HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Plato's Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.

In The Fundamentals of Ethics, Fifth Edition, author Russ Shafer-Landau employs a uniquely engaging writing style to introduce students to the essential ideas of moral philosophy. Offering more comprehensive coverage of the good life, normative ethics, and metaethics than any other text of its kind, this book also addresses issues that are often omitted from other texts, such as the doctrine of doing and allowing, the doctrine of double effect, ethicalparticularism, the desire-satisfaction th...

Michael J. Sandel shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us to make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions.

Should we financially reward children for good marks? Is it ethical to pay people to donate organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons or selling citizenship? In this title, the author asks: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?

Used in a variety of courses in various disciplines, Asking the Right Questions helps students bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysis and synthesis. Specifically, this concise text teaches students to think critically by exploring the components of arguments--issues, conclusions, reasons, evidence, assumptions, language--and on how to spot fallacies and manipulations and obstacles to critical thinking in both w...

‘Sterven is doodeenvoudig. Iedereen kan het’, de neerslag van de twee gesprekken die Wim Brands voerde met de toenmalige Denker des Vaderlands René Gude, beleefde vele herdrukken en kent veel dankbare lezers. Juist als de dood voor de deur staat, blijken filosofische vaardigheden handig om de gemoedsrust te bewaren.

Nu verschijnt dit unieke gesprek van twee vrienden over de naderende dood en de waarde van het leven in het Engels. Zo kunnen ook niet-Nederlandssprekenden een hart onder de ...

Martin Versfeld (1909–1995) is one of South Africa’s greatest philosophers, appreciated by academics and activists, poets and the broader public. His masterful prose spans the tension between disquiet and joy. Detractor of the violent trends of modernity, a critic of apartheid from the first hour, he was among the first philosophers of ecology. At the same time he celebrated the generosity of the world and advocated an ethics of simplicity, drawing on mediaeval theology and Eastern wisdom...

Simon Blackburn tackles the major moral questions surrounding birth, death, happiness, desire, and freedom, and considers how we should think about the meaning of life. This new edition highlights the importance of an understanding of approaches to ethics and its foundations, and how this relates to our modern world of eroding trust.

If every signified evoked by reading or hearing any signifier is indeterminate, it makes no sense to formulate a semiotics cum philosophy that attempts to prove the correctness of the proposition that every signified is indeterminate, since that proof uses signifiers.

Those who proclaim as their unshakeable conviction that man (= every human being) is only consciousness, as the most famous structuralists and Derrida with in their wake the deconstructionists do, and that consequently only subj...