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For the Pre-Socratic philosophers the soul was the source of movement and sensation, while for Plato it was the seat of being, metaphysically distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit. Plato s student Aristotle was determined to test the truth of both these beliefs against the emerging sciences of logic and biology. His examination of the huge variety of living organisms - the enormous range of their behaviour, their powers and their perceptual sophistication - convinced him of the inadequacy both of a materialist reduction and of a Platonic sublimati...

The noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers ... ethically he is supreme Bertrand Russell Published shortly after his death in 1677, the Ethics is Spinoza s greatest work - a fully cohesive philosophical system that strives to provide a picture of reality and to comprehend the meaning of an ethical life. It defines in turn the nature of God, the mind, human bondage to the emotions and the power of understanding - moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity s place in the natural order and the path to attainable happiness. A work of ...

More or less 150 years after Homer s Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance - that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me ... Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day - mock me horribly! A story of evil, debauchery and scandal, Oscar Wilde s only novel tells of Dorian Gray, a beautiful yet corrupt man. When he wishes that a perfect portrait of himself would bear the signs of ageing in his place, the picture becomes his hideous secret, as it follows Dorian s own downward spiral into cruelty and de...