinely establishing a claim and merely appearing to win a dispute. Read critically, it becomes a useful lesson in rhetoric, debate and intellectual self-defence
Nietzsche interprets Greek tragedy through the tension between Apollonian form and Dionysian force and uses it to ask broader questions about art and culture
Dostoevsky uses a family murder case to stage arguments about faith, freedom, suffering, responsibility and the problem of evil
A political and psychological novel about radical ideas, group dynamics, ambition and the destructive consequences of turning abstractions into total commitments
A collection of Platonic dialogues in which Socrates and other speakers investigate knowledge, justice, love, virtue, politics, and the good life
A clerk’s world destabilizes when a double appears who seems to possess the social confidence the protagonist lacks
Dostoevsky's narrator, driven to despair, falls asleep and dreams of a harmonious world; the vision turns into a meditation on sin, freedom, suffering, faith, and renewal
Schopenhauer’s essays on the wisdom of life turn philosophy toward a practical problem: given that suffering, frustration, limitation, and disappointment are built into human existence, how should a person live? Rather than promising happiness through achievement, Schopenhauer emphasizes
A volatile story of gambling, obsession, pride and dependence in which money becomes inseparable from emotion and status
A famous chapter from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which an imagined encounter between Christ and a Grand Inquisitor explores freedom, faith, authority, and human weakness
Prince Myshkin’s openness and innocence collide with a social world shaped by status, desire, money and emotional manipulation
Tolstoy develops a Christian critique of violence and coercion while arguing that moral transformation begins with individual conscience
Plato’s later dialogue explores legislation, education, civic order, religion, and the design of a well-governed city and its institutions
Kafka transforms a family crisis into a disturbing study of work, dependence, shame, isolation and the way usefulness shapes human relationships
A remarkably direct doorway into philosophical questions. Russell moves through appearance and reality, knowledge, doubt and the limits of what we can claim to know without turning the reader into a specialist first
Plato’s dialogue tests competing accounts of justice and asks what education, political order and the shape of a good life might have to do with one another
Montesquieu examines how laws relate to government, social institutions, geography, climate, customs, and different forms of political organization
This volume of Montesquieu’s comparative study examines laws, government, society, religion, commerce, climate, and history in relation to different forms of political life
A sequence of speeches about love becomes a discussion of desire, beauty, wisdom and the movement from physical attraction toward intellectual and moral aspirations. The dramatic format makes it one of Plato’s more inviting starting points
Kafka depicts Josef K.’s baffling arrest and struggle against an opaque legal system, turning an ordinary accusation into a nightmare of guilt and powerlessness
Schopenhauer turns toward the practical question of how a person can live with the circumstances they have rather than the fantasies they construct. Its pessimistic tone is part of the point: happiness is discussed through limits, temperament, habits and realistic expectations
Thomas Clarkson was one of the central figures of the British abolitionist movement, and this work argues that slavery in the British colonies was both morally indefensible and practically capable of being brought to an end. Clarkson’s method combines moral reasoning with evidence
Nietzsche presents his philosophical ideas through the prophetic figure Zarathustra, exploring self-overcoming, values, the Übermensch, recurrence, and the rejection of conventional morality
Cicero examines major problems of human distress—especially fear, grief, pain, passion, and death—through philosophical discussion shaped by Stoic and Academic traditions
This short work introduces a consequentialist approach to ethics, asking whether actions should be judged by their tendency to promote happiness. It is useful because it gives beginners one clearly stated moral theory to understand and test against difficult cases
Thomas More frames a debate about European society through an invented island whose institutions, property system, religion, laws, and social organization challenge the assumptions of his own age
Thoreau’s experiment in deliberately simplified living becomes a wide-ranging reflection on work, consumption, time, attention and society. It is less a handbook than a sustained challenge to assumptions about what a worthwhile life requires
Chesterton diagnoses social problems involving family, property, education, politics, and modern institutions while arguing for a more humane social order
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