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Added: 05.12.2005, 20:15

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The Great Learning was one of the "Four Books" in Confucianism. The Great Learning had come from a chapter in the Classic of Rites which formed one of the Five Classics. It consists of a short main text attributed to the teachings of Confucius and then ten commentary chapters accredited to one of Confucius' disciples, Zengzi. The ideals of the book were supposedly Confucius's; however the text was written after his death.

The "Four Books" were selected by the neo-Confucian Zhu Xi during the Song Dynasty as a foundational introduction to Confucianism and examinations for the state civil service in China came to follow his lead.

The text sets up a number of controversies that have underlain Chinese philosophy and political thinking. For example, one major controversy has been to define exactly the investigation of things. What things are to be investigated and how has been one of the crucial issues of Chinese philosophy.

One of the first steps to understanding The Great Learning is to understand how to "investigate things". This did not consist of scientific inquiry and experimentation, but introspection, building on what is already "known" of "principle". True introspection was supposed to allow the mind to become all knowing with regards to morality, relationships, civic duty and nature.

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The Confucian doctrine of the Mean teaches that too much is as bad as too little. The Aristotelian doctrine of the Mean coincidently articulates that there can be too much or too little of nearly every human passion and action.

The Doctrine of the Mean or Zhongyong is one of the Four Books of classical Chinese philosophy and a central doctrine of Confucianism. The text is attributed to Zisi (Kong Ji), the only grandson of Confucius (Kong Zi). It was originally a chapter in the Classic of Rites.

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Number of pages: 187
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Added: 05.12.2005, 20:09

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Number of pages: 34
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Added: 05.12.2005, 20:02

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Twilight of the Idols presents a vivid, compressed overview of many of Nietzsche’s mature ideas, including his attack on Plato’s Socrates and on the Platonic legacy in Western philosophy and culture. Polt provides a trustworthy rendering of Nietzsche’s text in contemporary American English, complete with notes prepared by the translator and Tracy Strong. An authoritative Introduction by Strong makes this an outstanding edition.

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Added: 23.09.2024, 02:20

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'The profoundest book there is, born from the innermost richness of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up with gold and goodness.'

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) was Nietzsche's own favourite among all his books and has proved to be his most popular, having sold millions of copies in many different languages. In it he addresses the problem of how to live a fulfilling life in a world without meaning, in the aftermath of 'the death of God'. Nietzsche's solution lies in the idea of eternal recurrence which he calls 'the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained'. A successful engagement
with this profoundly Dionysian idea enables us to choose clearly among the myriad possibilities that existence offers, and thereby to affirm every moment of our lives with others on this 'sacred' earth.

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Assembled by Nietzsche’s sister after his death, The Will to Power is a collection of the philosopher’s reflections and theories taken from his unpublished notebooks. Covering topics such as nihilism, Christianity, morality, and the famous “will to power,” the book was controversially presented as Nietzsche’s all-but-completed magnum opus containing his philosophical system. Including some of his most interesting metaphysical and epistemological thoughts, as well as some of his most disturbing ethical and political comments, the book would prove to have a significant influence on Nietzsche’s contentious reception in the twentieth century.

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Added: 05.12.2005, 20:00

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The Dawn of Day (German: Morgenröte – Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile; historical orthography: Morgenröthe – Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile) is a 1881 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (also translated as "The Dawn" and Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality).

Nietzsche de-emphasizes the role of hedonism as a motivator and accentuates the role of a "feeling of power." His relativism, both moral and cultural, and his critique of Christianity also reaches greater maturity. In Daybreak Nietzsche devoted a lengthy passage to his criticism of Christian biblical exegesis, including its arbitrary interpretation of objects and images in the Old Testament as prefigurements of Christ's crucifixion.

The polemical, antagonistic and informal style of this aphoristic book—when compared to Nietzsche's later treatments of morality—seems most of all to invite a particular experience. In this text Nietzsche was either not effective at, or not concerned with, persuading his readers to accept any specific point of view. Yet the discerning reader can note here the prefigurations of many of the ideas more fully developed in his later books. For example, the materialism espoused in this book might seem reducible to a naive scientific objectivism which reduces all phenomena to their natural, mechanical causes. Yet that is very traightforwardly not Nietzsche's strongest perspective, perhaps traditionally most well-expressed in The Gay Science.

