Essays & Speeches

Written in 1874 as part of his second Untimely Meditation, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben or On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, considers the proper functioning of history in service to human (and specifically German) life and culture.At the outset of his essay, Nietzsche distinguishes between advantageous and disadvantageous historical awareness. The “historical fever” in Germany at the time of writing is a disease in the... Read On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life Summary

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On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder, PhD, describes how tyrants have dismantled 20th-century republics and replaced them with totalitarian regimes, and how threats to democracies still exist today, including in America. Published in 2017, On Tyranny holds the distinction of being a #1 New York Times bestseller. Dr. Snyder is a Yale professor of European history. His short and pithy book details the methods that demagogues, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, have used to degrade... Read On Tyranny Summary

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater is a work of narrative non-fiction published in 2004 by W.W. Norton & Company. Slater, an American psychotherapist, examines 10 landmark psychological experiments—from B.F. Skinner’s infamous boxes to Harry Harlow’s primates—and, in doing so, she explores larger philosophical questions related to human freedom, the limits of science, and truth in art.Slater provides biographical details of the scientists behind each landmark experiment. She... Read Opening Skinner's Box Summary

One of the most important representatives of Renaissance philosophy, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate) was presented as a public discourse in 1486 but never published in his lifetime; Pico died in 1494, two years before its initial publication.In his oration, Pico investigates mankind, finding that pure reason is the highest level that man can reach. Alone among creatures, man has a part of every other creature. This... Read Oration on the Dignity of Man Summary

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One of the founding documents of Western philosophy, Plato’s dialog Phaedo sets forth some of the most important beliefs of Socrates, who shares these ideas with his disciples just before he is executed in ancient Athens. Phaedo is one of Plato’s most widely read works, second only to his Republic and Symposium. It ponders the nature of the human soul and the possibility of an afterlife.A well-known English translation by Benjamin Jowett is widely available... Read Phaedo Summary

Phaedrus is a dialogue written by Plato around 370 BC. It details a conversation between two characters, Phaedrus and Socrates. As with other dialogues by Plato, the characters are historical, but the conversation is not. The two encounter each other the morning after Phaedrus has heard Lysias, a prominent Athenian and famous orator, give a speech arguing against love. A man not in love, Lysias argues, is to be favored over one who is in... Read Phaedrus Summary

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is a personal narrative describing her observations of a creek near her home in Virginia over the course of a year. Dillard, a suburban housewife, uses a first-person narrative voice to describe her walks, paying homage to a tradition of nature writing while posing large questions about the nature of God and wilderness. The author blends research into the natural world, philosophical inquiry, and poetic imagery while engaging... Read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Summary

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is an adaptation of three lectures that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison delivered at the Massey Lectures at Harvard University in 1990. She turned the three-part series into a 91-page book, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. The lectures concern issues of race in American literature and the ways that writers actively construct whiteness and blackness within literature. Morrison examines the claim that works in the... Read Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Summary

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Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) is a philosophical work by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. It consists of eight lectures originally delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Columbia University in New York. James is closely associated with the philosophy of pragmatism, originally formulated by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and this book is considered the major statement of the ideas and principles of... Read Pragmatism Summary

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“Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is an essay by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In 1798 Wordsworth wrote, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads. Believing that the poems were so novel in theme and style that they required some explanation, Wordsworth wrote a prefatory essay to accompany the second edition of the poems in 1800; he then expanded the essay for the third edition of 1802.The “Preface” is often considered a manifesto... Read Preface to Lyrical Ballads Summary

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Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published in 1790, is written as a letter to a French friend of Burke’s family, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who requests Burke’s opinion of the French Revolution to date. Burke is a well-connected politician and political theorist of the late eighteenth century, though this tract would become his first significant work on the subject. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke speaks at length on the development... Read Reflections On The Revolution In France Summary