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The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time–A Philosophy Study Starter

Whether you’re majoring in philosophy, beginning your personal journey to better understand the universe, or you just have some humanities credits to fulfill, this is a great place to start. Logically speaking (which is an important way to speak within the context of philosophy), the most influential philosophers in history are responsible for the most influential ideas in history. These are the thinkers who put forth notions that still inform our understanding of the human condition today—groundbreaking, illuminating, ingenious (and frequently debunked) notions about reasoning, reality, spirituality, consciousness, dreams, social organization, human behavior, logic, and even love.

The list here is a portal to the history of human thought, a window into everything and nothing all at once. And yet, this is by no means a comprehensive discussion. The number of individuals who have impacted the course of human history through their insight, intuition, and intellect is far too great to quantify. And ideas expressed just by those included here fill untold volumes of writing. But based on our findings, this is the top tier of thinkers, those who paved the way for all which came after, who laid the foundation for so much of what we hold to be true, who in essence created the field of study we call philosophy.

What follows is a list of the The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of all time based on the period of history between 1000 BCE and 2000 CE. This is a bird’s eye view of philosophy, an overview from the very top, but by no means a comprehensive nor probing dive into any one area. That’s why we call this a Study Starter. We just get the ball rolling. The rest is up to you...

Influence Rankings

The InfluenceRanking engine calculates a numerical influence score for people, institutions, and disciplinary programs. It performs this calculation by drawing from Wikipedia/data, Crossref, and an ever-growing body of data reflecting academic achievement and merit.

The InfluenceRanking engine measures the influence of a given person in a given discipline, as well as in important related subdisciplines. Influence can also be measured within a specific set of time parameters. For instance, it is said that Greek thinker Pythagoras coined the term philosophy in the 6th Century BC. This, therefore, seems an appropriate starting point for the period under investigation. Accordingly, our ranking of the 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time uses the time parameters of 1000 BC to 2000 CE.

A Note On Diversity

We concede from the outset that this ranking list reflects a problem, not specifically with our algorithm, but with the human history of influence. What follows is a list composed entirely of men, most of them European, descendent from European ancestry, or famous for proliferating European ideas. Absent are the great women who have altered the course of human history by way of their ideas and actions. Also limited in appearance are the brilliant thinkers from Arabic or African antiquity, from Eastern traditions of thought, or from more recent centuries where the greatest minds were set to work on advancing civil rights.

• Top Influential Black Philosophers

This is not because we have overlooked these thinkers, nor because their contributions don’t warrant inclusion in such a list. Rather, this is a direct reflection of the enormous scope of time accounted for in our ranking. Across the vast majority of the 3000 years represented here, social, racial, and gender inequality have been very real and very consequential realities. Moreover, our rankings are limited to those thinkers whose work has enjoyed extensive translation in the English-speaking world.

Because our influence rankings measure the raw permeation of citations, writing, and ideas originating with each of these thinkers, the rigid prejudices that have persisted throughout history are also reflected on our list. This is not an endorsement of those prejudices-merely a faithful reporting on a subject which is inherently reflective of those prejudices.

Happily, when one distills a more current period of history in the philosophy discipline, one can see just how much the field of thought has evolved today, such that a meaningful number of women, people of color, and people of non-European origin are represented. This denotes a clear evolution in an academic field that, for all of its insight and illumination, also has a deep-seated history of Eurocentrism.

For a look at the philosophers with the greatest influence on the field today, check out:

• Top Influential Philosophers Today

With this limitation acknowledged, we bring you...

The Most Influential Philosophers of All Time

What follows is a list, in order, of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. Most of the names below will be familiar, though you might find a few surprises.

Other information provided below includes a condensed Wikipedia bio for each philosopher, their Key Contributions to the discipline, and Selected Works. You can also click on the profile link for each philosopher to see where they rank in specific philosophy subdisciplines, such as logic, ethics, and metaphysics.

1. Socrates (470 BC–399 BC)/ Plato (429 BC–347 BC)

*Socrates and Plato are inseparable from one another in the history of thought and are therefore inseparable in our ranking.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates’ lifetime, though a fragment of Ion of Chios’ Travel Journal provides important information about Socrates’ youth.

The most influential of Socrates’ students, Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He was the founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.

Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-called neoplatonism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato’s entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated, Plato’s works have consistently been read and studied.

Key Contributions from Socrates

• Socratic Dialogue
• Socratic Questioning
• Socratic Method

Key Contributions from Plato

• Theory of Forms
• Theory of Soul

Selected Works

*There is limited consensus about the exact publication date for each of these works. Dates below should be seen as approximations.

**Though Socrates is widely considered the father of the Western philosophical tradition, he authored no texts during his lifetime. His influence was felt in his lifetime through his dialogues with prominent pupils. Therefore, he is best read through the works of his most influential students:

• Apology of Socrates (c. 399 BC)
• The Phaedo (c. 399 BC)
• Crito (c. 399 BC)
• Symposium (c. 385-370 BC)
• The Republic (c. 375 BC)
• The Sophist (c. 360 BC)
• Timaeus (c. 360 BC)
• Symposium (c. 422 BC)
• Apology of Socrates to the Jury (c. 399 BC)
• Memorabilia (c. 371 BC)
• Oeconomicus (c. 362 BC)

Find out where Socrates among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

Find out where Plato among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

2. Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government.

Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.

Key Contributions

• Aristotelianism
• Peripatetic school
• On the Soul (c. 350 BC)
• Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC)
• Metaphysics (c. 335-323 BC)*
• Rhetoric (c. 322 BC)

Find out where this influencer ranks among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

3. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere “forms of intuition” which structure all experience, and therefore that while “things-in-themselves” exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere “appearances”, and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.

In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses. Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant’s views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.

• Categorical Imperative
• Kantian Ethics
• Practical Reason
• Transcendental Idealism
• Universal Natural History (1755)
• Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
• Critique of Judgment (1790)
• Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793)
• Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

4. René Descartes (1596–1650)

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.

Many elements of Descartes’s philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul , an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic “as if no one had written on these matters before.” His best known philosophical statement is ” cogito, ergo sum ″ (“I think, therefore I am”; French: Je pense, donc je suis ), found in Discourse on the Method (1637; in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy (1644, in Latin).

Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention given to epistemology in the 17th century.

• Cogito, Ergo Sum
• Cartesian Doubt
• Cartesian Coordinate System
• Cartesian Dualism
• Discourse on the Method (1637)
• Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
• Principles of Philosophy (1644)
• Passions of the Soul (1649)

5. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

• Master-slave Morality
• God is Dead
• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• Ecce Homo (1888; published in 1908)

6. Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum.

His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital . Marx’s political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

• Economic Determinism
• Historical Materialism
• Marxist Dialectic
• Marxist Philosophy of Nature
• Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)
• Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
• Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
• Das Kapital, Vol. 1 (1867)

7. Avicenna (980–1037)

Ibn Sina, also known as Abu Ali Sina , Pur Sina , and often known in the West as Avicenna , was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna “arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era”. He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine.

His most famous works are The Book of Healing , a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine , a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna’s corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and works of poetry.

• Islamic Metaphysics
• Proof of the Truthful
• Floating Man
• The Canon of Medicine (1025)
• The Book of Healing (1027)
• Al Nijat (Published 1913)

8. David Hume (1711–1776)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley, as a British Empiricist.

• Bundle Theory
• Association of Ideas
• Hume’s Fork
• A Treatise of Human Nature (1740)
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758)
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; posthumously)

9. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. In Heidegger’s fundamental text Being and Time (1927), “Dasein” is introduced as a term for the specific type of being that humans possess.[15] Dasein has been translated as “being there”. Heidegger believes that Dasein already has a “pre-ontological” and non-abstract understanding that shapes how it lives. This mode of being he terms “being-in-the-world”.

Commentators have noted that Dasein and “being-in-the-world” are unitary concepts in contrast with the “subject/object” view of rationalist philosophy since at least René Descartes. Heidegger uses an analysis of Dasein to approach the question of the meaning of being, which Heidegger scholar Michael Wheeler describes as “concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings”. Heidegger’s later work includes criticism of the view, common in the Western tradition, that all of nature is a “standing reserve” on call, as if it were a part of industrial inventory. Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.

*Indeed, because of Heidegger’s connection to Nazism, we consider his inclusion on this list controversial. However, his performance using our Ranking Analytics made this inclusion unavoidable. For more on the sometimes overlapping phenomena of influence and infamy, take a look at our discussion on the undeniable influence of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden .

• Heideggerian terminology
• Ontological Difference
• Being and Time (1927)
• Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929)
• Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)
• The Principle of Reason (1955-56)
• Identity and Difference (1955-57)

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the relatively slim 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise) (1921) which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus .

His only other published works were an article, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (1929), a book review, and a children’s dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations . A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations.”

• Family Resemblance
• Form of Life
• Language-Game
• Wittgenstein’s Ladder
• Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1921)
• Some Remarks on Logical Form (1929)
• Philosophical Investigations (1953)
• Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1967)

11. John Locke (1632–1704)

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

• Natural Rights
• Lockean Proviso
• Consent of the Governed
• Consciousness
• Social Contract
• A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
• Two Treatises of Government (1690)
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and an important figure in German idealism. He is considered one of the fundamental figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from aesthetics to ontology to politics, both in the analytic and continental tradition. Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism , in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome.

• Hegelian Dialectic
• Master-slave Dialectic
• Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
• Science of Logic (1812-1816)
• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)
• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)

13. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the and the . The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism; of which he argued that reason is found in God. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.

• Scholasticism
• Theological Intellectualism
• Moderate Realism
• Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265)
• Summa Theologiae (1265-1274)

14. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian Andersen were all “understood” far too quickly by “scholars”.

• Existentialism
• Leap of Faith
• On The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
• Fear and Trembling (1843)
• Either/Or (1843)
• The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

15. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl’s thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.

• Phenomenology
• Formal Ontology
• Theory of Moments
• Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)
• Logical Investigations (1900)
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Present Phenomenological Philosophy (1913)
• Cartesian Meditations (1931)

16. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. Russell was also a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.

• Analytic Philosophy
• Axiom of Reducibility
• Automated Reasoning
• Mathematical Beauty
• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• On Denoting (1905)
• Principia Mathematica (1910)
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919)

17. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

• Existence Precedes Essence
• Being-in-itself
• Nausea (1938)
• Being and Nothingness (1943)
• No Exit (1944)
• Existentialism and Humanism (1946)

18. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

• Deconstruction
• Phallogocentrism
• Speech and Phenomena (1967)
• Of Grammatology (1967)
• Writing and Difference (1967)
• Margins of Philosophy (1972)

19. Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

• Disciplinary institution
• Foucauldian discourse analysis
• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961)
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963)
• The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966)
• The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

20. Averroes (1126–1198)

Ibn Rushd (full name in Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد, romanized: Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd;) often Latinized as Averroes was a Muslim Andalusian polymath and jurist of Berber descent who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the western world as The Commentator and Father of Rationalism . Ibn Rushd also served as a chief judge and a court physician for the Almohad Caliphate. Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna.

• Unity of the Intellect
• Aristotelianism in the Islamic philosophical tradition
• Philosophy within a Muslim Religious Tradition
• The General Principles of Medicine (c. 1162)
• Decisive Treatise on the Agreement Between Religious Law and Philosophy (c. 1178-1180)
• Examination of the Methods of Proof Concerning the Doctrines of Religion (c. 1179-1180)
• The Incoherence of the Incoherence (c. 1179-1180)

21. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

John Stuart Mill , usually cited as J. S. Mill, was an English philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

• Utilitarianism
• Liberal Feminism
• Mill’s Methods
• A System of Logic (1843)
• On Liberty (1859)
• Utilitarianism (1863)
• The Subjection of Women (1869)

22. William James (1842–1910)

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the “Father of American psychology”. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James’s reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism.

• The Will to Believe
• Pragmatic Theory of Truth
• Radical Empiricism
• Stream of Consciousness
• The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• The Will To Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)
• Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

23. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a prominent German polymath and one of the most important logicians, mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment. As a representative of the seventeenth-century tradition of rationalism, Leibniz developed, as his most prominent accomplishment, the ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton’s contemporaneous developments. Mathematical works have consistently favored Leibniz’s notation as the conventional expression of calculus. It was only in the 20th century that Leibniz’s law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity found mathematical implementation.

• The Product Rule
• Law of Continuity
• Best of All Possible Worlds
• Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1864)
• Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)
• New Essays on Human Understanding (1704)
• The Theodicy (1710)
• Monadology (1714)

24. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)

• Frege’s Propositional Calculus
• Principle of Compositionality
• Context Principle
• Begriffsschrift (1879)
• The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884)
• Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893-1903)

25. John Dewey (1859–1952)

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He is regarded as one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey’s works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.” Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology.

• Instrumentalism
• Functional Psychology
• Progressive Education
• Occupational Psychosis
• Psychology (1887)
• Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888)
• Ethics (1908)
• Democracy and Education (1916)
• Art as Experience (1934)

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The Most Anthologized Essays of the Last 25 Years

In which joan didion appears more than once.

Depending on who you are, the word “essay” may make you squirm. After all, here in America at least, our introduction to the essay often comes complete with five paragraphs and “repeat but rephrase” and other soul-killing rules. But in actuality, essays are nothing like the staid, formulaic, boring things they make you write in high school. They’re all over the place. They’re wild. Or at least they can be. After all, the word essay comes from the French verb essayer , which means “to try.” Essays are merely attempts, at expression, or at proof; they claim to be nothing more. I’ve always thought that was lovely.

For this list, I looked at 14 essay anthologies, plus the three volumes of Lee Gutkind’s The Best Creative Nonfiction and John D’Agata’s three-part survey of the form ( The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay , and The Making of the American Essay ), for a total of 20 books published between 1991 and 2016. I ignored all themed anthologies, as well as any limited to a specific year or publication. This is the last survey of anthologies in a series—earlier this month, I looked at the most anthologized short stories and the most anthologized poems —and considering all three lists together affords the ability to compare the way the different forms are canonized and read in America.

Of the three, I was most surprised by the data here. The essay is perhaps the most ravenous of forms, but these anthologies included letters, speeches (notably, a fair number of presidential addresses), excerpts from longer, reported works of non-fiction, and a number of works that I consider stories (like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” which most agree is a short story, and some argue is a poem, but is certainly not an essay) or even actual poetry (John D’Agata, I know you’re a rebel and all, but “ For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey ,” while incredible, is not an essay). On the other hand, several essays that I consider top-notch classics didn’t make the cut (like Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” and Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which each appear only once in all the anthologies I surveyed). And Michel de Montaigne, who essentially coined the term, is only feebly represented. The better news is that five of the nine most anthologized essays are by writers of color, which is significantly better than either of the other lists do in that regard.

