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TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION

TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT

A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION

By John Locke
Read by Leighton Pugh
12 hours 50 minutes

John Locke (1632-1704) was a product of his troubled times: he lived through the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, Monmouth’s Rebellion, the Bloody Assizes and the Glorious Revolution. His empirical thinking was very much directed at finding rational solutions to the root causes of those troubles. Considered the founder of English empiricism and a precursor of the enlightenment his ideas on religious toleration, human rights and limitations on governmental power may seem so normal to us now as to be common sense, so well have they been assimilated by the social psyche; but this was far from being the case when Locke proposed them. Continue Reading →

UNTIMELY CONSIDERATIONS

By Friedrich Nietzsche
Read by Michael Lunts
• 12 hours 57 minutes

Untimely Considerations contain four essays: David Strauss – Writer and Confessor; On the Use and Abuse of History for Life; Schopenhauer as Educator; and Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Continue Reading →

UTILITARIANISM • ON LIBERTY

By John Stuart Mill
Read by Derek Le Page
8 hours 49 minutes

John Stuart Mill (1808-1873) was a torch-bearer for liberal thought in the 19th century: liberty of the individual, freedom of speech, a champion for women’s suffrage in Parliament. A remarkable man – he learnt Greek aged three, and by eight had read Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato – he campaigned all his life for a just society. Continue Reading →

WAGNER’S ‘RING’ AND ITS SYMBOLS

The Myth and the Music With 200 music examples

By Robert Donington
Read by Michael Lunts
13 hours 33 minutes

‘This enthralling book is an examination – deep analysis might be the word – of Wagner and his great work in terms not of politics or merely musical values, but in those of the depth psychology which it is simplest to call “post-Jungian”. In a short review, one can hardly do justice to the patience and thoroughness of Professor Donington’s analysis, not only of the principal characters but of the enormous structure of symbol, irony and illusion drawn from the primordial myths, and relating it to the music which is so powerful and direct a language. Continue Reading →

WATT

Watt

By Samuel Beckett
Read by Dermot Crowley
10 hours 5 minutes

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other ‘has its place in the series’ – those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. Continue Reading →

WHAT IS METAPHYSICS, WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER WRITINGS

By Martin Heidegger
Read by Martyn Swain
4 hours 24 minutes

This recording contains four important and related works by Heidegger: ‘What is Philosophy’, ‘What is Metaphysics’, ‘On the Essence of Truth’ and ‘The Question of Being’. It starts with ‘What is Philosophy’ which originated as a lecture given in Normandy in 1955, and was first published a year later. Continue Reading →

WHAT IS PROPERTY?

by PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON

Read by James Gillies
11 hours 12 minutes

‘Property is Theft’, a phrase which has passed into common parlance, was the rallying call of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s political treatise What Is Property?Proudhon (1809-1865) was both admired and excoriated. A political theorist of the first order, he was vilified in his native France by the Communists and the Monarchists alike, though admired by Karl Marx as well as many in the nation’s academia and judiciary who valued the clarity of his thought and analytical method. Continue Reading →

WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read by Leighton Pugh
22 hours 57 minutes

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was the original German title – was Goethe’s second novel, published 1795-6, almost two decades after The Sorrows of Young Werther. It again focuses on a young man, but this time on his growing understanding and maturity as he makes his way in the world. Continue Reading →

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