Books like Identität und Differenz by Martin Heidegger

Friedrich Nietzsche’s *Zur Genealogie der Moral* interrogates the origins of ethical values, arguing that concepts like compassion, equality, and justice derive from a historical process of domination rather than divine or scientific certainty.

Martin Heidegger explores the question of Being, posing how existence is understood in the world, and influencing existentialism, phenomenology, and modern philosophy.

One of the central texts of western philosophy and an effort to connect Newtonian physics with the best of Continental rationalism and empiricism. Its writing was inspired by the skeptic David Hume waking Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers."

This book, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history. First published in German in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics presents an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity. Of major interest is Heidegger's brilliant phenomenological description of the mood of boredom, which he describes as a "fundamental attunement" of modern times.

What does it take for you to persist from one time to another? What sorts of changes could you survive, and what would bring your existence to an end? What makes it the case that some past or future being, rather than another, is you? So begins Eric Olson's pathbreaking new book, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology. You and I are biological organisms, he claims; and no psychological relation is either necessary or sufficient for an organism to persist through time. Conceiving of personal identity in terms of life-sustaining processes rather than bodily continuity distinguishes Olson's position from that of most other opponents of psychological theories. And only a biological account of our identity, he argues, can accommodate the apparent facts that we are animals, and that each of us began to exist as a microscopic embryo with no psychological features at all. Surprisingly, a biological approach turns out to be consistent with the most popular arguments for a psychological account of personal identity, while avoiding metaphysical traps. And in an ironic twist, Olson shows that it is the psychological approach that fails to support the Lockean definition of "person" as (roughly) a rational, self-conscious moral agent, an attractive view that fits naturally with a biological account.