Below, I’ve separated my findings into four lists: the most anthologized essays (this should be self-explanatory), the most anthologized essayists (the authors with the most essays total across the anthologies), the most widely anthologized essayists (the authors with the most discrete essays across the anthologies), and the one hit wonders (those essays that were their authors only piece represented across the anthologies, albeit multiple times). At the end, there’s the full list, consisting of all duplicated essays and all essayists who had at least three pieces among the books I surveyed.

Most Anthologized Essays

Nine inclusions:

“Once More to the Lake,” E. B. White

Seven inclusions:

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Six inclusions:

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf

Five inclusions:

“Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell

Four inclusions:

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” N. Scott Momaday

Three inclusions:

“Graduation,” Maya Angelou “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss “Seeing,” Annie Dillard “Learning to Read,” Frederick Douglass “Of the Coming of John,” W.E.B. Du Bois from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America , Barbara Ehrenreich “On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner “The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould “Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr “Salvation,” Langston Hughes “The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson “The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch “Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton “Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace “Yeager,” Tom Wolfe

Two inclusions:

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa “Graven Images,” Saul Bellow “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady “Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicolas Carr “The Dream,” Winston Churchill “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” Hillary Rodham Clinton “Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer “Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum “The White Album,” Joan Didion “On Going Home,” Joan Didion “On Morality,” Joan Didion “Total eclipse,” Annie Dillard “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard from An American Childhood , Annie Dillard “Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early “The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich “Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson “Young Hunger,” M.F.K. Fisher “When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Atul Gawande “He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg “Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy “The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene “Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick “On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt “The Courage of Turtles,” Edward Hoagland “A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid “Dream Children: a Reverie,” Charles Lamb “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee “On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs “Of Some Verses on Virgil,” Michel de Montaigne “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee “Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Barack Obama “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders “The Men We Carry in our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders “Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?,” Peter Singer “A Century of Cinema,” Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth “Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker “Writing and Analyzing a Story,” Eudora Welty “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams “A Preface to Persius,” Edmund Wilson “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf

The Most Anthologized Essayists ( the authors with most essays published among the anthologies )

Sixteen essays: Joan Didion

Fourteen essays: Annie Dillard

Thirteen essays: Virginia Woolf

Eleven essays: James Baldwin George Orwell E. B. White

Nine essays: Richard Rodriguez Henry David Thoreau

Eight essays: Martin Luther King, Jr. Susan Sontag Jonathan Swift

Seven essays: Samuel Johnson Michel de Montaigne Mark Twain Eudora Welty

Six essays: Francis Bacon Barbara Ehrenreich Stephen Jay Gould Maxine Hong Kingston Zora Neale Hurston Charles Lamb John McPhee David Sedaris Amy Tan

Five essays: Maya Angelou Eula Biss M.F.K. Fisher Atul Gawande William Hazlitt Jamaica Kincaid Nancy Mairs H.L. Mencken N. Scott Momaday Adrienne Rich Lewis Thomas Alice Walker David Foster Wallace Tom Wolfe

The Most Widely Anthologized Essayists  ( authors with most discrete essays published among the anthologies )

Ten essays:

Joan Didion

Nine essays:

Annie Dillard

Seven essays:

Samuel Johnson Richard Rodriguez Virginia Woolf

Six essays:

Sir Francis Bacon Michel de Montaigne George Orwell David Sedaris Seneca Susan Sontag Mark Twain Eudora Welty

Five essays:

James Baldwin Charles Lamb H.L. Mencken Adrienne Rich Lewis Thomas Henry David Thoreau

Four essays:

Max Beerbohm G.K. Chesterton Barbara Ehrenreich M.F.K. Fisher Atul Gawande Stephen Jay Gould William Hazlitt Jamaica Kincaid Phillip Lopate Barry Lopez Nancy Mairs Cynthia Ozick Anna Quindlen Scott Russell Sanders Robert Louis Stevenson James Thurber Alice Walker

One Hit Wonders ( authors with a only single essay represented across the anthologies )

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan

“On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner “Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr “The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson “The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa “Graven Images,” Saul Bellow “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady “Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicolas Carr “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” Hillary Rodham Clinton “Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum “Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley “Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson “He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg “Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy “The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene “Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz “Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams

The Full List ( all essays by writers with at least one duplication or three disparate essays anthologized )

“The Great American Desert,” Edward Abbey “The Cowboy and his Cow,” Edward Abbey “Havasu,” Edward Abbey

“Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie “Indian Education,” Sherman Alexie “Captivity,” Sherman Alexie

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison (x 2)

“Graduation,” Maya Angelou (x 3) “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou “Champion of the World,” Maya Angelou

“How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa (x 2)

“Of Truth,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Revenge,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Boldness,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Innovations,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Masques and Triumphs,” Sir Francis Bacon “Antithesis of Things,” Sir Francis Bacon

“Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin (x 5) “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin (x 3) “Alas, Poor Richard,” James Baldwin “The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston,” James Baldwin “Equal in Paris,” James Baldwin

“Going Out for a Walk,” Max Beerbohm “Laughter,” Max Beerbohm “Something Defeasible,” Max Beerbohm “A Clergyman,” Max Beerbohm

“Graven Images,” Saul Bellow (x 2)

“What Reconciles Me,” John Berger “Photographs of Agony,” John Berger “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” John Berger

“The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss (x 3) “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss (x 2)

“Blindness,” Jorge Luis Borges “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus,” Jorge Luis Borges

“I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady (x 2)

“Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. (x 2)

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicholas Carr (x 2)

“The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson from Short Talks , Anne Carson “Kinds of Water,” Anne Carson

“Marginal world,” Rachel Carson “The Obligation to Endure,” Rachel Carson “A Fable for Tomorrow,” Rachel Carson

“A Piece of Chalk,” G.K. Chesterton “On Running After One’s Hat,” G.K. Chesterton “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls,” G.K. Chesterton “On Sandals and Simplicity,” G.K. Chesterton

“The Dream,” Winston Churchill (x 2) from “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Winston Churchill from “This Was Their Finest Hour,” Winston Churchill

“Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer (x 2) “More Room,” Judith Ortiz Cofer “Myth of the Latin Woman: I just met a girl named Maria,” Judith Ortiz Cofer

“Another Country,” Edwidge Danticat “Uncle Moïse,” Edwidge Danticat “Westbury Court,” Edwidge Danticat

“Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum (x 2)

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion (x 4) “The White Album,” Joan Didion (x 2) “On Going Home,” Joan Didion (x 2) “On Morality,” Joan Didion (x 2) “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion “In Bed,” Joan Didion “At the Dam,” Joan Didion “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Joan Didion from Salvador , Joan Didion “The Santa Ana,” Joan Didion

“Seeing,” Annie Dillard (x 3) “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard (x 2) “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard (x 2) rom An American Childhood , Annie Dillard (x 2) “Sight into Insight,” Annie Dillard “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley,” Annie Dillard from For the Time Being , Annie Dillard “The Chase,” Annie Dillard “The Stunt Pilot,” Annie Dillard

“Learning to Read,” Frederick Douglass (x 3) from “Fourth of July Oration,” Frederick Douglass

“Of the Coming of John,” W.E.B. Du Bois (x 3) “A Mild Suggestion,” W.E.B. Du Bois

“Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley (x 2)

“Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early (x 2) “Digressions,” Gerald Early

from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America , Barbara Ehrenreich (x 3) “Serving in Florida,” Barbara Ehrenreich “Cultural Baggage,” Barbara Ehrenreich “War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited,” Barbara Ehrenreich

“The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich (x 2) from the Journals, Gretel Ehrlich “Lijiang,” Gretel Ehrlich

“On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner (x 3)

“Brown Wasps,” Loren Eiseley “The Angry Winter,” Loren Eiseley “The Snout,” Loren Eiseley

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot “Marie Lloyd,” T.S. Eliot “The Dry Salvages,” T.S. Eliot

“The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Conservative,” Ralph Waldo Emerson “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson (x 2)

“Young Hunger,” M.F.K. Fisher (x 2) “Once a Tramp, Always,” M.F.K. Fisher “The Flaw,” M.F.K. Fisher “Paris Journal,” M.F.K. Fisher

“The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald (x 3) “Sleeping and Waking,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Learning to Write,” Benjamin Franklin from the Autobiography , Benjamin Franklin “The Levee,” Benjamin Franklin

“When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Atul Gawande (x 2) from “Overkill,” Atul Gawande “Final Cut,” Atul Gawande “Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready,” Atul Gawande

“He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg (x 2)

“Java Man,” Malcolm Gladwell “None of the Above: What I.Q. Doesn’t Tell You about Race,” Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell

“Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould (x 3) “Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” Stephen Jay Gould “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” Stephen Jay Gould “The Median Isn’t the Message,” Stephen Jay Gould

“Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy (x 2)

“The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene (x 2)

“Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick (x 2)

“No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston (x 5) “Tongue-Tied,” Maxine Hong Kingston

“On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt (x 2) “On Going a Journey,” William Hazlitt “The Fight,” William Hazlitt “Brummelliana,” William Hazlitt

“Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr (x 3)

“The Courage of Turtles,” Edward Hoagland (x 2) “The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain,” Edward Hoagland “Heaven and Nature,” Edward Hoagland

“Salvation,” Langston Hughes (x 3) “Bop,” Langston Hughes

“How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston (x 6)

“The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson (x 3)

“The Boarding house,” Samuel Johnson “The Solitude of the Country,” Samuel Johnson “Dignity and Uses of Biography,” Samuel Johnson “Conversation,” Samuel Johnson “Debtors’ Prisons (1),” Samuel Johnson “Debtors’ Prisons (2),” Samuel Johnson “To Reign Once More in Our Native Country,” Samuel Johnson

“A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid (x 2) “On Seeing England for the First Time,” Jamaica Kincaid “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid “Biography of a Dress,” Jamaica Kincaid

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. (x 7) “I Have a Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Dream Children: a Reverie,” Charles Lamb (x 2) “New Year’s Eve,” Charles Lamb “A Chapter on Ears,” Charles Lamb “The Superannuated Man,” Charles Lamb from “On Some of the Old Actors,” Charles Lamb

“Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee (x 2)

“Second Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln (x 3) “First Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln

“Against Joie de Vivre,” Phillip Lopate “Portrait of my Body,” Phillip Lopate “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” Phillip Lopate “The Dead Father: A Rememberance of Donald Barthelme,” Phillip Lopate

“Flight,” Barry Lopez “Grown Men,” Barry Lopez “The Raven,” Barry Lopez “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez

“The Fourth of July,” Audre Lorde “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Audre Lorde

“The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch (x 3)

“On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs (x 2) “Ron her Son,” Nancy Mairs “Body in Trouble,” Nancy Mairs “Disability,” Nancy Mairs

“My Confession,” Mary McCarthy “Artists in Uniform,” Mary McCarthy “Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?,” Mary McCarthy

“The Case for Single-Child Families,” Bill McKibben “Waste Not, Want Not,” Bill McKibben “Curbing Nature’s Paparazzi,” Bill McKibben

“The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee (x 4) “Under the Snow,” John McPhee from Annals of the Former World , John McPhee

“On Being an American,” H.L. Mencken “Hills of Zion,” H.L. Mencken “Reflections on Journalism,” H.L. Mencken “The Libido for the Ugly,” H.L. Mencken “Funeral march,” H.L. Mencken

“The Way to Rainy Mountain,” N. Scott Momaday (x 4) “An American Land Ethic,” N. Scott Momaday

“Of some verses on Virgil,” Michel de Montaigne (x 2) “Of books,” Michel de Montaigne “Of a monstrous child,” Michel de Montaigne from “On Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” Michel de Montaigne “Of Experience,” Michel de Montaigne

“Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee (x 2)

“This is Not Who We Are,” Naomi Shihab Nye “Thank You in Arabic,” Naomi Shihab Nye “One Village,” Naomi Shihab Nye

“Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Barack Obama (x 2) “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama

“Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell (x 5) “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell (x 2) “Such, Such were the Joys,” George Orwell “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell “The Moon under Water,” George Orwell “A Hanging,” George Orwell

“Drugstore in Winter,” Cynthia Ozick “The Lesson of the Master,” Cynthia Ozick “Highbrow Blues,” Cynthia Ozick “Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” Cynthia Ozick

“The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato (x 2)

“An Animal’s Place,” Michael Pollan “Why “Natural” Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore,” Michael Pollan “What’s Eating America,” Michael Pollan

“Future is Now,” Katherine Anne Porter “St. Augustine and the Bullfight,” Katherine Anne Porter “The Necessary Enemy,” Katherine Anne Porter

“Between the Sexes, a Great Divide,” Anna Quindlen “Stuff Is Not Salvation,” Anna Quindlen “The War We Haven’t Won,” Anna Quindlen “Homeless,” Anna Quindlen

“Split at the Root,” Adrienne Rich “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Adrienne Rich “Taking Women Students Seriously,” Adrienne Rich “Claiming an Education,” Adrienne Rich from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich

“Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez (x 3) “Late Victorians,” Richard Rodriguez “Going Home Again,” Richard Rodriguez from Crossing Borders , Richard Rodriguez from Darling , Richard Rodriguez “Private Language, Public Language,” Richard Rodriguez “‘Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans,” Richard Rodriguez

“Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz (x 2)

“Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders (x 2 ) “The Men we Carry in our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders (x 2) “The Singular First Person,” Scott Russell Sanders “The Inheritance of Tools,” Scott Russell Sanders

“Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle (x 2)

“Repeat After Me,” David Sedaris “Loggerheads,” David Sedaris “A Plague of Tics,” David Sedaris “Guy Walks into a Bar Car,” David Sedaris “The Drama Bug,” David Sedaris “Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa,” David Sedaris

“On Noise,” Seneca “Asthma,” Seneca “Scipio’s Villa,” Seneca “Slaves,” Seneca “Epistle 47,” Seneca “Sick,” Seneca

“Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko (x 2)

“What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?,” Peter Singer (x 2) from Animal Liberation , Peter Singer

“A Century of Cinema,” Susan Sontag (x 2) “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag (x 2) “Notes on ‘Camp,'” Susan Sontag from “Freak Show,” Susan Sontag “Unguided Tour,” Susan Sontag from “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” Susan Sontag.

“Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton (x 3) “Seneca Falls Keynote Address,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples (x 3) “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s,” Brent Staples

“Aes Triplex,” Robert Louis Stevenson “The Lantern-bearers,” Robert Louis Stevenson “An Apology for Idlers,” Robert Louis Stevenson “On Marriage,” Robert Louis Stevenson

“A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift (x 6) “Good Manners and Good Breeding,” Jonathan Swift “A Meditation upon a Broom-stick,” Jonathan Swift

“Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan (x 6)

“Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (x 2)

“Lives of a Cell,” Lewis Thomas “Notes on Punctuation,” Lewis Thomas “To Err is Human,” Lewis Thomas “Becoming a Doctor,” Lewis Thomas “The Medusa and the Snail,” Lewis Thomas

“Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau (x 3) “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau (x 2) “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau (x 2) “The Battle of the Ants,” Henry David Thoreau “Night and Moonlight,” Henry David Thoreau

“The Secret Life of James Thurber,” James Thurber “Sex Ex Machina,” James Thurber “My Own Ten Rules for a Happy Marriage,” James Thurber “Snapshot of a Dog,” James Thurber

“Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth (x 2)

“Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain (x 2) “Corn-pone Opinions,” Mark Twain “Italian without a master,” Mark Twain “Thoughts of God,” Mark Twain from Life on the Mississippi “Letters from the Earth,” Mark Twain

“In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker (x 2) “Looking for Zora,” Alice Walker “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” Alice Walker “Becoming What We’re Called,” Alice Walker

“Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace (x 3) “Ticket to the Fair,” David Foster Wallace “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,” David Foster Wallace

“Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White (x 9) “The Ring of Time,” E.B. White “About Myself,” E.B. White

“Writing and Analyzing a Story,” Eudora Welty (x 2) “Sweet Devouring,” Eudora Welty “Clamorous to Learn,” Eudora Welty “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Eudora Welty “The Little Store,” Eudora Welty “Listening,” Eudora Welty

“The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams (x 2)

“A Preface to Persius,” Edmund Wilson (x 2) “Old Stone House,” Edmund Wilson “Life is a Narrative,” Edmund Wilson

“Yeager,” Tom Wolfe (x 3) “Putting Daddy On,” Tom Wolfe “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” Tom Wolfe

The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf (x 6) “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf (x 2) “Leslie Stephen,” Virginia Woolf “Harriette Wilson,” Virginia Woolf “Ellen Terry,” Virginia Woolf “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf from Three Guineas , Virginia Woolf

Anthologies Surveyed:

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present , ed. Philip Lopate (1997); The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (2001);  Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present , ed. Lex Williford and Michael Martone (2007);  The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction , 14th edition, ed. Melissa Goldthwaite, Joseph Bizup, John Brereton, Anne Fernald, Linda Peterson (2015);  The Norton Book of Personal Essays , ed. Joseph Epstein (1997); The Best Creative Nonfiction , ed. Lee Gutkind, Volumes 1, 2, & 3 (2007); The Signet Book of American Essays , ed. M. Jerry Weiss and Helen Weiss (2006); The Oxford Book of Essays , ed. John Gross (1991); 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , Samuel Cohen (2011); The Eloquent Essay: An Anthology of Classic & Creative Nonfiction , ed. John Loughery (2000); The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose , Third Edition, ed. Laura Buzzard, Don LePan, Nora Ruddock, Alexandria Stuart (2016); The Next American Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2003) & The Lost Origins of the Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2009) & The Making of the American Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2016); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction , ed. B. Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve (2005); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth , ed. Bill Roorbach (2001); 40 Model Essays , Second edition, ed. Jane E. Aaron and Ellen Kuhl Repetto (2003); The Seagull Reader: Essays , Third Edition, ed. Joseph Kelly (2015)

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1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A young, impoverished former student in Saint Petersburg, Russia, formulates a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker to redistribute her wealth among the needy. However, after carrying out the act, he is consumed by guilt and paranoia, leading to a psychological battle within himself. As he grapples with his actions, he also navigates complex relationships with a variety of characters, including a virtuous prostitute, his sister, and a relentless detective. The narrative explores themes of morality, redemption, and the psychological impacts of crime.

2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Set in the backdrop of the Napoleonic era, the novel presents a panorama of Russian society and its descent into the chaos of war. It follows the interconnected lives of five aristocratic families, their struggles, romances, and personal journeys through the tumultuous period of history. The narrative explores themes of love, war, and the meaning of life, as it weaves together historical events with the personal stories of its characters.

3. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

This novel is a complex narrative that weaves together three distinct yet intertwined stories. The first story is set in 1930s Moscow and follows the devil and his entourage as they wreak havoc on the city's literary elite. The second story is a historical narrative about Pontius Pilate and his role in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The third story is a love story between the titular Master, a writer who has been driven to madness by the criticism of his work, and his devoted lover, Margarita. The novel is a satirical critique of Soviet society, particularly the literary establishment, and its treatment of artists. It also explores themes of love, sacrifice, and the nature of good and evil.

4. Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

"Collected Fiction" is a compilation of stories by a renowned author that takes readers on a journey through a world of philosophical paradoxes, intellectual humor, and fantastical realities. The book features a range of narratives, from complex, multi-layered tales of labyrinths and detective investigations, to metaphysical explorations of infinity and the nature of identity. It offers an immersive and thought-provoking reading experience, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, past and present, and the self and the universe.

5. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A young prince from a tiny asteroid embarks on a journey across the universe, visiting various planets and meeting their strange inhabitants. Along the way, he learns about the follies and absurdities of the adult world, the nature of friendship, and the importance of retaining a childlike wonder and curiosity. His journey eventually leads him to Earth, where he befriends a fox and learns about love and loss before finally returning to his asteroid.

6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

The novel is a humorous, rambling narrative that chronicles the life of Tristram Shandy. The story is filled with digressions, anecdotes, and eccentric characters, as Tristram often interrupts his own tale to interject commentary or to recount stories from his family's past. Despite the seemingly haphazard structure, the novel is a clever exploration of narrative form and a satirical critique of traditional biographies and novels.

7. Essays by Michel de Montaigne

The complete essays.

This collection of essays explores a wide range of topics such as solitude, cannibals, the power of the imagination, the education of children, and the nature of friendship. The author employs a unique and personal approach to philosophy, using anecdotes and personal reflections to illustrate his points. The essays provide a profound insight into human nature and condition, and are considered a significant contribution to both literature and philosophy.

8. Candide by Voltaire

Or optimism.

"Candide" is a satirical novel that follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor. When he is expelled from the paradise for kissing a baron's daughter, he embarks on a journey around the world, witnessing the horrors of war, natural disasters, and human cruelty. Throughout his journey, Candide maintains his optimistic philosophy, despite the constant hardships he faces, ultimately concluding that one must cultivate their own garden, a metaphor for taking control of one's own destiny.

9. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The book is a tragic play in two parts that tells the story of a scholarly man named Faust, who becomes dissatisfied with his life and makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles. In exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures, Faust agrees to give his soul to Mephistopheles after death. The narrative explores themes of ambition, despair, love, and redemption, ultimately leading to Faust's salvation.

10. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The possessed.

"The Possessed" is a complex political novel set in a provincial Russian town, exploring the destructive influence of radical ideologies on society. The narrative revolves around a group of revolutionaries, their philosophical debates and their destructive actions, driven by nihilism and anarchism. The story is a critique of the political and social chaos of the time, showcasing the author's deep understanding of human psychology and his profound insights into the human condition. It is an exploration of faith, reason, and the nature of freedom and is considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature.

11. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Or, life in the woods.

This work is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, inspired by the author's two-year experience of living in a cabin near a woodland pond. Filled with philosophical insights, observations on nature, and declarations of independence from societal expectations, the book is a critique of the complexities of modern civilization and a call to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the natural world. It explores themes such as self-reliance, solitude, and the individual's relationship with nature.

12. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

The life of the german composer adrian leverkühn, told by a friend.

The novel is a reimagining of the Faust legend set in the context of the first half of the 20th century and the turmoil of Germany in that period. It tells the story of a composer who makes a pact with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited creative genius. The protagonist's life and work reflect the cultural and political journey of Germany leading up to World War II, providing a deep exploration of the individual's role in a society undergoing dramatic change. The novel is also a profound meditation on the nature of time, the art and the artist, and the destructiveness of human ambition.

13. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

A sort of introduction.

"The Man Without Qualities" is a satirical novel set in Vienna during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It follows the life of Ulrich, a thirty-two-year-old mathematician, who is in search of a sense of life and reality but is caught up in the societal changes and political chaos of his time. The book explores themes of existentialism, morality, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.

14. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

This influential work explores the treatment and perception of women throughout history, arguing that women have been repressed and defined only in relation to men. The author presents a detailed analysis of women's roles in society, family, work, and in the creation of their own identities. She discusses the concept of 'the other' and how this has been used to suppress women, while also examining the biological, psychological, and societal impacts of this oppression. The book is a seminal text in feminist theory, challenging traditional notions of femininity and calling for equality and freedom for women.

15. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

"Memoirs of Hadrian" is a historical novel that presents a fictional autobiography of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138 AD. Narrated in the first person, the novel explores Hadrian's ascension to the throne, his administration, his love for the young Antinous, and his philosophical reflections on life and death. The narrative is framed as a letter to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, offering insights into the complexities of power, the nature of leadership, and the human condition.

16. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Set against the backdrop of the Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history, the novel explores the philosophical concept of Nietzsche's eternal return through the intertwined lives of four characters: a womanizing surgeon, his intellectual wife, his naïve mistress, and her stoic lover. The narrative delves into their personal struggles with lightness and heaviness, freedom and fate, love and betrayal, and the complexities of human relationships, all while offering a profound meditation on the nature of existence and the paradoxes of life.

17. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This comedic science fiction novel follows the intergalactic adventures of an unwitting human, Arthur Dent, who is rescued just before Earth's destruction by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for a galactic travel guide. Together, they hitch a ride on a stolen spaceship, encountering a range of bizarre characters, including a depressed robot and a two-headed ex-president of the galaxy. Through a series of satirical and absurd escapades, the book explores themes of existentialism, bureaucracy, and the absurdity of life, all while poking fun at the science fiction genre and offering witty commentary on the human condition.

18. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

A novel of suspense.

Set in a wealthy Italian monastery in the 14th century, the novel follows a Franciscan friar and his young apprentice as they investigate a series of mysterious deaths within the monastery. As they navigate the labyrinthine library and decipher cryptic manuscripts, they uncover a complex plot involving forbidden books, secret societies, and the Inquisition. The novel is a blend of historical fiction, mystery, and philosophical exploration, delving into themes of truth, knowledge, and the power of the written word.

19. Confessions by Augustine

The confessions of saint augustine.

"Confessions" is an autobiographical work by a renowned theologian, in which he outlines his sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is written in the form of a long, introspective prayer directed to God, exploring the author's spiritual journey and deep philosophical ponderings. The book is renowned for its eloquent and deeply personal exploration of faith, making it a cornerstone of Christian theology and Western literature.

20. Molloy by Samuel Beckett

"Molloy" is a complex and enigmatic novel that follows the journey of its eponymous character, an elderly, disabled vagabond, who is tasked with finding and killing a certain person. The narrative is split into two parts: the first is told from Molloy's perspective as he navigates his way through a strange and often hostile world, while the second follows a detective named Moran who is assigned to find Molloy. The novel is renowned for its challenging narrative structure, its bleak and absurdist humor, and its profound exploration of themes such as identity, existence, and the human condition.

21. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels

A spectre is haunting europe.

This influential political pamphlet advocates for the abolition of private property, the rights of the proletariat, and the eventual establishment of a classless society. The authors argue that all of history is a record of class struggle, culminating in the conflict between the bourgeoisie, who control the means of production, and the proletariat, who provide the labor. They predict that this struggle will result in a revolution, leading to a society where property and wealth are communally controlled.

22. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

In this novel, a young intellectual who is immersed in books and ideas embarks on a journey with a passionate and adventurous older man named Zorba. The two men have contrasting personalities, which leads to a series of philosophical discussions and adventures. The story is set in Crete and explores themes of life, death, friendship, love, and the struggle between the physical and intellectual aspects of existence. Zorba's zest for life and his fearlessness in the face of death inspire the young man to embrace a more physical and spontaneous way of living.

23. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

The histories of gargantua and pantagruel.

"Gargantua and Pantagruel" is a satirical and humorous tale of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The narrative is filled with bawdy humor, wordplay, and grotesque and exaggerated characters, reflecting the realities of 16th-century France. The book is also known for its profound insights on education, religion, and politics, often criticizing the corruption and hypocrisy of the powerful. The novel is a rich blend of fantasy, comedy, and philosophical discourse, making it a classic of Renaissance literature.

24. Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre

The novel follows a historian living in a small French town, struggling with a strange and unsettling feeling of disgust and revulsion he calls 'nausea'. He grapples with the existential dread of his own existence and the meaningless of life, continually questioning his own perceptions and the nature of reality. As he navigates through his everyday life, he is plagued by his philosophical thoughts and the overwhelming sensation of nausea, leading him to a profound existential crisis.

25. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

Including a journal of a tour to the hebrides.

"The Life of Samuel Johnson" is a comprehensive biography that chronicles the life of one of the most prominent English literary figures of the 18th century. The book provides an in-depth account of Samuel Johnson's life, his literary works, and his significant contribution to English literature. It also offers a detailed portrait of his personality, his relationships, his struggles with depression and illness, and his views on a variety of subjects. The book is as much a biography of Johnson as it is a portrayal of 18th-century England.

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Nonfiction Books » Philosophy Books » Best Philosophy Books of All Time

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The Best Philosophy Books of All Time

Recommended by philosophers.

Last updated: August 21, 2024

After interviewing hundreds of philosophers, these are the philosophy books that come up again and again. If you click on 'expert recommendations,' you'll see what various experts we've interviewed say about each book and why they view it as important.

Many of the books on this list are straightforward reads, that you can enjoy without any prior knowledge. One or two books, while immensely important, are notorious for their impenetrability. In either case, reading one of our experts' explanations of what is significant about a book is nearly always helpful, giving you a tool to navigate the book so you are aware of what parts are worth paying attention to and which are less relevant.