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Added: 23.09.2024, 02:21

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Here is Friedrich Nietzsche's great masterpiece The Anti-Christ, wherein Nietzsche attacks Christianity as a blight on humanity. This classic is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Nietzsche and his place within the history of philosophy. "We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts-the strong man as the typical reprobate, the 'outcast among men.' Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!" -Friedrich Nietzsche

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We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and valuing it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is now every bit as necessary as it may be painful. With these words Friedrich Nietzsche, the revolutionary German philosopher, launches a frontal assault on the modern historical scholarship of his age. That scholarship, which prides itself on its objectivity and its ruthless enquiry into the facts, Nietzsche argues, undermines life, because it destroys our confidence in our own culture, our instincts, and our ability to live meaningful lives. We end up knowing all there is to know about our past, but losing contact with the emotionally meaningful value of that past. With so much knowledge we can have no horizon of significance, no moral frame of reference, because everything is dissolved into an infinite sea of becoming, and the most important elements of our lives become subservient to historical scholarship instead of the other way around. The best solution for this acute problem is a new generation of young people who will use history to expose its dangers and who will re-establish the priorities which serve life, by putting human beings in charge of history and no longer allowing a perverse mania for scientific knowledge to corrupt cultures and individuals. 

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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:55

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Human, All Too Human (1878) is often considered the start of Friedrich Nietzsche's mature period. A complex work that explores many themes to which Nietzsche later returned, it marks a significant departure from his previous thinking. Here Nietzsche breaks with his early allegiance to Schopenhauer and Wagner, and establishes the overall framework of his later philosophy. In contrast to his previous disdain for science, now Nietzsche views science as key to undercutting traditional metaphysics. This he sees as a crucial step in the emergence of free spirits who will be the avant-garde of culture. In summing up the crucial change of perspective expressed in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche used the following words in his later work Ecce Homo:"Human, All Too Human is a memorial of a crisis.... [W]ith this book I liberated myself from that in my nature which did not belong to me. Idealism does not belong to me...realities were altogether lacking in my knowledge, and the 'idealities' were worth damn all! A downright burning thirst seized hold of me: thenceforward I pursued in fact nothing other than physiology, medicine, and natural science."This is an essential work for anyone who wishes to understand Nietzsche's incisive critique of Western culture and values.

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Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own 'will to power' upon the world.

This edition includes a commentary on the text by the translator and Michael Tanner's introduction, which explains some of the more abstract passages in Beyond Good and Evil.

Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) became the chair of classical philology at Basel University at the age of 24 until his bad health forced him to retire in 1879. He divorced himself from society until his final collapse in 1899 when he became insane. A powerfully original thinker, Nietzsche's influence on subsequent writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre, was considerable.

If you enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil you might like Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also available in Penguin Classics.

"One of the greatest books of a very great thinker." —Michael Tanner

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Number of pages: 438
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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:37

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When the Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime.
It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific celebrity. Even more vitally, it was to set in motion the intellectual currents that culminated in the arrival of The Origin of Species in Victorian drawing-rooms in 1859. His journal, reprinted here in a shortened version, is vivid and immediate, showing us a naturalist making patient observations, above all in geology. As well as a profusion of natural history detail, it records many other things that caught Darwin’s eye, from civil war in Argentina to the new colonial settlements of Australia. The editors have provided an excellent introduction and notes for this Penguin Classics edition, which also contains maps and appendices, including an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s friend and captain of the Beagle

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Published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was a book at the very heart of Darwin's research interests - a central pillar of his 'human' series. This book engaged some of the hardest questions in the evolution debate, and it showed the ever-cautious Darwin at his boldest. If Darwin had one goal with Expression, it was to demonstrate the power of his theories for explaining the origin of our most cherished human qualities: morality and intellect. As Darwin explained, "He who admits, on general grounds, that the structure and habits of all animals have been gradually evolved, will look at the whole subject of Expression in a new and interesting light."

