"Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled farther than forty miles from his home in Konigsberg. How appropriate that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. Kant's aim was to restore metaphysics. He insisted that all experience must conform to knowledge. According to Kant, space and time are subjective; along with various "categories," they help us to see the phenomena...

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...

"A monumental and riveting account of how a poet, a physicist, and a philosopher pursued truth to the very limits of human apprehension and revealed the fundamental nature of our place in the universe. Spiraling in the wreckage of a failed love affair, Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges channeled his devastation into his work, reassessing the slippery nature of our own identities and the way we perceive reality, ultimately securing his place in the...