Tracing the exchange of ideas among history's key philosophers, The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, Eighth Edition, provides a generous selection of excerpts from major philosophical works and makes them more easily understandable to students with lucid and engaging explanations. Extensive cross-referencing shows students how philosophers respond appreciatively or critically to the thoughts of other philosophers.

The Great Conversation, Eighth Edition, is also available in two separate volumes to suit your course needs:

The Great Conversation: Volume I: Pre-Socratics through Descartes, Eighth Edition

The Great Conversation: Volume II: Descartes through Derrida and Quine, Eighth Edition

Norman Melchert is Selfridge Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and a former Acting Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University. He is the author of Who's to Say? A Dialogue on Relativism (1994) and numerous journal articles.

David R. Morrow is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University. College. He is the coauthor of A Workbook for Arguments, Second Edition (2015) and numerous papers in applied ethics.

*=New to this Edition
A Word to Instructors
A Word to Students
Acknowledgments
16. From Medieval to Modern Europe
The World God Made for Us
Reforming the Church
Revolutions
Humanism
Skeptical Thoughts Revived
Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo: The Great Triple Play
The Counter-Reformation
17. René Descartes: Doubting Our Way to Certainty
The Method
Meditations on First Philosophy (each Meditation is followed by Commentary and Questions)
Meditation I
Meditation II
Meditation III
Meditation IV
Meditation V
Meditation VI
What Has Descartes Done?
A New Ideal for Knowledge
A New Vision of Reality
Problems
The Place of Humans in the World of Nature
The Mind and the Body
God and the Problem of Skepticism
The Preeminence of Epistemology
18. Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley: Materialism and the Beginnings of Empiricism
Thomas Hobbes: Catching Persons in the Net of the New Science
Method
Minds and Motives
* Sketch: Margaret Cavendish
Sketch: Francis Bacon
The Natural Foundation of Moral Rules
John Locke: Looking to Experience
Origin of Ideas
Idea of the Soul
Idea of Personal Identity
Language and Essence
The Extent of Knowledge
Of Representative Government
Of Toleration
George Berkeley: Ideas into Things
Abstract Ideas
Ideas and Things
God
19. David Hume: Unmasking the Pretensions of Reason
How Newton Did It
* Profile: Émilie du Chåtelet
To Be the Newton of Human Nature
The Theory of Ideas
The Association of Ideas
Causation: The Very Idea
The Disappearing Self
Rescuing Human Freedom
Is It Reasonable to Believe in God?
Understanding Morality
Reason Is Not a Motivator
The Origins of Moral Judgment
Is Hume a Skeptic?
20. Immanuel Kant: Rehabilitating Reason (within Strict Limits)
Critique
Judgments
Geometry, Mathematics, Space, and Time
Common Sense, Science, and the a Priori Categories
Phenomena and Noumena
Sketch: Baruch Spinoza
Sketch: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Reasoning and the Ideas of Metaphysics: God, World, and Soul
The Soul
The World and the Free Will
God
The Ontological Argument
Reason and Morality
The Good Will
The Moral Law
Sketch: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Autonomy
Freedom
21. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Taking History Seriously
Historical and Intellectual Context
The French Revolution
The Romantics
Epistemology Internalized
Sketch: Arthur Schopenhauer
Self and Others
Stoic and Skeptical Consciousness
Hegel's Analysis of Christianity
Reason and Reality: The Theory of Idealism
Spirit Made Objective: The Social Character of Ethics
History and Freedom
22. Kierkegaard and Marx: Two Ways to "Correct" Hegel
Kierkegaard: On Individual Existence
The Aesthetic
The Ethical
The Religious
The Individual
Marx: Beyond Alienation and Exploitation
Alienation, Exploitation, and Private Property
Communism
23. Moral and Political Reformers: The Happiness of All, including Women
The Classic Utilitarians
Profile: Peter Singer
The Rights of Women
24. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Value of Existence
Pessimism and Tragedy
Good-bye Real World
The Death of God
Revaluation of Values
Master Morality/Slave Morality
Profile: Iris Murdoch
The Overman
Affirming Eternal Recurrence
25. The Pragmatists: Thought and Action
Charles Sanders Peirce
Fixing Belief
Belief and Doubt
Truth and Reality
Meaning
Signs
John Dewey
The Impact of Darwin
Naturalized Epistemology
Sketch: William James
Nature and Natural Science
Value Naturalized
26. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Linguistic Analysis and Ordinary Language
Language and Its Logic
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Sketch: Bertrand Russell
Picturing
Thought and Language
Logical Truth
Saying and Showing
Setting the Limit to Thought
Value and the Self
Good and Evil, Happiness and Unhappiness
The Unsayable
Profile: The Logical Positivists
Philosophical Investigations
Philosophical Illusion
Language-Games
Naming and Meaning
Family Resemblances
The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought
Profile: Zen
Our Groundless Certainty
27. Martin Heidegger: The Meaning of Being
What Is the Question?
The Clue
Phenomenology
Being-in-the-World
The "Who" of Dasein
Modes of Disclosure
Attunement
Understanding
Discourse
Falling-Away
Idle Talk
Curiosity
Ambiguity
Care
Death
Conscience, Guilt, and Resoluteness
Temporality as the Meaning of Care
28. Simone de Beauvoir: Existentialist, Feminist
Ambiguity
Profile: Jean-Paul Sartre
Ethics
Woman
29. Postmodernism: Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty
Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida
Writing, Iterability, Différance
Deconstructing a Text
Knowledge and Power: Michel Foucault
Archaeology of Knowledge
Genealogy
Liberal Irony: Richard Rorty
Contingency, Truth, and Antiessentialism
Liberalism and the Hope of Solidarity
Relativism
30. Physical Realism and the Mind: Quine, Dennett, Searle, Nagel, Jackson, and Chalmers
Science, Common Sense, and Metaphysics: Willard van Orman Quine
Holism
Ontological Commitment
Natural Knowing
The Matter of Minds
Intentionality
Intentional Systems: Daniel Dennett
The Chinese Room: John Searle
Consciousness: Nagel, Jackson, Chalmers
Afterword
Appendix: Writing a Philosophy Paper
Glossary
Credits
Index