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"Cornel Ronald West is a prominent African-American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently a professor of Religion at Princeton. West's intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, Marxism, pragmatism, and transcendentalism."

"The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach, also simply known as the Baker Report or Baker-Hamilton Report, is a United States Congress-mandated assessment of the war in Iraq authored by the Iraq Study Group. The report was released to the public on December 6, 2006 both on the Internet and as a published book."

"Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is a book written by George Berkeley in 1713.

"The most important concepts in the Three Dialogues are: perceptual relativity, the conceivability ("master") argument and Berkeley's phenomenalism. The perceptual relativity argument is that the same object can appear to have different characteristics (e.g. shape) depending on the observer's perspective. Since objective features of objects cannot change without an inherent change in the object itself, then shape must not be an objective feature.

"Hylas is understood to represent John Locke, Berkeley's primary contemporary philosophical adversary. A Hylas is featured in Greek mythology: in the Dialogues the name Hylas is derived from an ancient Greek word for matter which Hylas argues for in the dialogue.

"Philonous translates as lover of mind and represents Berkeley himself."

"Self-Reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was first published in his 1841 collection, Essays: First Series. It contains the most solid statement of one of Emerson's repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas."

"Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement, also known as the third critique, simultaneously completes Kant's Critical project and lays the foundations for modern aesthetics. The standard English translation is the one made by James Creed Meredith. The book is divided into two main sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement, and also includes a large overview of the entirety of the Critical system, arranged in its final form. The Critique of Judgement constitutes a discussion of the place of Judgement itself, which must overlap both the Understanding (which proceeds within the determinist camp) and Reason (which exploits the camp of spontaneity)."

"The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humor or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point to which ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge, although neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized. He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained.

"René Descartes (1596-1650) is one of the most important Western philosophers of the past few centuries. During his lifetime, Descartes was just as famous as an original physicist, physiologist and mathematician. But it is as a highly original philosopher that he is most frequently read today. He attempted to restart philosophy in a fresh direction. Descartes' work was influential, although his studies in physics and the other natural sciences much less so than his mathematical and philosophical work. Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, Descartes' philosophical ghost was always present; Locke, Hume, Leibniz and even Kant felt compelled to philosophical entanglement with this intellectual giant. For these reasons, Descartes is often called the "father" of modern philosophy.  The two most widely known of Descartes' philosophical ideas are those of a method of hyperbolic doubt, and the argument that, though he may doubt, he cannot doubt that he exists. The first of these comprises a key aspect of Descartes' philosophical method. As noted above, he refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers - but he also refused to accept the obviousness of his own senses. In the search for a foundation for philosophy, whatever could be doubted must be rejected. He resolves to trust only that which is clearly and distinctly seen to be beyond any doubt. In this manner, Descartes peels away the layers of beliefs and opinions that clouded his view of the truth. But, very little remains, only the simple fact of doubting itself, and the inescapable inference that something exists doubting, namely Descartes himself."