The remarkable range of Plato's Dialogues is vividly demonstrated by these three works. It opens with Phaedrus, a highly personal discussion between Socrates (David Rintoul) and the young, love-struck Phaedrus (Gunnar Cauthery). They go for a walk outside the walls of Athens and, under a plane tree by the banks of the Ilissus, talk about love - erotic and 'Platonic' love. Socrates endeavours to steer Phaedrus away from infatuation and show him that real love is based on concern for the beloved.

Here, in this second collection of Socratic Dialogues from Plato's Early Period, read by David Rintoul as Socrates with a full cast, are contrasting six works. Often, as with Gorgias, which opens the recording, Socrates combats the popular subjects of sophistry and rhetoric, in direct conversation with Gorgias (a leading sophist teacher), and with one of his pupils, Callicles.

The Republic is perhaps the single most important, the most studied and the most quoted text of all of Plato's Socratic Dialogues. Through the medium of Socrates, Plato outlines his view and ideas concerning the ideal working of the city-state. Socrates narrates a conversation that took place the previous day with Cephalus, Glaucon, Thrasymachus and others. The dialogue is organised into 10 books and covers a broad range of topics, including the ideal community and the ideal rulers of the community.

These five very different Socratic Dialogues date from Plato's later period, when he was revisiting his early thoughts and conclusions and showing a willingness for revision. In Timaeus (mainly a monologue read by David Timson in the title role), Plato considers cosmology in terms of the nature and structure of the universe, the ever-changing physical world and the unchanging eternal world. And he proposes a demiurge as a benevolent creator God.

Here are the Socratic Dialogues presented as Plato designed them to be - living discussions between friends and protagonists, with the personality of Socrates himself coming alive as he deals with a host of subjects, from justice and inspiration to courage, poetry and the gods. Plato's Socratic Dialogues provide a bedrock for classical Western philosophy. For centuries they have been read, studied and discussed via the flat pages of books, but the ideal medium for them is the spoken word.

Aristotle’s Organon comprises six key essays on logic, initially collected by Theophrastus, his successor as head of the Peripatetic school, and given its final form by Andronicus some three centuries later. The six essays are: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics and On Sophistical Refutations. One of the principal topics of Aristotle’s focus is syllogism, in which two premises (one major, one minor) lead to a conclusion. This features in Prior Analytics and On Interpretation.

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can lay claim to being the most important single work of modern philosophy, a work whose methodology, if not necessarily always its conclusions, has had a profound influence on almost all subsequent philosophical discourse. In this work Kant addresses, in a groundbreaking elucidation of the nature of reason, the age-old question of philosophy: “How do we know what we know?” and the limits of what it is that we can know with certainty.

Being and Time was published in 1927 during the Weimar period in Germany, a time of political, social and economic turmoil. Heidegger himself did not escape the pressures and his nationalism, and undeniable anti-Semitism in the following decades cast a shadow over the man, but not the work. Being and Time is not coloured by expressions of his later views (unlike other writings) and remains an outstanding document.

The title Politics literally means ‘the things concerning the city’. Here, Aristotle considers the important role that politics plays in the life of the community and its contribution to harmonious and virtuous existence. It is divided into eight books and was a cornerstone in political philosophy for centuries despite certain features - including attitudes towards slaves and women - clearly placing its conclusions and advice within the confines of Athenian society of the fourth century BCE.

First published in 1621, and hardly ever out of print since, it is a huge, varied, idiosyncratic, entertaining and learned survey of the experience of melancholy, seen from just about every possible angle that could be imagined. The Anatomy of Melancholy, presented here with all the original quotations in English, is, at last, available on audiobook in its entirety.