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 The Origin of Species laid the foundation of evolutionary biology as early as 1859. Extraordinarily well written, the book doesn’t only explain evolution in an instructive and accessible manner, it also includes fascinating stories about how the process of natural selection occurs in the animal and plant kingdoms.
When it first appeared, The Origin of Species attracted a lot of attention in both scientific and religious circles, and even though many theories contradicting its postulations have been posited over the decades, the book’s value as one of the greatest work of scientific literature still endures. 

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Number of pages: 303
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Book genre: psychology
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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:33

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First published in 1899 during a period of crisis for French democracy, The Psychology of Socialism details Le Bon's view of socialism and radicalism primarily as religious movements. The emotionalism and hysteria of the period―especially as manifested during the Dreyfuss Affair―convinced Le Bon that most political controversy is based neither on reasoned deliberation nor rational interest, but on a psychology that partakes of contatgion andhysteria. Le Bon points to the irrationality of religion and uses the religiosity of socialism to debunk socialism as an irrational movement based on hatred and jealousy.

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Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) disparaged the Revolution and the revolutionary legacy because he distrusted the common person, particularly when making collective decisions. His analysis of revolutionary crowds pictured them as primitive animals devoid of good decision–making abilities who had to be reigned in by a "strong man" or dictatorial figure.

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Number of pages: 129
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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:31

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One of the most influential works of social psychology in history, The Crowd was highly instrumental in creating this field of study by analyzing, in detail, mass behavior. The book had a profound impact not only on Freud but also on such twentieth-century masters of crowd control as Hitler and Mussolini — both of whom may have used its observations as a guide to stirring up popular passions. In the author's words, "The masses have never thirsted after the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."Although the volume focuses on crowd psychology, it is also brilliantly instructive on the effects of the generally accepted beliefs of a nation's citizenry on the processes of history. Among the topics covered here are general characteristics and mental unity of the crowd; the crowd's sentiments and morality; its ideas, reasoning power, and imagination; opinions and beliefs of crowds and the means used by leaders to persuade; classification of crowds, including criminal and electrical assemblages, as well as the functioning of criminal juries and parliamentary assemblies.A must-read volume for students of history, sociology, law, and psychology, The Crowd will also be invaluable to politicians, statesmen, investors, and marketing managers. "Any study of crowd behavior, popular psychology, fascism, etc. would do well to begin with Le Bon's work." — Anson Rabinbach, Professor of History, Princeton University

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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:29

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In the years 1735–1737, first in Dublin and subsequently in London, an Irish  philosopher  George Berkeley  (1685–1752)  published The Querist, a three-piece treatise on economics. In 1750–1752, new editions which appeared in Dublin, Glasgow, and London followed, slightly modied. The popularity of the work can be ascribed to its actual topic – the Que-rist depicted the disastrous economic situation in Ireland and pointed at possible improvements. 

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George Berkeley's work, “The analyst,” is a criticism of the calculus, in both its Newtonian and Leibnizian formulations, arguing that the foundations of the calculus are incoherent and the reasoning employed in it is inconsistent. Berkeley's powerful objections provoked numerous responses, and the task of replying to them set the agenda for much of British mathematics in the 1730s and 1740s. George Berkeley is best known for his contributions in philosophy, and more specifically for denying the existence of matter and propounding the idealistic thesis that only minds and ideas exist, so that in the case of “sensible objects” esse est percipi, or to be is to be perceived. The Principles failed to be the success for which Berkeley had hoped. Avoiding any talk of motion or acceleration, he worked out an approach to fluxions that considers only finite differences of magnitudes and bears a surprisingly strong resemblance to the modern view of the calculus. Although Paman's work was little read, both he and Maclaurin provided responses to the analyst that show Berkeley was right about fundamental obscurities in the calculus while also indicating how to overcome them.

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Added: 23.09.2024, 01:56

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Through the letters between Abelard and Heloise, we follow the path of their 12th-century romance, from its reckless and ecstatic beginnings when Heloise became Abelard's pupil, through the suffering of public scandal and enforced secret marriage, to their eventual separation.

