Library

Start here

• BookWhat Does It All Mean?, Thomas Nagel (1987)
  The best short first book in philosophy: nine chapters, one question each, from free will to death, without a single name-drop.
• BookThe Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1912)
  A century old and still one of the clearest introductions to knowledge, perception and induction. Free online, since it is in the public domain.
• BookApology, Crito and Phaedo, Plato (c. 399–360 BCE)
  The trial and death of Socrates. The place where Western philosophy's picture of itself begins.
• BookMeditations, Marcus Aurelius (c. 170–180)
  An emperor's private notes to himself. Read a page at random; it works better that way. See Stoicism.
• BookLetters from a Stoic, Seneca (c. 65)
  Short, warm, practical letters on time, friendship, anger and fear. The most companionable book in ancient philosophy.
• BookThink, Simon Blackburn (1999)
  A lively, opinionated guided tour of the main questions, built around classic texts.
• BookThe Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Julian Baggini (2005)
  A hundred thought experiments, two pages each, with short commentary. Good for a browsing habit.
• NovelSophie's World, Jostein Gaarder (1991)
  A history of Western philosophy disguised as a mystery novel for teenagers, which many adults have quietly enjoyed.
• BookThe Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (1942)
  Begins with the only question Camus thought truly serious, and answers it in under two hundred pages. See the myth of Sisyphus.
• BookJustice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, Michael Sandel (2009)
  The book of a famous Harvard course: trolleys, markets, lying and fairness, argued from every side. The lectures are free online.
• PodcastPhilosophy Bites, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton (2007 onward)
  Short interviews with leading philosophers, one topic per episode. Hundreds of episodes, all free.
• Video seriesCrash Course Philosophy, Hank Green (2016)
  Forty-six ten-minute videos covering most of the topics on this site, fast and accurate.

Going further

• BookNicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (4th century BCE)
  The founding text of virtue ethics. Books I, II and X are the place to start.
• BookMeditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes (1641)
  Six days of doubt and reconstruction, about eighty pages long. Every later theory of mind and knowledge argues with it.
• BookAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume (1748)
  Hume's own shorter, sharper rewrite of his Treatise. Sections IV to VIII cover causation, induction and free will.
• BookGroundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant (1785)
  Kant's shortest ethical work and the source of the categorical imperative. Hard, but short.
• BookUtilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (1863)
  A short, readable defence of utilitarianism that also anticipates most of the objections.
• BookThe Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche (1882)
  Contains both the 'death of God' and the first statement of the eternal recurrence.
• BookExistentialism Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1946)
  A public lecture that became the movement's manifesto, and the source of existence precedes essence.
• BookThe Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir (1947)
  The best attempt to build an existentialist ethics, and a corrective to Sartre.
• BookFree Will: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas Pink (2004)
  A clear map of the free will debate in about 130 pages.
• BookConsciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore (2005)
  A quick tour of the science and philosophy of consciousness by a writer who takes the strange possibilities seriously.
• BookA Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, John Perry (1978)
  A dying philosopher argues with her friends over three nights about whether she could survive death. The best way into personal identity.
• BookThe Mind's I, Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (eds.) (1981)
  Classic essays and stories on minds and selves, each with a commentary. Includes Nagel's bat and Searle's room.
• BookAnarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick (1974)
  Home of the experience machine and one of the most entertaining books in political philosophy.
• BookThe Life You Can Save, Peter Singer (2009)
  The drowning child argument turned into a practical book. Free online in an updated edition.
• BookThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1962)
  The book that introduced the paradigm shift and changed how people think about science.
• BookParadoxes, R. M. Sainsbury (1987; 3rd ed. 2009)
  The standard guide to Zeno, the sorites, the liar and their relatives.
• BookReality+, David Chalmers (2022)
  Uses virtual worlds and the simulation argument to work through the classic questions of knowledge and reality.
• BookElbow Room, Daniel Dennett (1984)
  A witty case for compatibilism: the kinds of free will worth wanting.
• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.) (1995 onward)
  Free, peer-reviewed and maintained by experts. The first place to go after any entry on this site.

The deep end

• BookCritique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1781)
  The most important book in modern philosophy, and one of the hardest. Read with a guide.
• BookA Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume (1739–40)
  The full version of Hume's assault on causation, the self and moral reasoning. Book I, Part IV contains the bundle theory.
• BookEthics, Baruch Spinoza (1677)
  Philosophy in the form of geometry: definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs. Demanding and, to its admirers, unmatched.
• BookBeing and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)
  Long and dense, but the sections on bad faith and the look of the other are among the most quoted in twentieth-century philosophy.
• BookPhilosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)
  Numbered remarks that circle the same problems from many angles. Best read slowly, with company.
• BookReasons and Persons, Derek Parfit (1984)
  Part Three is the most influential modern work on personal identity, and Part Four reinvented population ethics.
• BookA Theory of Justice, John Rawls (1971)
  The book behind the veil of ignorance. Chapters 1 to 3 hold the core argument.
• BookThe Conscious Mind, David Chalmers (1996)
  The full case for taking the hard problem seriously, including the zombie argument.
• BookConsciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett (1991)
  The full case against it. Read it alongside Chalmers.
• BookThe View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel (1986)
  A sustained study of the conflict between the subjective and objective standpoints, across mind, freedom, ethics and death.
• BookOn the Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis (1986)
  A brilliant defence of an unbelievable view: that every possible world is real.
• BookKnowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson (2000)
  Turns the Gettier tradition on its head by treating knowledge as basic rather than analysing it.
• BookThe Incoherence of the Philosophers, Al-Ghazali (1095)
  A logician's attack on the Aristotelian philosophers of its day, including the famous argument about causation.
• BookThe Incoherence of the Incoherence, Ibn Rushd (c. 1180)
  The reply, point by point. Read the two together for one of the great philosophical exchanges.
• BookOutlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus (c. 200)
  The ancient sceptic's toolkit. Its rediscovery in the sixteenth century helped set the agenda for modern philosophy.
• BookVagueness, Timothy Williamson (1994)
  The full defence of epistemicism, the surprising view that every vague word has a sharp boundary.