E-Texts and Other Course-Related Links

Online Primary Texts We’ll Be Using This Semester

• Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Introduction translated by Zawar Hanfi, 1972, the rest translated by George Eliot (Marianne Evans), 1854.
• Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Gregor Benton, 1974.
• _____. Theses on Feuerbach. Trans. Cyril Smith, based on work done jointly with Don Cuckson, 2002.
• Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Translation compiled from translations by Francis Golffing and Walter Kaufmann. Text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel.
• _____. The Twilight of the Idols. Translation prepared from the original German and the translations by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale.
• Schiller, Friedrich. Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man. From Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian. With introductions and notes. New York, Collier [c1910] Series: The Harvard Classics, 32.

Electronic Versions of Seminal Texts in the History of Metaphysics

• Parmenides’ On Nature—a version by Allan F. Randall, based on translations by David Gallop, Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Jonathan Barnes, John Mansley Robinson and others. A highly readable version.
• The fragments of Parmenides’ On Nature—The Arthur Fairbanks translation. An older translation.
• Plato’s Sophist—the Harold North Fowler translation at the Perseus Project.
• Aristotle’s Metaphysics—the Hugh Tredennick translation (1933) at the Perseus Project. All the advantages of the Perseus Project’s interface.
• Aristotle’s Metaphysics—the Hugh Tredennick translation (1933) at Non-Contradiction.com. One big file, easy to search.
• Aristotle’s Metaphysics—the W.D. Ross translation (1924) at Non-Contradiction.com. One big file, easy to search; the more widely used, “classical” translation.
• Plotinus’ Enneads—the translation by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page at the University of Adelaide Library’s eBooks@Adelaide.
• Thomas Aquinas’s masterful On Being and Essence—a very recent translation (1997) by Robert T. Miller. At the Internet Medieval Source Book.
• Descartes’s Meditations of First Philosophy—the Elizabeth Haldane translation (1911) in an HTML version that was once available at the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy, and that’s still accessible via a page maintained by Floy Doull at Memorial University at Newfoundland.
• Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy—a trilingual (Latin, French, English) edition featuring the John Veitch translation into English (1901). Good site if you want to be able quickly to consult the Latin or the French.
• Spinoza’s Ethics—an HTML edition by Ron Bombardi of the Elwes translation (1883) of one of the most beautiful of all the works of classical modern metaphysics, from Middle Tennessee State University.
• Leibniz’s Monadology—the Robert Latta translation of Leibniz's late formulation of his metaphysics.
• Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Treatise of Human Nature at the University of Adelaide Library’s eBooks@Adelaide. These are works—some might say the definitive works—in the modern anti-metaphysical tradition. It’s in the Enquiry that we find, just five paragraphs from the end, the following famous passage:

  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

• Baumgarten’s Metaphysica—the text Kant always used in his lectures on metaphysics. In Latin.
• Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—a searchable on-line edition of the Norman Kemp-Smith translation.
• Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft—text of the first edition (1781). In German.
• Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft—text of the second edition (1787). In German.
• The Bonn Kant-Corpus—an electronic edition of Kant’s works, correspondence, and Nachlass. Includes the Academy edition of Kant’s works. In German.

Kant Sites

• “Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics”—the main Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Kant (there’s also an article on Kant’s Aesthetics.
• “Immanuel Kant”—the Wikipedia article on Kant.
• “Critique of Pure Reason”—the Wikipedia article on the first Critique.
• Kant on the Web—Stephen Palmquist’s big list of Kant links. This probably deserves recognition as “The Kant Home Page” on the web.
• Kant Links—a list of useful links maintained by Richard Lee to e-texts of Kant’s works and to pages on Kant.
• A site for a course on Kant—maintained by G.J. Mattey at UC Davis. Includes material on Kant’s predecessors and his critics as well as a modest Kant-Lexicon.
• Immanuel Kant: Information Online—a good jumping-off point for Kant resources in Europe. The site is in German.

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