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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:27

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If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound? It does not, according to George Berkeley. Originally published in 1710, this landmark of Western philosophy introduced a revolutionary concept: immaterialism, which asserts that to be is to perceive or be perceived.
An Irish clergyman who spent his entire philosophical career as a churchman, Berkeley linked his investigations to his religious interests. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge opens with an assault on Locke’s theory of abstract ideas and proceeds with arguments that sensible qualities exist only when perceived as ideas. Physical objects, he claims, are no more than collections of qualities, and these sensible objects, too, are merely ideas. Berkeley relates his position to the achievements of eighteenth-century science, and proclaims the compatibility of immaterialism with traditional religion.
The fullest expression of Berkeley’s doctrine of immaterialism, this classic work influenced British philosophers from David Hume to Bertrand Russell and the other logical positivists. It is essential reading for all students of philosophy.

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Added: 05.12.2005, 19:24

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Berkeley’s 1735 A Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics responds to criticism of The Analyst. Berkeley emphasizes his interest in Truth, as he sees it, as opposed to the interest in Authority of the Infidel/atheist Mathematician.  He asserts that the issue is not whether the “Method of Fluxions” is functionally useful, but whether the concepts in it are conceivable and solid, or whether mathematicians essentially accept it on faith based in its usefulness and in the reputation of Newton.

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Number of pages: 164
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Added: 04.12.2005, 17:00

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Number of pages: 485
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Added: 04.12.2005, 16:57

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Hegel wrote this classic as an introduction to a series of lectures on the "philosophy of history" — a novel concept in the early nineteenth century. With this work, he created the history of philosophy as a scientific study. He reveals philosophical theory as neither an accident nor an artificial construct, but as an exemplar of its age, fashioned by its antecedents and contemporary circumstances, and serving as a model for the future. The author himself appears to have regarded this book as a popular introduction to his philosophy as a whole, and it remains the most readable and accessible of all his philosophical writings.

Eschewing the methods of original history (written during the period in question) and reflective history (written after the period has passed), Hegel embraces philosophic history, which employs a priori philosophical thought to interpret history as a rational process. Reason rules history, he asserts, through its infinite freedom (being self-sufficient, it depends on nothing beyond its own laws and conclusions) and power (through which it forms its own laws). Hegel argues that all of history is caused and guided by a rational process, and God's seemingly unknowable plan is rendered intelligible through philosophy. The notion that reason rules the world, he concludes, is both necessary to the practice of philosophic history and a conclusion drawn from that practice.

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Number of pages: 281
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'Hegel's Philosophy of Right' concerns ideas on justice, moral responsibility, family life, economic activity and the political structure of the state. He shows how human freedom involves living with others in accordance with publicly recognized rights and laws.

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Number of pages: 309
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Book genre: history
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Added: 04.12.2005, 16:55

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The Thirty Years War: Friedrich Schiller’s classic history of the savage war of religion that devastated Germany and tore apart the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church during the years 1618 to 1648. It was the time of Gustavus Adolphus, the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand II, Cardinal Richelieu, Albrecht von Wallenstein, terrible battles, starvation, social collapse, and intolerable suffering.Friederich Schiller (1759 to 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. In this work, Schiller provides a perceptive description of how a religious war became a political war which forever transformed the politics of Europe.

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Added: 04.12.2005, 16:51

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The Principal Doctrines (Kyriai doxai, sometimes Kyriai doxiai) are forty authoritative conclusions set up as official doctrines by the founders of Epicureanism: Epicurus of Samos, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, Hermarchus of Mitilene and Polyaenus of Lampsacus. The first four doctrines make up the Tetrapharmakos (Four Cures), which have sometimes been compared to Buddhism's Four Noble Truths.

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In his letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus offers a summary of his ethical system. 

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Number of pages: 198
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Book genre: philosophy
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ISBN: 978-0-674-03105-0
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Added: 04.12.2005, 16:50

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Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. The Consolation was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution. It is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his 'nurse' Philosophy. Her instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free will, restore his health and bring him to enlightenment. The Consolation was extremely popular throughout medieval Europe and his ideas were influential on the thought of Chaucer and Dante.

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Added: 04.12.2005, 16:47

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Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment 'clandestine' or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally.