The Critique of Practical Reason was published in 1788, seven years after Immanuel Kant's major work, Critique of Pure Reason. In it, Kant sets out his moral philosophy - and it proved a seminal text in the history of the subject. He argues that the summum bonum (the highest good) of life is that rather than just pursuing happiness, people should inhabit a moral dimension that enables them to deserve the happiness that God can give. Though much shorter than Critique of Pure Reason, this is the sourcebook for Kant’s ethical doctrines.

In the 21st century, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) remains one of the key figures in the field of analytical psychology - and Psychological Types, or The Psychology of Individuation, published in 1921, is one of his most influential works. It was written during the decade after the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which effectively ended his friendship and collaboration with Sigmund Freud.

Matter and Memory, (Matière et Mémoire), published in 1896, was the second book written by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), one of the leading French philosophers of his age. It followed Time and Free Will (1889) and helped to establish him as a major force in anti-mechanistic thought, opposing the trend towards uncompromisingly secular and scientific views. However, when Matter and Memory appeared, Bergson was 39 and had yet to become the hugely influential figure he became in the first decades of the 20th century.

As philosophy professor Taylor Carman explains in his helpful introduction, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of modern phenomenology, one of the most important and influential movements of the 20th century. Ideas, published in 1913 – its full title is Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy – was the key work. It is arguably ‘the most fundamental and comprehensive statement of the fundamental principles of Husserl’s mature philosophy’.

The brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality. Throughout The Use of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?

Perhaps one of the most revolutionary works of philosophy ever presented, The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel's 1807 work that is in numerous ways extraordinary. A myriad of topics are discussed, and explained in such a harmoniously complex way that the method has been termed Hegelian dialectic. Ultimately, the work as a whole is a remarkable study of the mind's growth from its direct awareness to scientific philosophy, proving to be a difficult yet highly influential and enduring work.

Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953, two years after the death of its author. In the preface written in Cambridge in 1945 where he was professor of philosophy he states: ‘Four years ago I had occasion to re-read my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking.’

Kant's Prolegomena, although a small book, is without doubt the most important of his writings, writes the translator, Paul Carus. Prolegomena means, literally, prefatory or introductory remarks, and it furnishes us with a key to his main work, The Critique of Pure Reason; in fact, it is an extract containing all the salient ideas of Kant's system. It approaches the subject in the simplest and most direct way and is therefore best adapted as an introduction into his philosophy.

Schopenhauer was just 30 when his magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, a work of considerable learning and innovation of thought, first appeared in 1818.

Much to his chagrin and puzzlement (so convinced was he of its merits), it didn't have an immediate effect on European philosophy, views and culture. It was only decades later that it was recognised as one of the major intellectual landmarks of the 19th century.

John Locke and his works - particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message - that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses - complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live.