Read expert recommendations

“It contains a tremendous amount of nonsense about what the ideal society would be like. But it is an unmissable book because of Socrates. He invented the method of doing and teaching philosophy that has never been improved on. His persistent questions forced people to spell out their beliefs more fully and precisely, often unearthing beliefs they hardly knew they had. He would then challenge them with counter-examples, putting pressure on beliefs by pointing out unwelcome consequences they had. This questioning is often both intimidating and liberating. Those of us who teach philosophy aim, not always successfully, for the liberation without the intimidation…Some of Socrates’s opponents in The Republic challenge him as to whether there is any reason to be moral, apart from social pressures. They use a simple but brilliant thought experiment. Would you have any reason to avoid wrongdoing if you had a ring that made you invisible, so there was no chance of getting caught? It is not the answers given to this and the other questions in the book, but the absolutely fundamental challenges of the questions themselves.” Read more...

The best books on Moral Philosophy

Jonathan Glover , Philosopher

Plato's Republic: A Ladybird Expert Book

By angela hobbs.

(If you’re not quite ready to take on Plato’s great work, this is a very short and enjoyable book, with illustrations, that explains the context and introduces the most important topics that the Republic covers, written by a leading scholar)

Dialogues and Natural History of Religion

By david hume.

“I think it’s a remarkable book. The Dialogues were published after he died, though the Natural History of Religion was published in 1757…Hume thought it didn’t actually make much difference whether you believed that God did design the universe or whether you didn’t, because if you could say nothing about this God then it wasn’t a very interesting belief to hold.” Read more...

The best books on Morality Without God

Mary Warnock , Philosopher

Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries

“Mencius gives the example of a child falling down a well. He says, ‘When a child falls down a well, what do people do? They don’t just run away, they run towards it.’ They almost can’t help themselves–it’s something they just do. And he observes this and builds part of his moral philosophy on it.” Read more...

The best books on Humanism

Andrew Copson , Nonprofit Leaders & Activist

The Nicomachean Ethics

By aristotle.

“ The Nicomachean Ethics sets out in a systematic way to answer the question, ‘What is the good life?’ Aristotle wrote it not for scholars, not for other professional philosophers, but for everybody. He took the view that if a person applied practical wisdom to the right course of action in a given circumstance, he would achieve the good. And I like the fact that, as Socrates had done before him, he was thinking about a theory of the good life in terms of what is practical and reasonable” Read more...

The best books on Ideas that Matter

A C Grayling , Philosopher

by John Stuart Mill

“What this book does is hammer home one truth. Mill described it as a ‘philosophic textbook of a single truth’. According to him it was hugely influenced by his discussions with his wife, Harriet Taylor, though she didn’t physically write it, and it’s his name on the cover. As the title suggests, it’s focused on liberty, on freedom. It puts forward what’s come to be known as ‘the harm principle’ which is that the only justification for the state or other people interfering with the lives of adults is if they risk harming others with their actions” Read more...

Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon

Nigel Warburton , Philosopher

Middlemarch

By george eliot.

“The main story concerns a young woman named Dorothea who is hungry for an intellectually and spiritually expansive life but not sure how to secure it. Given the time she lives in, the early nineteenth century, her first thought is to marry the man who can teach her the most, and this leads her to an unfortunate marriage with the dry pedant Mr. Casaubon. Casaubon turns out to be not only an impoverished thinker but a rigid and small-souled person. Sterile scholarship can be just another form of self-deception. George Eliot was not only a great novelist but a fine philosopher. You feel, underneath the workings of the plot, a superb philosophical mind thinking things out in an original and moving way. The fact that her writing is moving, working us over with the artistry of the novelist, is essential to her conception.” Read more...

Rebecca Goldstein on Reason and its Limitations

Rebecca Goldstein , Philosopher

Meditations on First Philosophy

By rené descartes.

“René Descartes is a superb writer who, in his first Meditation (which is the one I’m recommending) takes skepticism—which is an unwillingness to assume anything, a philosophical stance where you question everything—about as far as it can go. Meditations is written as if he is going through a process in real time, he’s imagining himself sitting by a fire taking all the thoughts that he’s had in his past, the different ways of acquiring information, cross-questioning himself about whether he could have been deceived about any of those, and employing what’s come to be known as ‘Cartesian Doubt’. It’s not taking as true anything about which there is the slightest possible doubt. In ordinary life, that’s not a way to behave.” Read more...

by Thomas Hobbes

“We continue to read Hobbes’s Leviathan because it very powerfully articulates a particular worldview. It’s an incredible philosophical system that continues to have power in our thinking today. It’s one of the articulations of a theory of sovereignty, for example, that continues to be the key ideology of our interstate global system. There are these systematic philosophical elements that make him a philosopher. But he’s also engaged in the politics of his time and making very particular observations about his own time, his own society, his own culture. There are all of these things that are going on in this text, which is partly why it’s such a rich text. It’s the combination of somebody who is a systematic philosopher, an astute observer of history and society, and who is writing at a time in history that is full of tumult and great transformations. It’s an exciting time and he is an exciting thinker. That’s quite a combination.” Read more...

The Best Thomas Hobbes Books

Arash Abizadeh , Philosopher

by Henry David Thoreau

“It’s probably the quickest read out of the five books that I’ve recommended. He said in Walden ‘in most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained.’ There’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today.” Read more...

The best books on American Philosophy

John Kaag , Philosopher

Critique of Pure Reason

By immanuel kant.

“This is the greatest philosophical book of all time. This is Kant’s masterpiece…He’s interested in the limits to what we can know; he’s interested in the limits to what we can use pure reason to ascertain; he’s interested in the limits to what we can even think about. He’s interested in these limits in various different senses. On the one hand, he’s keen to approach them, to map out the limits from within by doing as much as possibly can be done through the exercise of reason; but he’s also interested in stepping up a level and looking at them from above, asking questions of principle about where these limits are to be drawn and what might lie beyond them. Of course, there’s an inevitable problem that arises there because if you’re asking questions about what lies beyond the limits of knowledge then inevitably the question arises: can you hope to know any answers to such questions? For if you claim you can, aren’t you involved in self-stultification? So, all these tensions are there throughout the Critique , and they’re part of what makes it such a fascinating read.” Read more...

The Best Immanuel Kant Books

Adrian Moore , Philosopher

Confucius (trans. Edward Slingerland)

“It’s not written by Confucius himself. It is more a collection of anecdotes of how he engaged his students, almost in dialogue form. And in them, he comes off as a very charming, humorous figure, not at all dogmatic and very modern. I think that’s partly why he’s been so influential. There’s this view that Confucius was a conformist, but that’s partly because of the way Confucianism has been misused throughout Chinese history…The Confucians are not in favour of conformity at all. Indeed one of the most famous sayings from the Analects is: ‘Exemplary persons should pursue harmony but not conformity.’ Harmony really is this idea that you have differences – explained by metaphors like: very tasty dishes composed of many different ingredients that are bland on their own but together they combine to form this delicious dish; or else music, where you have one instrument that sounds OK on its own but when it’s combined with other instruments it produces a beautiful harmony. Confucius himself, if you look at his model as an educator, very much encouraged a constant questioning and constant self-improvement and definitely not a conformist attitude to learning. Rather the opposite I’d say.” Read more...

The best books on Confucius

Daniel A. Bell , Philosopher

Consciousness Explained

By daniel dennett.

“Dennett, in this book, is trying to dismiss the dualist intuition completely, to get rid of it entirely. When he says ‘Consciousness Explained’, in my understanding it’s explicable for Dennett because he thinks we are mistaken in thinking that there is anything beyond what is within the realm of normal physical descriptions of mechanisms and their dispositions and their properties. That’s all we need. This book has been a massive influence on me, as has Dennett himself, throughout my career…But I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by his perspective.” Read more...

Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

Anil Seth , Scientist

by Albert Camus

“It has been said that he did extensive research for The Plague . The ‘plague’ is generally taken to be a metaphor or meta-commentary on Nazism during World War II. I’m not necessarily sold on that as the exclusive interpretation of the novel. Other people have argued that he was reading about plagues during the time that he was writing this. But one thing that’s really interesting in the background is that, for at least a period of time while writing the novel, Camus was trying to recover from a bout of tuberculosis and he was staying in a village in southern France in the Free Zone (Vichy). The remarkable events that took place there were the basis for the book called Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Paul Hallie. In this small, poor, rural village they banded together and pooled their resources to save somewhere between three and five thousand Jews from the Nazis. Camus was in this village as this was happening, as people were hiding, as they were separated from their loved ones, while he himself was separated from his loved ones. So, I’m not sure to what degree the astute nature of his writing can be attributed to his reading about previous plagues, or to his first-hand experience of being bedridden with an illness, embedded in a town where people were hiding from a much more militaristic and malignant sort of ‘plague’.” Read more...

The Best Books by Albert Camus

Jamie Lombardi , Philosopher

The Confessions

By augustine (translated by maria boulding).

“St Augustine is, in some ways, misunderstood and misappropriated in modern scholarship and popular perception. I can understand why, because reading him can be a bit of a hard slog to begin with. His Confessions can seem unfashionably self-hating, and the drama that’s being played out, the way he makes a first-person address towards this God figure, feels a bit artificial and it can put people off. But if you work out what’s going on, what his motivation is, and what the context is, what he’s making is an incredibly modern, intimate, psychological diagnosis of the human condition.” Read more...

The best books on The Saints

Simon Yarrow , Historian

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

By kate manne.

***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***

“We chose the book, firstly, because we both love it as a book. It’s a really good example of a book that’s incredibly powerful, and both academically rigorous and accessible. That combination is one of the reasons I think it has been so successful. Another reason I like this book—which ties in with the first, and Manne talks about herself in the book—is that discussions around misogyny or sexism can become so fraught. I think applying this strict, analytical lens to that kind of debate and discussion is very satisfying because it really helps to clarify the concepts that are so often either misconstrued or misunderstood in these kinds of debates. Also, some of the concepts she articulates, ‘himpathy’ being the most notable example, have really caught on in popular culture, which again, I think, is a credit to her innovative analysis.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books by Women

Man's Search for Meaning

By viktor frankl.

“I chose this book because it’s an incredibly powerful and moving example of what existentialist thought can actually be for in real life, what good it can do, how it can help people. Viktor Frankl was a concentration camp survivor and a psychotherapist and psychologist. Just after the war he wrote a book which has been translated as Man’s Search for Meaning . (The original title translates as Saying Yes to Life Anyway: A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp .) In it, he tells the story of his experience and how you can maintain your inner freedom and your human identity in the face of a situation that is designed to completely destroy and demolish all human dignity. It’s almost impossible to do, and he doesn’t say ‘This is the recipe for how I did it’ — he just explores the ways in which fragments of purpose and of meaning in human life kept him going.” Read more...

The best books on Existentialism

Sarah Bakewell , Philosopher

by Niccolo Machiavelli

“ The Prince is an occasion piece. It was written in 1513 after the Medici had been returned to power. Machiavelli was out of a job—he’d been tortured and fired—and couldn’t afford to live in Florence. And his obsession with politics and international affairs was such that he couldn’t let go. So he started a correspondence with his friend Francesco Vettori and, from that correspondence, arose The Prince . It was a book about how to deal with the crisis of Italy after the French invasions. Machiavelli’s response, in The Prince, was that the only way Italy was going to maintain its independence, and freedom, and drive out the barbarians—which is a term he always used for northern Europeans—was to beat them at their own game, to be more violent, more vicious, more brutal, and more faithless” Read more...

The Best Italian Renaissance Books

Kenneth Bartlett , Historian

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

By baruch spinoza & samuel shirley (translator).

“The first task Spinoza set himself in the Tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible as the inerrant word of God. He takes the five so-called books of Moses and shows why they probably aren’t by a single person, and certainly not by Moses. As he goes through the various books of the Old Testament, what he’s out to establish is that these writings reflect human ideas, and that they are the ideas of particular people expressed at a particular place and a particular time. Most educated people accept that now, but it was a horrifying idea to the religious establishment in Spinoza’s time…Spinoza thought that the rules by which Jews lived, as derived from the Bible, merely reflected the circumstances of the early state of Israel, and because Israel no longer existed, and times had moved on, he thought these rules had become irrelevant. The dietary laws and so forth that bound the religious community of his time, and which continue to bind the orthodox, were all based, he felt, on a misunderstanding. It was a mistake to suppose that God wanted you to go on living like that even today.” Read more...

The best books on God

Anthony Gottlieb , Philosopher

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Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays

Colin McGinn, Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays , MIT Press, 2017, 317pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262036191.

Reviewed by Simon Blackburn, University of Cambridge

As should be expected, Colin McGinn's collection of essays displays many virtues. It is bold, original, intelligent, and the product of many years of deep acquaintance with a wide range of philosophical problems and their recent treatments. It is beautifully clear, and a good advertisement for the short, self-contained, jargon-free essay. It is also, as the title promises, provocative, both in the bland sense of provoking thought, which anyone writing as a philosopher would hope to do, and in the spicier sense of being unafraid of treading on many peoples' toes, or even, perhaps, hoping to do so. At any rate, its author emerges as a large-scale contrarian, impatiently opposed to many movements in contemporary philosophical thought, and quite happy to suppose that it does not take much to show that they are largely wrong-headed. Many of the essays are self-standing pieces of excellent, thought-provoking philosophy (those on modality and color being especially noteworthy). Others are more casual, more like jeux d'esprit .

The fifty-five essays are presented under seven headings: Mind (12 essays), Language (8), Knowledge (8), Metaphysics (11), Biology (5), Ethics (8), and Religion (3). The longest is 'Knowing and Necessity' at 20 pages, and the shortest is 'Physical Noncognitivism' at one and a half pages.

When he kicked a stone to refute Berkeley, Dr. Johnson saw himself as a robust common-sense realist rebutting a wholly fantastical idealism. McGinn is something of a Johnsonian: he too has strong views about things being real. His realities include the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, the private world, the noumenal world as well as the phenomenal world, real properties and causal relations, universals, and facts themselves, including moral facts. He knows, of course, that such doctrines involve mysteries, but he is hospitable to mysteries: he is perhaps best known for his 'mysterian' philosophy of mind, holding that there is indeed a 'hard problem' of consciousness but it is likely to be a problem that we are cognitively unequipped to resolve. He has little sympathy with the mid-twentieth century optimism of Wittgenstein, Strawson, Austin, Ryle, Sellars or Quine, dismissing the 'hard problem' as a mirage. He holds instead that any mind-brain identity theory, or any functionalism, or indeed any view according priority to what is public, succumbs to the well-known assaults of Nagel, Jackson, Kripke, Putnam, Chalmers, and Block. He is constitutionally a protector of hard problems, and it is their would-be solvers that he particularly hopes to provoke.

McGinn also holds that as well as the conscious mind there is a domain of unconscious mental states. Memories, for instance, persist through time as unconscious mental states, and not just as modifications of the brain that determine what, on occasion, we can bring to consciousness. Again, though, he agrees that we have 'no adequate concept of unconscious mental states'. Causal necessity, as well, is 'as real as anything in nature,' but here too we are inevitably totally baffled as to how it works: realistic mysterianism is once more the answer. This is the view that we know that there is something whose nature we shall never know, although McGinn remains relatively silent about the good that this piece of knowledge is supposed to do for us. Not for McGinn the thought that nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said, nor even Hume's view that if we deal in such things 't'will be of little consequence to the world'.

McGinn poses for himself the problem that his view of philosophy leaves him. He holds both that philosophy is exhausted by conceptual analysis, and that there are problems of philosophy that might be forever insoluble by us. I am much readier to agree that there are philosophical problems insoluble by conceptual analysis, as that is usually understood, than that there are problems insoluble by philosophy taken more generously. Moore's impasse when faced with ethics is enough of a warning, compared with the tradition of Hume and Smith, which worked via an understanding of our psychologies and their genealogy rather than narrow conceptual analysis.

McGinn's own solution, presented in the chapter 'Analysis and Mystery', is that the right concepts may be unavailable to us. Were a species to form the right concepts, it would not have our problems, but that species is not us, either as we are, or even as we might become. Both the families of concepts that might be innate to us, and the family arising from the way we think about empirical experience, fail to contain the keys that turn the locks. This is itself, of course, a possibility described de dicto rather than de re -- we can say that 'there might be concepts which would provide solutions' but we can never say of any concept that it provides a solution, since we can have no way of framing such a concept to ourselves. We cannot even know in which direction to look for coming nearer to such concepts; not only are there are no strategies for unlocking philosophical mysteries, in the way there are for unlocking scientific mysteries, there are not even strategies for getting any closer to doing so.

Bertrand Russell wrote that his grandmother despised his interest in metaphysics, telling him that the whole subject could be summed up in the saying: "What is mind? No matter; what is matter? Never mind." Russell added 'on the fifteenth or sixteenth repetition of this remark it ceased to amuse me' and one might sympathise, but McGinn follows Grannie. She was right about the central concepts of metaphysics: mind, body, causation, time, freedom, and in fact reality in general. Grannie however was ridiculing poor Bertie's interest in the subject, and I do not think McGinn intends to do that. He has, after all, pursued a long and distinguished career in it. Nevertheless, the worry persists that perhaps Grannie was right, and the best policy is not to think about these things at all.

Although this depressing view of the possibilities for philosophy forms a central theme in the book, it by no means exhausts its contents. Once McGinn leaves heavy-duty metaphysics, he becomes distinctly more sprightly, dancing elegantly around issues in the philosophy of biology, ethics, and religion.

In the section on biology, McGinn is at his best in an essay ('The Language of Evolution') pointing out the pitfalls in Darwin's analogy between the kind of selection that breeders of animals or plants go in for, and anything that happens in nature. He suggests that instead of natural selection Darwin should have contented himself with saying that while human beings purposely select, animals and plants reproductively compete, with some more successful at generating heirs than others. There is nothing but metaphor involved in reifying 'nature' as an intentional agent. I agree that this is a useful point to make. I am not so clear how it fits with another essay ('Selfish Genes and Moral Parasites'). In this essay McGinn takes very seriously Richard Dawkins's problem of how to reconcile apparent human altruism with our selfish genes, and expounds an answer drawing on the example of the cuckoo parasitizing prey species, such as the reed warbler. The reed warbler is not being altruistic as it raises a cuckoo chick. It has been hoodwinked. Similarly, McGinn thinks, we are manipulative and manipulated into such altruism as we manage. We parasitize each other without realizing it, or rather our genes do: 'the gene that manipulates the mind-brain of others the best is the one that makes the target enjoy what is in fact manipulation'. I am afraid I am myself no happier with the idea of genes manipulating people than I am with nature selecting survivors: the underlying literal truth seems to be, roughly, that we reinforce any altruistic tendencies we find in each other, which is no doubt true, but not very shocking. McGinn goes on to talk of the central role of language in manipulation, but he can scarcely credit those manipulative genes with linguistic powers. But then I do not take Dawkins's problem seriously either, and I don't think the kinds of symbiotic relationships that are found through biology are well conceptualized either in terms of selfishness or of manipulation.

'God and the Devil' is the penultimate, and second shortest, essay in the collection. It suggests the possibility that God and the Devil are in fact identical, rather like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. To the obvious objection that the religious conception of God involves His being perfectly good, which would not be the case if He is identical with the Devil, McGinn breezily replies that 'this argument begs the question against the identity claim, since that is precisely what we should abandon if we accept identity'. Here, as elsewhere, one may be left spluttering that more needs to be said: if somebody suffers from the delusion that Paris is the same city as London, it scarcely begs the question to point out that Paris is in France and London is not, although 'that is precisely what we should abandon if we accept identity'. I do not think that McGinn would be much troubled by this riposte: perhaps he is satisfied to have provoked the splutter. This essay leads to the final flourish, in which the coat that McGinn is trailing gets even longer as he recommends and defends a religion not of love, but of hate. 'You must hate everyone (with the possible exception of yourself, but even then) . . . '. Wisely, he does not dwell on the results we might expect if his religion of hate were followed, engendering more hate in the world than we already have. I try not to splutter again when I suggest that we already have enough.

Obviously there are many other essays than the ones I have been able to mention, and many of them repay serious attention. I do not think the collection could be recommended to students without a fair amount of assistance, since quite often positions are simply indicated by the names of people who hold them (Quine, Wittgenstein, Putnam, and so on) without further elaboration. But they could certainly form a spicy addition to courses that are already up and running. They would serve as good fuel for people coming new to philosophy, and it is no bad thing to have someone else to get one's students to splutter.

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10 Greatest Philosophers of All Time

Updated: August 15, 2024

Published: November 25, 2021

Philosophers have been shaping the world and our school of thought for thousands of years and are still very much relevant in our world today. The greatest philosophers of all time have left us with abundant resources that help us understand the human psyche and the world around us. Before we get to some of the most famous philosophers, let’s look at what philosophy entails.

What is Philosophy?

Originating from the Greek words meaning “love of wisdom,” philosophy can be considered the study of knowledge, existence, and reality.

Philosophers’ ideas circulate around ethics, nature, aesthetics, metaphysics, being, logic, knowledge, and theory. Since philosophers take into consideration human existence, their lessons last beyond their time. This is why the teachings of the top ten philosophers still hold true to this day.

Top 10 Greatest Philosophers

Let’s take a look at some memorable teachings and background information about some of the greatest philosophers of all time.

1. Aristotle

Aristotle, one of the most famous Greek philosophers, was also a polymath who lived in Ancient Greece in 384-322 BC. He was taught by another famous philosopher, Plato.

Aristotle is often referred to as the first scientist in history. He is responsible for at least 200 treatises, and approximately 31 of those are still in circulation today. His work focused on disciplines, philosophy of mind through ethics, political theory, aesthetics, and rhetoric, along with non-philosophical works about empirical biology; he was very well known for his theories on plant and animal observation, which were very detailed.

Today, he is most remembered for the first logic, or systematic treatment of principles of correct reasoning, along with identifying the three main methods of rhetoric: ethos (ethics), pathos (emotions), and logos (logic). He also developed the theory of deduction, or as we call it today, syllogism.

Lao Tzu developed a theory strongly connected to Taoism. He authored the main book on Taoism around 500 BCE in Ancient China. Taoism focuses on the balance of animals and humans and how they should coexist in the universe.

He also believed in spiritual immortality, in which your soul does not die but instead becomes one with the universe after death. The chi (or qi) is the energy that guides the universe, and he believed that we should exist in harmony.

Taoism is also where the balancing of forces, known as the yin and yang, is derived from; this idea focuses on matching forces, such as light and dark, hot and cold, and action and inaction, portraying how the opposites work together to make sense of the world.

In the 8th century CE, Taoism became the religion of the Tang dynasty. Until it was banned in the Communist takeover of 1949, Taoism was one of the main religions of China, alongside Confucianism and Buddhism.

3. John Locke

John Locke (1632 – 1704) was an Oxford academic who also researched medicine. He is best known for his work on the Enlightenment and his developments in liberalism.

Locke strongly believed in all persons’ rights to life, liberty, and property and refuted the divine right of kings. He also believed that if a ruler did not adhere to individuals’ rights , the people had the right to remove the king by force. First and foremost, he believed that a government’s duty is to exist for the people.

His contributions to epistemology and political theory greatly influenced the Enlightenment and the formation of the U.S. Constitution. Locke’s work laid the foundation for modern philosophical empiricism and political liberalism, and he was a contemporary and friend of notable scientists like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton.

4. Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was a German philosopher who developed Marxism in the 1800s. Marxism focuses on the social, political, and economic theory that the working class and capitalists are at war.

He strongly believed that one day, the working class would overthrow the capitalist class in a revolution, allowing the working class to seize control of the economy.

Marx’s influential works, including The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital , analyze the dynamics of capitalism and its impact on labor, production, and economic development. His theories continue to influence contemporary political and economic thought today.

5. Confucius

Confucius, a philosopher from China that lived from 770 – 481 BCE, believed in living life around ethical and moral social standards. He is remembered for wanting to make education available to all and established teaching as an actual career. (It looks like the University of the People and Confucius have something in common: we both believe in making education accessible for all).

He also established Confucianism, which is a school of belief revolving around personal ethics and morality. The four main principles of Confucianism are referred to as his ethics. They include: justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, and respect for autonomy.  His five constant virtues that are most referred to are benevolence, righteousness, trustworthiness, propriety, and wisdom.

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an American philosopher, lecturer, abolitionist, and essayist, profoundly impacted society with his transcendentalist views. He is best remembered for his essay Self-Reliance , which advocates for individual intuition and judgment.

Living in the 19th century, he much resembled British Romantic contemporaries in the sense that he, too, believed in the strong connection between God, man, and nature. His work is life-changing as it really inspires the reader to trust their own judgment above all else.

Today, Emerson’s influence can be seen in movements that emphasize personal development, environmentalism, and spiritual self-discovery.

7. Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant is a well-known modern philosopher who lived from 1724-1804 near the Baltic Sea and is remembered for his seminal works Critiques of Practical Reason , Pure Reason , and the Power of Judgement .

He preached that measuring whether actions are right or wrong depends on whether or not we have fulfilled our duty rather than what the consequences of our actions are. By using his fundamental law of morality, he concludes that moral reason overrides any other sort of reason.

His ideas have profoundly influenced modern ethical and philosophical thought, laying the groundwork for contemporary discussions on morality and duty.

8. Epicurus

Epicurus (341-270 BCE) was a highly influential Greek philosopher and the founder of Epicureanism. He believed that the goal of human life revolved around happiness, resulting from the absence of mental disturbances and physical pain.

His philosophy was that happiness was the highest good of human life and that it was defined by the pursuit of pleasure, not the pure exercise of reason. He also believed that anxiety was derived from irrational desires, and by eliminating the fear of punishment and death, one could relieve oneself of anxiety and find happiness.

His philosophy continues to influence modern thoughts on hedonism and the pursuit of a balanced, fulfilling life.

9. Socrates

Socrates (470-399 BCE), often referred to as the founder of Western philosophy, was a Greek philosopher from Athens. He was the first to be considered a moral philosopher of the ethical tradition of thought. He has no texts and is remembered mostly for his posthumous accounts of his students, Xenophon and Plato.

He gave way to the rise of Socratic dialogue, a literary genre all about teaching through asking questions. In 399 BC, he was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and failing to acknowledge the city’s official gods.

His ideas and methods have profoundly influenced the development of Western philosophical thought.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche

Another German philosopher makes it on the list. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) profoundly impacted Western thought through his extensive writings on subjects ranging from science to art, culture, and history.

Nietzsche is best known for his philosophy of nihilism, the idea that everything lacks meaning, including life itself. This concept influenced subsequent existentialist and surrealist movements, which built upon his ideas about the absence of objective truth and the importance of individual perspective.

Nietzsche’s work continues to challenge and inspire contemporary discussions on meaning, morality, and the human condition.

The Influence of Philosophy on Modern Thought

Philosophy has a huge impact on how we think today, influencing fields like psychology, politics, and science. Take John Locke, for example. His ideas on individual rights and government responsibility are at the heart of modern democracy and even helped shape the U.S. Constitution. Karl Marx’s insights into capitalism and class struggle have inspired worldwide social and economic movements. And let’s not forget Immanuel Kant, whose thoughts on duty and morality still guide ethical decision-making in our personal and professional lives.

At the University of the People, we see philosophy in action through our mission to make education accessible to everyone . By offering various degree programs and partnering with top universities , UoPeople is all about empowering individuals through learning. Our tuition-free model echoes the philosophical belief in democratizing knowledge, making sure that financial barriers don’t stand in the way of personal and academic growth.

Final Thoughts

It is apparent that many of these ideas and philosophies are still very much referred to in modern-day society. It is because of these philosophers that we have been able to really study humanity and the way we communicate with ourselves, each other, nature, and God.

The greatest philosophers of all time have paved the way for our thinking and allowed us to ask ourselves questions in ways we may never have thought to. They have left us with guiding principles for the way we carry ourselves in society, our ideas of government, poetry, education, math, science, and all the ways in which we inquire more about the world.

Why are these philosophers considered the greatest of all time?

These philosophers are celebrated because their ideas have deeply influenced how we think about the world, ethics, politics, and more. Their work continues to shape modern theories and practices, making their contributions timeless and impactful.

What’s the significance of Socratic dialogue?

Socratic dialogue, introduced by Socrates, is all about asking and answering questions to get to the heart of ideas. It’s a fantastic way to develop critical thinking and reasoning skills, and it’s still widely used in education today.

How does John Locke’s philosophy influence modern democracy?

John Locke’s ideas on individual rights and government responsibility are key to modern democracy. His thoughts helped shape the U.S. Constitution and still influence how we think about human rights and governance today.

What is Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism all about?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism suggests that life doesn’t have inherent meaning. This can be a bit unsettling, but it also encourages people to create their own meaning and values. His ideas have inspired movements like existentialism and surrealism, focusing on individual perspective and self-determination.

How can I apply philosophical teachings in my everyday life?

Philosophical teachings can be super useful in daily life. For example, you can use Socratic questioning to improve problem-solving, apply Kantian ethics to make better moral choices, or follow Epicurean principles to seek happiness and reduce stress.

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At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More

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The philosophy shortlist: Our top 10 articles

  We have put together a collection of Prospect articles with contributions from leading thinkers such as Roger Scruton, Ray Monk and Michael Sandel . Happy thinking! Nature, nurture and liberal values (25 January 2012) Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses, writes the philosopher Roger Scruton . How should we study religion? (22 March 2006) The philosophers Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne debate the correct approach to the study of religion. Sell Descartes, buy Spinoza (25 May 2011) Investors, take note: this Dutch rationalist is a hot stock says novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein . Matters of life and death (7 October 2007) Interest in “trolleyology”—a way of studying moral quandaries—has taken off in recent years. Some philosophers say it sheds useful light on human behaviour, others see it as a pointless pursuit of the unknowable, writes David Edmonds . A Philosopher in the age of science (14 March 2013) There is a place for modern philosophers, argues the writer Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson . Wittgenstein's forgotten lesson (20 July 1999) Wittgenstein’s philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times. The philosopher Ray Monk explains why his thought is still relevant. Sense and nonsense (20 February 2000) In 1971 a reclusive American academic revived liberal political philosophy with “A Theory of Justice.” Why did he write it? And why was it applauded and then ignored by the left? Asks the writer and broadcaster Bryan Magee . If I ruled the world: Michael Sandel (19 September 2012) It is time to restore the distinction between good and gold, says Michael Sandel .

Prospect Editorial Team

Virtues and vices

Make it awkward!

Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script

Alexandra Plakias

Metaphysics

Desperate remedies

In order to make headway on knotty metaphysical problems, philosophers should look to the methods used by scientists

Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

Meaning and the good life

A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Thinkers and theories

Rawls the redeemer

For John Rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness

Alexandre Lefebvre

Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?

Anthropology

Your body is an archive

If human knowledge can disappear so easily, why have so many cultural practices survived without written records?

Helena Miton

Seeing plants anew

The stunningly complex behaviour of plants has led to a new way of thinking about our world: plant philosophy

Stella Sandford

‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’

Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation

Céline Henne

History of ideas

All that we are

The philosophy of personalism inspired Martin Luther King’s dream of a better world. We still need its hopeful ideas today

Bennett Gilbert

An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place

A novel kind of music

So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth

Joel Sandelson

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Decolonising psychology

At times complicit in racism and oppression, psychology has also been a fertile ground for radical and liberatory thought

Rami Gabriel

Beyond authenticity

In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves

Samantha Rose Hill

Politics and government

Governing for the planet

Nation-states are no longer fit for purpose to create a habitable future for humans and nature. Which political system is?

Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman

Neuroscience

Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?

Baffled by human diversity

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today

Jacob Zellmer

Philosophy was once alive

I was searching for meaning and purpose so I became an academic philosopher. Reader, you might guess what happened next

Pranay Sanklecha

An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’

Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist

Global history

The route to progress

Anticolonial modernity was founded upon the fight for liberation from communists, capitalists and imperialists alike

Frank Gerits

Paper trails

Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister

Peter Salmon

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

How to Write a Philosophical Essay

Authors: The Editors of 1000-Word Philosophy [1] Category: Student Resources Word Count: 998

If you want to convince someone of a philosophical thesis, such as that God exists , that abortion is morally acceptable , or that we have free will , you can write a philosophy essay. [2]

Philosophy essays are different from essays in many other fields, but with planning and practice, anyone can write a good one. This essay provides some basic instructions. [3]

1. Planning

Typically, your purpose in writing an essay will be to argue for a certain thesis, i.e., to support a conclusion about a philosophical claim, argument, or theory. [4] You may also be asked to carefully explain someone else’s essay or argument. [5]

To begin, select a topic. Most instructors will be happy to discuss your topic with you before you start writing. Sometimes instructors give specific prompts with topics to choose from.

It’s generally best to select a topic that you’re interested in; you’ll put more energy into writing it. Your topic will determine what kind of research or preparation you need to do before writing, although in undergraduate philosophy courses, you usually don’t need to do outside research. [6]

Essays that defend or attack entire theories tend to be longer, and are more difficult to write convincingly, than essays that defend or attack particular arguments or objections: narrower is usually better than broader.

After selecting a topic, complete these steps:

• Ensure that you understand the relevant issues and arguments. Usually, it’s enough to carefully read and take notes on the assigned readings on your essay’s topic.
• Choose an initial thesis. Generally, you should choose a thesis that’s interesting, but not extremely controversial. [7] You don’t have to choose a thesis that you agree with, but it can help. (As you plan and write, you may decide to revise your thesis. This may require revising the rest of your essay, but sometimes that’s necessary, if you realize you want to defend a different thesis than the one you initially chose.)
• Ensure that your thesis is a philosophical thesis. Natural-scientific or social-scientific claims, such as that global warming is occurring or that people like to hang out with their friends , are not philosophical theses. [8] Philosophical theses are typically defended using careful reasoning, and not primarily by citing scientific observations.

Instructors will usually not ask you to come up with some argument that no philosopher has discovered before. But if your essay ignores what the assigned readings say, that suggests that you haven’t learned from those readings.

2. Structure

Develop an outline, rather than immediately launching into writing the whole essay; this helps with organizing the sections of your essay.

Your structure will probably look something like the following, but follow your assignment’s directions carefully. [9]

2.1. Introduction and Thesis

Write a short introductory paragraph that includes your thesis statement (e.g., “I will argue that eating meat is morally wrong”). The thesis statement is not a preview nor a plan; it’s not “I will consider whether eating meat is morally wrong.”

If your thesis statement is difficult to condense into one sentence, then it’s likely that you’re trying to argue for more than one thesis. [10]

2.2. Arguments

Include at least one paragraph that presents and explains an argument. It should be totally clear what reasons or evidence you’re offering to support your thesis.

In most essays for philosophy courses, you only need one central argument for your thesis. It’s better to present one argument and defend it well than present many arguments in superficial and incomplete ways.

2.3. Objection

Unless the essay must be extremely short, raise an objection to your argument. [11] Be clear exactly which part of the other argument (a premise, or the form) is being questioned or denied and why. [12]

It’s usually best to choose either one of the most common or one of the best objections. Imagine what a smart person who disagreed with you would say in response to your arguments, and respond to them.

Offer your own reply to any objections you considered. If you don’t have a convincing reply to the objection, you might want to go back and change your thesis to something more defensible.

2.5. Additional Objections and Replies

If you have space, you might consider and respond to the second-best or second-most-common objection to your argument, and so on.

2.6. Conclusion

To conclude, offer a paragraph summarizing what you did. Don’t include any new or controversial claims here, and don’t claim that you did more than you actually accomplished. There should be no surprises at the end of a philosophy essay.

Make your writing extremely clear and straightforward. Use simple sentences and don’t worry if they seem boring: this improves readability. [13] Every sentence should contribute in an obvious way towards supporting your thesis. If a claim might be confusing, state it in more than one way and then choose the best version.

To check for readability, you might read the essay aloud to an audience. Don’t try to make your writing entertaining: in philosophy, clear arguments are fun in themselves.

Concerning objections, treat those who disagree with you charitably. Make it seem as if you think they’re smart, careful, and nice, which is why you are responding to them.

Your readers, if they’re typical philosophers, will be looking for any possible way to object to what you say. Try to make your arguments “airtight.”

4. Citations

If your instructor tells you to use a certain citation style, use it. No citation style is universally accepted in philosophy. [14]

You usually don’t need to directly quote anyone. [15] You can paraphrase other authors; where you do, cite them.

Don’t plagiarize . [16] Most institutions impose severe penalties for academic dishonesty.

5. Conclusion

A well-written philosophy essay can help people gain a new perspective on some important issue; it might even change their minds. [17] And engaging in the process of writing a philosophical essay is one of the best ways to develop, understand, test, and sometimes change, your own philosophical views. They are well worth the time and effort.

[1] Primary author: Thomas Metcalf. Contributing authors: Chelsea Haramia, Dan Lowe, Nathan Nobis, Kristin Seemuth Whaley.

[2] You can also do some kind of oral presentation, either “live” in person or recorded on video. An effective presentation, however, requires the type of planning and preparation that’s needed to develop an effective philosophy paper: indeed, you may have to first write a paper and then use it as something like a script for your presentation. Some parts of the paper, e.g., section headings, statements of arguments, key quotes, and so on, you may want to use as visual aids in your presentation to help your audience better follow along and understand.

[3] Many of these recommendations are, however, based on the material in Horban (1993), Huemer (n.d.), Pryor (n.d.), and Rippon (2008). There is very little published research to cite about the claims in this essay, because these claims are typically justified by instructors’ experience, not, say, controlled experiments on different approaches to teaching philosophical writing. Therefore, the guidance offered here has been vetted by many professional philosophers with a collective hundreds of hours of undergraduate teaching experience and further collective hundreds of hours of taking philosophy courses. The editors of 1000-Word Philosophy also collectively have thousands of hours of experience in writing philosophy essays.

[4] For more about the areas of philosophy, see What is Philosophy? by Thomas Metcalf.

[5] For an explanation of what is meant by an “argument” in philosophy, see Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf.

[6] Outside research is sometimes discouraged, and even prohibited, for philosophy papers in introductory courses because a common goal of a philosophy paper is not to report on a number of views on a philosophical issue—so philosophy papers usually are not “research reports”—but to rather engage a specific argument or claim or theory, in a more narrow and focused way, and show that you understand the issue and have engaged in critically. If a paper engages in too much reporting of outside research, that can get in the way of this critical evaluation task.

[7] There are two reasons to avoid extremely controversial theses. First, such theses are usually more difficult to defend adequately. Second, you might offend your instructor, who might (fairly or not) give you a worse grade. So, for example, you might argue that abortion is usually permissible, or usually wrong, but you probably shouldn’t argue that anyone who has ever said the word ‘abortion’ should be tortured to death, and you probably shouldn’t argue that anyone who’s ever pregnant should immediately be forced to abort the pregnancy, because both of these claims are extremely implausible and so it’s very unlikely that good arguments could be developed for them. But theses that are controversial without being implausible can be interesting for both you and the instructor, depending on how you develop and defend your argument or arguments for that thesis.

[8] Whether a thesis is philosophical mostly depends on whether it is a lot like theses that have been defended in important works of philosophy. That means it would be a thesis about metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, logic, history of philosophy, or something therein. For more information, see Philosophy and Its Contrast with Science and What is Philosophy? both by Thomas Metcalf.

[9] Also, read the grading rubric, if it’s available. If your course uses an online learning environment, such as Canvas, Moodle, or Schoology, then the rubric will often be visible as attached to the assignment itself. The rubric is a breakdown of the different requirements of the essay and how each is weighted and evaluated by the instructor. So, for example, if some requirement has a relatively high weight, you should put more effort into doing a good job. Similarly, some requirement might explicitly mention some step for the assignment that you need to complete in order to get full credit.

[10] In some academic fields, a “thesis” or “thesis statement” is considered both your conclusion and a statement of the basic support you will give for that conclusion. In philosophy, your thesis is usually just that conclusion: e..g, “Eating meat is wrong,” “God exists,” “Nobody has free will,” and so on: the support given for that conclusion is the support for your thesis.

[11] To be especially clear, this should be an objection to the argument given for your thesis or conclusion, not an objection to your thesis or conclusion itself. This is because you don’t want to give an argument and then have an objection that does not engage that argument, but instead engages something else, since that won’t help your reader or audience better understand and evaluate that argument.

[12] For more information about premises, forms, and objections, see Arguments: Why do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf.

[13] For a philosophical argument in favor of clear philosophical writing, and guidance on producing such writing, see Fischer and Nobis (2019).

[14] The most common styles in philosophy are APA (Purdue Online Writing Lab, n.d.a) and Chicago (Purdue Online Writing Lab, n.d.b.).

[15] You might choose to directly quote someone when it’s very important that the reader know that the quoted author actually said what you claim they said. For example, if you’re discussing some author who made some startling claim, you can directly quote them to show that they really said that. You might also directly quote someone when they presented some information or argument in a very concise, well-stated way, such that paraphrasing it would take up more space than simply quoting them would.

[16] Plagiarism, in general, occurs when someone submits written or spoken work that is largely copied, in style, substance, or both, from some other author’s work, and does not attribute it to that author. However, your institution or instructor may define “plagiarism” somewhat differently, so you should check with their definitions. When in doubt, check with your instructor first.

[17] These are instructions for relatively short, introductory-level philosophy essays. For more guidance, there are many useful philosophy-writing guides online to consult, e.g.: Horban (1993); Huemer (n.d.); Pryor (n.d.); Rippon (2008); Weinberg (2019).

Fischer, Bob and Nobis, Nathan. (2019, June 4). Why writing better will make you a better person. The Chronicle of Higher Education . 

Horban, Peter. (1993). Writing a philosophy paper. Simon Fraser University Department of Philosophy . 

Huemer, Michael. (N.d.). A guide to writing. Owl232.net .

Pryor, Jim. (N.d.). Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper. Jimpryor.net .

Purdue Online Writing Lab. (N.d.a.). General format. Purdue Online Writing Lab . 

Purdue Online Writing Lab. (N.d.b.). General format. Purdue Online Writing Lab .

Rippon, Simon. (2008). A brief guide to writing the philosophy paper. Harvard College Writing Center .

Weinberg, Justin. (2019, January 15). How to write a philosophy paper: Online guides. Daily Nous .

Related Essays

Arguments: Why do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf

Philosophy and its Contrast with Science by Thomas Metcalf

What is Philosophy? By Thomas Metcalf

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• The 35 Best Philosophy Books to Live Better and Become a Great Thinker

I used to think philosophy meant sitting in a college auditorium, reading boring old texts in languages no one speaks anymore. When I was 23, however, I discovered Ryan Holiday and his work on Stoicism . I read his book The Obstacle Is the Way , and I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. Philosophy is not about analyzing the thoughts of people who died long ago. It’s about how to live a good life, right here, right now — and that’s exactly what philosophy books are for.

We’ve summarized over 1,000 books here at Four Minute Books. Today, we’ll compile the best philosophy titles for you. Whether you’re a beginner or a philosophy expert, we’re sure you’ll find a book on here that’ll teach you something new. Find a strong set of guiding principles, discover where it came from, and adjust it to your own and modern life.

As usual, we’ve sorted our list into multiple sub-categories. First, we’ll cover the best philosophy books all around. Then, we’ll get into Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy, important philosophers, as well as books talking specifically about ethics and morality. Finally, we’ll show you some “philosophies of productivity” and other books that present a coherent worldview for our modern world.

Besides a picture of the cover of each title, you’ll find our favorite quote from the author, a one-sentence-summary of the book, and some suggestions on when and why to read the book. We’ve also included three key takeaways, as well as some buttons you can click to read the book’s free summary on Four Minute Books or buy a copy for yourself on Amazon (affiliate links).

Use the clickable table of contents below to quickly jump to any book or category, and start discovering the many wonderful, enlightening philosophies we can use to live a better life!

Here are the 35 best philosophy books of all time!

Table of Contents

1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

2. man’s search for meaning by viktor frankl, 3. the daily stoic by ryan holiday.

• 4. The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant 

5. The Republic by Plato

6. discourses by epictetus.

• 7. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch 

8. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca

9. meditations on first philosophy by rené descartes, 10. on the shortness of life by seneca, 11. a guide to the good life by william b. irvine, 12. how to be a stoic by massimo pigliucci, 13. how to think like a roman emperor by donald robertson.

• 14. The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday 

15. The Bhagavad Gita by Vyasa

16. the art of war by sun tzu, 17. the tao te ching by lao tzu, 18. the book of joy by dalai lama & desmond tutu, 19. lives of the stoics by ryan holiday, 20. plato at the googleplex by rebecca goldstein, 21. breakfast with socrates by robert rowland smith, 22. the nicomachean ethics by aristotle, 23. the prince by niccolò machiavelli, 24. the ethics of ambiguity by simone de beauvoir, 25. the better angels of our nature by steven pinker, 26. essentialism by greg mckeown, 27. deep work by cal newport, 28. the power of full engagement by jim loehr & tony schwartz, 29. principles by ray dalio, 30. 12 rules for life by jordan peterson, 31. minimalism by joshua fields millburn & ryan nicodemus, 32. digital minimalism by cal newport, 33. kaizen by sarah harvey, 34. the subtle art of not giving a f*ck by mark manson.

• 35. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle 

Other Book Lists by Topic

Other book lists by author, best philosophy books overall.

Favorite Quote

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

The Book in One Sentence

Meditations is a collection of 12 books written by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who consistently journaled to remember his education in Stoic philosophy, and whose writings will teach you logic, faith, and self-discipline.

Why should you read it?

If you’re looking for daily comfort, motivation, and wisdom, this is one of the best books you’ll ever pick up. I don’t see why anyone shouldn’t read this. The advice is as sound as when Marcus gave it to himself 2,000 years ago, and the book will benefit you in tough as well as glorious times. Plus, it might even inspire you to start journaling yourself!

Key Takeaways

• True “logic” doesn’t always make sense, but everything happens for a reason.
• Life is too short to complain.
• The only pain you suffer is the pain you create yourself.

If you want to learn more, you can read our free four-minute summary or get a copy for yourself.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Viktor Frankl

Man’s Search for Meaning details holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s horrifying experiences in Nazi concentration camps, along with his psychological approach of logotherapy, which is also what helped him survive and shows how you can – and must – find meaning in your life.

There are few holes this book couldn’t make you crawl back out from. Beyond inspiring you to rethink meaning and find it wherever you go, however, it will also instill tremendous respect in you for those who’ve come before us. This book is enlightening on both a personal and a historical level, and I think almost anyone would benefit from reading it.

• Sometimes, the only way to survive is to surrender to death.
• Your life has its own meaning, and it’s up to you to find it.
• Use paradoxical intention to make your fears go away.

“Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what’s outside your control.” — Ryan Holiday

The Daily Stoic is a year-long compilation of short, daily meditations from ancient Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, teaching you equanimity, resilience, and perseverance via the three Stoic disciplines of perception, action, and will.

If you struggle with reading non-fiction at a pace that makes you feel good about your progress, this is the book for you. It’s also one of my all-time favorites. I read it every year for five years in a row. A page a day is so easy to read, you can’t not do it. As a result, you’ll gain a great overview of Stoicism and implement plenty of its tenets in your life.

• Perception gives purpose to your thoughts, actions, and ultimately everything you do.
• We can change the course of our life by actively choosing our actions instead of just reacting to our impulses.
• Will is our internal force of perseverance, ready to give us hope when everything else fails.

4. The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant  

“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.” — Will Durant 

The Story of Philosophy profiles the lives of great Western philosophers, such as Plato, Socrates, and Nietzsche, exploring their views on politics, religion, morality, the meaning of life, and plenty of other important concepts.

If you’re curious about the origins of philosophy, this is the definitive title to read. Durant and his wife are some of the greatest historians who ever lived, and they fantastically condensed the world’s story, in this case down to 700 pages. If you want to start with something shorter, grab The Lessons of History first, then go deeper on each of history’s most important philosophers in this masterpiece.

• Ancient Greek philosophers paved the way for philosophy, science, and new forms of societal governance.
• Philosopher Spinoza helped decipher the hidden meanings of religion.
• Voltaire was partially responsible for the French revolution and the improvement of political systems around the world.

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.” — Plato

The Republic is one of the most important political and philosophical works in history , written by Plato, the archetypal philosopher and one of Socrates’ students , in the form of a dialogue about justice and political systems.

If you’re in politics, this is a must-read. If not, it’s still a valuable read on what it means to be governed, how to be a good citizen, and why philosophers can be good rulers but don’t necessarily will be . All-around a classic worth picking up.

• Justice must be looked at on an individual as well as a city level.
• Both cities and souls can be divided into three distinct parts.
• Philosophers trying to rule others will face lots of difficulty, and rightfully so.

“What else is freedom but the power to live our life the way we want?” — Epictetus

Discourses is a collection of ancient philosopher Epictetus’ lectures, transcribed by one of his students, helping us make sense of the world and teaching us to accept hardship, change, and life events that feel like setbacks at first but will ultimately make us stronger.

Unlike most of the other ancient philosophers, Epictetus didn’t start from wealth. He was a slave, but thanks to his ideas and behavior, he was set free. He lived frugally till the end of his days, and that’s why his lectures are full of common sense. If you want an original take on Stoicism that didn’t come from a point of privilege, this is your best bet.

• Without life’s challenges, we wouldn’t feel the need to grow and evolve. 
• Everything great in life takes time and effort to build.
• If you can’t control it, don’t stress over it.

7. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch  

“If I only had three words of advice, they would be, ‘tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘all the time.’” — Randy Pausch

The Last Lecture is a college professor’s final message to the world before his impending death of cancer at a relatively young age, offering meaningful life advice, significant words of wisdom, and a great deal of optimism and hope for humanity.

Imagine your favorite school teacher or mentor were to give one last lecture before they died. Wouldn’t you attend? Well, Randy Pausch may not be your favorite college professor, but he probably will be if you give his last lecture a chance. The book is full of inspiration, hard-gained wisdom, and memories that will make you smile. Randy also gave the actual lecture , of course, but I recommend reading the book first. It holds more detail and makes the talk feel a lot stronger.

• If you never give up on your dreams, eventually, some of them will come true.
• True satisfaction comes from helping others succeed.
• The simplest advice is often the most valuable.

Best Philosophy Books About Stoicism and Western Philosophy

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you need is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.” — Seneca

Letters from a Stoic is a collection of encouraging moral messages sent by Roman Stoic and philosopher Seneca to his friend Lucilius in order to help him become less emotional, more disciplined, and find the good life.

There used to be a thing called “pen pals.” People would commit to writing each other letters on a regular basis. Nowadays, the practice is dwindling. Thanks to this book, however, you can have a pen pal, and not just any pen pal but one of the most famous philosophers in history. If you’d like a friend to send you letters of encouragement, this book is perfect for you.

• The goal of attaining wisdom is to live in harmony with nature.
• Your most valuable possession is your mind.
• A wise man doesn’t need friends, but he chooses to make them anyway.

“Dubium sapientiae initium — Doubt is the origin of wisdom.” — René Descartes

Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the premier works of Western philosophy, written by  René Descartes in 1641, prompting us to abandon everything that can possibly be doubted and then starting to reason our way forward based only on what we can know with absolute certainty.

Are you a person driven by logic and reason? Then this is the philosophy book for you. Descartes’ approach of starting from what’s 100% true and then going from there is fascinating. If you’d like to test your reasoning skills and aren’t afraid of someone challenging your assumptions, read this book.

• Your senses don’t always tell the truth.
• The fact that you think proves that you exist.
• There are three levels of truth in the world.

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” — Seneca

On the Shortness of Life is a 2,000 year old, 20-page masterpiece by Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher and teacher to the emperors, about time and how to best use it to ensure you lead a long and fulfilling life.

There are a million talks, books, and celebrities out there telling us that “life is short.” But, honestly, no one ever said it better than Seneca in this short read. You’ll find yourself making highlight after highlight. It’s amazing and, productivity-wise, probably the only book you’ll ever have to read.

• Chasing leisure, luxury, and legacy is what makes a long life appear short.
• You can be busy all your life without ever doing something meaningful, so beware.
• Your ability to contemplate and appreciate life will never disappear.

“The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.” — William B. Irvine

A Guide to the Good Life is a roadmap for aspiring Stoics, revealing why this ancient philosophy is useful today, what Stoicism is truly about, and showing you how to cultivate its powerful principles in your own life.

If you’re looking for a general introduction to Stoicism, get this book. It covers its historical rise and fall, most important concepts, as well as the best pieces of Stoic advice. A great overview of this resurgent philosophy.

• The two primary values of Stoicism are virtue and tranquility.
• Learn to want what you already have.
• Immediately accept things that are outside of your control, and focus on what you can do with what you’ve got.

“Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one.” — Massimo Pigliucci

How to Be a Stoic is a practical guide for applying ancient philosophy in modern life, covering the principles philosophers like Socrates, Epictetus, and Cato followed to cultivate strength in the three Stoic disciplines of desire, action, and assent.

For a deeper dive into Stoicism and its central areas of application, consider this book. Like many other books on the topic, it divides its ideas into three section mapping to the three Stoic disciplines, so even if you’re just looking for advice on one particular field, you can easily skip around and get right to what’s most relevant to you right now.

• The concept of “preferred indifferents” can help you act in line with your morals without becoming extremist.
• In Stoicism, virtue is the highest good, and it’s made up of four values.
• You can have useful, pleasurable, and good friendships. The good are the most important.

“What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.” — Donald Robertson

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor combines the story of famous Stoic and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius with lessons from modern psychology to help you become more emotionally resilient and develop the strength to overcome even the most challenging circumstances.

If you prefer learning from stories, this is a great book for you. Robertson releases the ideas behind Stoicism slowly, rolling them out alongside Marcus’ life story, adding insight into modern psychology along the way. The result is an effortless read that makes for fantastic insights without feeling like a typical non-fiction book.

• We come from nature, and we’ll return to it eventually, so it’s only logical to live in agreement with it. 
• Life is about constant improvement, which is why we should all work on our virtues every day.
• Stoics know there’s no point in worrying over what you can’t control, so best just make your peace with it.

14. The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday  

“There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.” — Ryan Holiday

The Obstacle Is the Way will help you endure the struggles of life with grace and resilience, thanks to lessons drawn from ancient heroes, former presidents, modern actors, and successful athletes and how they turned adversity into success thanks to the powers of perception, action, and will.

If you think, “Well, all this stuff about Stoicism is great, but what does it look like today ?” then this title, and of course Ryan Holiday’s other books , are a great place to start. Ryan can be largely credited with bringing Stoicism back to life, and he does it with countless examples from modern-world leaders, athletes, and celebrities embodying Stoic ideals. The first of three books in his original trilogy on Stoicism, you’ll want to read  Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key next.

• Imagine you’re advising yourself as a friend to keep an objective perspective.
• Large obstacles have large weaknesses – identify them and use them against them.
• Use your will to accept what you cannot change and change the things you can.

Best Philosophy Books About Eastern Philosophy

“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” — Vyasa

The Bhagavad Gita is the number one spiritual text in Hinduism, packed with wisdom about life and purpose as well as powerful advice on living virtuously but authentically without succumbing to life’s temptations or other people’s dreams.

You don’t have to be Hindu to appreciate Hindu wisdom. Philosophy works best when you balance multiple perspectives, and though, as readers have told me, it’s very hard for outsiders to fully grasp “the Gita,” it still provides valuable counterpoints worth studying.

• Living life doing what you were destined to do brings peace, while the opposite breeds pain and insecurity.
• Find meaning in the journey and let go of constant anticipation.
• Meditation can help you master your thoughts and regain focus.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” — Sun Tzu

The Art of War is considered the definitive text on military strategy and warfare, written in ancient China around 500 BC, inspiring businesses, athletes, and of course generals to beat their opponents and competition the right way.

If you’re looking for a highly action-oriented approach to philosophy, this classic might be for you. It’s a book about war, yes, but it’s also a book about business, work, and life. If you metaphorically apply Sun Tzu’s strategies of warfare to your next big meeting, it might go better than you expect. You’ll also pick up plenty of honorable attitudes along the way, as the soldier’s path is, ideally, supposed to be a virtuous one — and it’s walking that path that this book hopes to teach you.

• Only enter battles you know you can win.
• Deceive your competition to make them do what you want.
• Lead your team as if you were leading a single man by the hand.

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.” ― Lao Tzu

The Tao Te Ching is a collection of 81 short, poignant chapters full of advice on living in harmony with “the Tao,” translated as “the Way,” an ancient Chinese interpretation of the spiritual force underpinning all life, first written around 400 BC but relevant to this day.

Whereas Western philosophy is focused more on the self and dealing with the outside world, Eastern philosophy promotes harmony and being part of the world. Few books encapsulate this Eastern approach more appropriately than this book. Plus, at 81 short chapters, it’s an easy and quick read full of great life advice. Definitely another one for your must-read shelf!

• Fully accept whatever the current moment brings. Give yourself fully to reality.
• Admit your own faults and mistakes, because ultimately, they might be your greatest source of strength.
• Always compete in a spirit of play to stay in harmony with the Tao.

“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.” — Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu

The Book of Joy  is the result of a 7-day meeting between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, two of the world’s most influential spiritual leaders, during which they discussed one of life’s most important questions: how do we find joy despite suffering?

When two globally revered spiritual leaders talk, it’s worth paying attention. When they discuss handling suffering as an essential life skill (because suffering is inevitable), you might want to drop everything else and listen for a while. This one probably works really well as an audiobook too. If you’re looking for more joy in your life, get this one.

• A life without suffering does not exist.
• Since we can’t control suffering, we must practice our response to it.
• Compassion and sadness help us alleviate our troublesome responses to suffering.

Best Books About Important Philosophers

“There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.” — Ryan Holiday

Lives of the Stoics takes a deep dive into the experiences and beliefs of some of the earliest philosophers practicing the four Stoic virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.

If you’re already on the Stoicism-train but want to know more about the most important Stoic philosophers’ lives, this book is for you. Beyond just the most important Stoic ideas, you’ll also find plenty of anecdotes and details about the lives of Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others. If you like biographies, you’ll enjoy this book.

• Stoicism came about as a result of extreme hardship. 
• Not everyone who initially followed Stoicism fully lived up to its standards. 
• Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor whose practice of Stoicism helped him lead with compassion and humility.

“If we don’t understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools.” — Rebecca Goldstein

Plato at the Googleplex asks what would happen if ancient philosopher Plato were alive today and came in contact with the modern world, for example by touring Google’s headquarters, and what the implications of his encounters are for the relevance of philosophy in our civilized, hyper-technological world.

Are you skeptical that philosophy still has a place in the modern world? Then this book provides the perfect thought experiment. If Plato were on a speaking tour today, what would he tell us? This book combines the fun of a novel with the insight of a history book, and the result is a trip you’ll never forget! Perhaps, it might even change your mind.

• Google can answer most questions but not all of them.
• No two people are the same, and neither should education treat them that way.
• Plato came up with a definition of love that encompasses all human relationships.

“You can’t be free to be right unless you can free to be wrong.” — Robert Rowland Smith

Breakfast With Socrates takes you through an ordinary day in the company of extraordinary minds, linking each hour of the day and its activity to the core ideas of one of history’s great philosophers, such as  Descartes, Nietzsche, or Socrates.

If you’re looking for an easy, extremely practical introduction to philosophy, look no further. From breakfast to going to work to falling asleep at night, this book will paint a philosophical backdrop for plenty of familiar everyday situations. Then, it will fill said backdrop with the wisdom of one of history’s great philosophers. What a wonderful concept for a book!

• Philosophy isn’t about spinning your head all day; it’s about making wise decisions.
• Your morning routine is a battle of the egos.
• A good way of assessing your happiness is to ask yourself if you’d like to live the same life again.

Best Philosophy Books About Ethics & Morality

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.” — Aristotle

The Nicomachean Ethics is a historically important text compiling Aristotle’s extensive discussion of existential questions concerning happiness, ethics, friendship, knowledge, pleasure, virtue, and even society at large.

This one’s for nerds and philosophy geeks like me. Even modern translations still aren’t always super easy to understand, and you’ll have to reread sentences all the time. That said, there is something about reading an original text that makes it feel more special than even the best second-hand reporting. If you want to be able to claim you’ve actually read Aristotle, get yourself a copy of this book.

• Aim to achieve a state of eudaimonia instead of conventional happiness.
• Arete, or virtue, is accomplished through a lifetime of work.
• Strive to be magnanimous — someone who does great and honorable things.

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” — Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prince is a 16th century political treatise famous for condoning, even encouraging, evil behavior amongst political rulers in order for them to stay in power.

In my mind, this book is something akin to a big “BEWARE” sign. You read it. You understand how people in power can easily abuse it. And you’ll be much less likely to become the victim of power schemes in the future. Don’t think of this as an instruction manual, for it’ll only lead you down a dark path. Treat it with care, however, and it will be enlightening.

• Countries can be easy to conquer but hard to rule or vice versa – and markets are the same.
• If a country truly wants to protect itself, it needs its own army, not mercenaries. The same holds true for businesses.
• If you want to run a business, you have to assemble your advisors and know when to listen to them.

“We are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.” — Simone de Beauvoir

The Ethics of Ambiguity explains existentialist philosophy in a post–World War II setting, showing us how we can accept the absurdity of life and use its randomness to create rather than despair.

Philosophy, like many other fields and book-writing in general, has historically been dominated by men. How refreshing to get a woman’s perspective. On existentialism, one of the most relevant and, arguably, useful philosophies, no less. If you’re looking for an introduction into existentialism and/or some background on one of history’s best female philosophers, pick this one.

• You’re freer than you think, and you should take advantage of it.
• There is no such thing as a completely neutral perspective.
• Abstract ideals aren’t as important as real people, but our governments mess this up all the time.

“As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.” — Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature proves that we live in the most peaceful time in history, taking us through several major shifts that led to a global reduction in crime, explaining what motivates us to behave violently, and showing that these motivators are far outweighed by our naturally peaceful tendencies.

It’s easy to feel depressed. All you have to do is turn on the news. But despite all the bad reporting, when you zoom out on the timeline, the world is doing better than it ever has. If you’re looking for hope, optimism, and more faith in humanity, this is the one to read.

• Ideologies always start out with good intentions, but they can quickly deteriorate into promoting violence.
• The Flynn effect increases humanity’s ability to reason over time, thus making us less violent.
• Thanks to the invention of the printing press, humanitarian philosophy could spread, which decreased violence across the board.

Best Philosophy Books for Productivity

“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.” — Greg McKeown

Essentialism will show you a new, better way of looking at productivity  by giving you permission to be extremely selective about what’s truly essential in your life and then ruthlessly cutting out everything else.

Most productivity books are just collections of common-sense tips. This one offers a fully fledged out philosophy for how to get things done, both in work and in life. That’s what makes this book so refreshing. It also shows you what philosophy looks like when we extend it beyond its usual, often academically influenced confines. All around a fantastic book!

• Doing nothing and doing everything are both signs of learned helplessness.
• Become the editor of your own life with the 90% rule.
• Always give yourself a time buffer of 50%.

“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive — no matter how skilled or talented you are.” — Cal Newport

Deep Work   proposes that we have lost our ability to focus deeply and immerse ourselves in a complex task, showing us how to cultivate this skill again and manage our attention better than ever before thanks to  four simple rules.

If you struggle to focus and feel like you can barely hold your attention together, read this book. It’s one of few productivity books presenting a coherent worldview, and that’s what makes it one of the best.

• There are four strategies for deep work, all of which require intention.
• Productive meditation can help you work more deeply, even while you’re taking a break.
• Stop working at the same time each day. 

“We grow the aspects of our lives that we feed — with energy and engagement — and choke off those we deprive of fuel. Your life is what you agree to attend to.” — Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz

The Power of Full Engagement will show you how to manage the only thing worth managing – your energy – by teaching you how to properly maintain the four kinds of energy, accept your limitations, and live a life of purpose.

Are you struggling to balance the various areas of life demanding your time and energy? Then this book is for you. It’s also not a philosophy book per se, but it presents a model you can use to navigate all of life. Plus, the energy management concept is just fascinating. Worth checking out!

• Manage your energy, not your time.
• Keep track of all four sources of energy in your life.
• Accept your limitations. 

Best Philosophy Books for Modern Life

“The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.” — Ray Dalio

Principles outlines and breaks down the set of rules for work and life that billionaire investor Ray Dalio, CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund, has acquired throughout his 40-year career in finance.

This book is part biography, part career advice, and part philosophical manual. Dalio put everything he had into it, and it shows. It has a lot to offer, and even if you’re not the biggest philosophy nut yet, you’ll gain a lot from Dalio’s vast life experience. The book is also quite moving, so there’s a strong emotional component as well. Check out Ray Dalio’s other books when you’re done!

• Principles are powerful weapons in the fight against flawed thinking.
• Radical truthfulness and transparency are two of Ray’s most important ideas.
• Great businesses use principles to create environments where the best ideas win.

“It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you’re unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable.” — Jordan Peterson

12 Rules for Life is a story-based, stern yet entertaining self-help manual for young people laying out a set of simple rules to help us become more disciplined , behave better, act with integrity, and balance our lives while enjoying them as much as we can.

Love or hate Jordan Peterson , the man has a way with words. In this case, he uses his calm yet convincing voice to provide essential life advice to young people. The advice makes sense, and the stories are inspiring. All around, this is a book worth peeking into.

• Sweep in front of your own door before pointing out that the street is dirty.
• Treat yourself like a child you’re responsible for.
• Aim to do what is meaningful, not convenient.

“You needn’t settle for a mediocre life just because the people around you did.” — Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus

Minimalism   is an instructive introduction to the philosophy of less, and how it helped two guys who had achieved the American dream let go of their possessions and the depressions that came with them.

Minimalism is one of few modern-day, standalone philosophies. That alone makes this book worth reading. More so, however, it has a chance at making you happier. Caring less about possessions is a wonderful way of making room for what’s truly important in your life, and this book explains this life approach extremely well.

• Debt goes first. Get rid of your financial crutches to finally feel free.
• Use the TARA method to become more accepting of other people in your life.
• You are not your job. Don’t let your work define you.

“Focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.” — Cal Newport

Digital Minimalism shows us where to draw the line with technology, how to properly take time off our digital devices, and why doing so is the key to living a happy, focused life in a noisy world.

We have so much more technology than we did even 20 years ago, and yet, no one has updated philosophy to help us acknowledge this fact. Well, no one except Cal Newport. If you struggle to find the line between your screen and reality, this book will provide plenty of tips and tactics but also some powerful arguments as to why spending less time online matters.

• Digital minimalism centers on 3 principles: clutter is costly, optimization is vital, and intentionality is satisfying.
• Plan downtime events as a source of inward joy and deep contemplation.
• Quick fixes and “life hacks” might prompt a healthy new habit, but they don’t promote sustainable change.

“Change is infectious and when success is achieved in one area, you are encouraged to apply the same techniques to another area of your life.” — Sarah Harvey

Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of “continuous improvement,” which is often used in business but can also be applied to personal growth, offering us a path to self-improvement that’s less plagued by pressure and anxiety and more marked by small, daily steps adding up to incremental but meaningful progress.

If you feel overwhelmed by all the positive changes you’re hoping to make in your life, stop and read this book. This refreshing philosophy gives us permission to take it slowly, to live our lives one day at a time and yet still feel good about them. Everything is going well when you improve a little every day — what a comforting philosophy to live by!

• Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy centered around incremental growth, and it begins with evaluating your habits.
• The best way to reach a big goal is to start with a step so small, you’ll barely notice the difference.
• Review your habits regularly to track your progress.

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.” — Mark Manson

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck does away with the positive psychology craze to instead give you a Stoic, no-BS approach to living a life that might not always be happy, but that will be meaningful and centered only around what’s important to you.

Are you tired of the constant prompts to be positive and put on a smile? Then this is the book for you. Manson has managed to evolve nihilism — a philosophy in which nothing matters and that commonly makes people depressed — into something meaningful: a world in which very few things matter, but the ones that do are really, really important. An absolute mega-bestseller of a book, full of humor and sound advice. Definitely a recommended read.

• Values you can’t control are bad values to follow.
• Don’t believe you know anything with certainty; it keeps you from improving.
• Trying to leave a legacy might ruin your life.

35. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle  

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” — Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now shows you that every minute you spend worrying about the future or regretting the past is a minute lost, because the only place you can truly live in is the present, the now, which is why the book offers actionable strategies to start living every minute as it occurs and becoming 100% present in and for your life.

If you feel like reality keeps letting you down, perhaps you’re not spending enough time in it. Of course we get sad when we constantly think about the past or the future! This book will remedy that problem. If you’re a mindfulness skeptic or feel burned out, this book might provide just the new perspective you need.

• Life is just a series of present moments.
• All pain is a result of resistance to the things you cannot change.
• You can free yourself from pain by constantly observing your mind yet not judging your thoughts.

Tim Ferriss once came close to committing suicide. The thing he credits for successfully climbing out of the hole, not returning, and managing his depression a lot better since then? Philosophy! Stoicism, in his case. Tim calls it “an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments; for making better decisions.” 

Thanks to people like him, Ryan Holiday , and others, this set of ancient ideas from a few good thinkers is seeing a resurgence. Whichever particular philosophy you find most helpful in living your life, however, only you can find out. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether we connect more with Stoicism, existentialism, or even the ideals promoted in Star Wars . What matters is that we find a set of life rules that works for us .

I hope our list of the best philosophy books will help you do just that. Pick a title, start learning, and remember what William James said: “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.”

Looking for more of the best books on various topics? Here are all the book lists we’ve made for you so far:

• The 60 Best Business Books of All Time (Will Forever Change How You Think About Organizations)
• The 20 Best Entrepreneurship Books to Start, Grow & Run a Successful Business
• The 14 Best Finance Books of All Time
• The 21 Best Habit Books of All Time to Change Any Behavior
• The 33 Best Happiness Books of All Time That Everyone Should Read
• The 60 Best History Books of All Time (to Read at Any Age)
• The 7 Best Inspirational Books That Will Light Your Inner Fire
• The 40 Best Leadership Books of All Time to Help You Become a Truly Inspiring Person
• The 31 Best Motivational Books Ever Written
• The 12 Best Nonfiction Books Most People Have Never Heard Of
• The 34 Best Psychology Books That Will Make You Smarter and Happier
• The 25 Best Sales Books of All Time to Help You Close Any Deal
• The 33 Best Self-Help Books of All Time to Read at Any Age
• The 22 Best Books About Sex & Sexuality to Improve Your Love Life & Relationships
• The 30 Most Life-Changing Books That Will Shift Your Perspective & Stay With You Forever

Looking for more books by the world’s most celebrated authors? Here are all of the book lists by the author we’ve curated for you:

• All Brené Brown Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• Jordan Peterson Books: All Titles in Order of Publication + The 5 Top Books He Recommends
• All Malcolm Gladwell Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• All Michael Pollan Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• Peter Thiel Books: A Comprehensive List of Books By, About & Recommended by Peter Thiel
• All Rachel Hollis Books: The Full List of Non-Fiction, Fiction & Cookbooks, Sorted by Popularity & the Best Reading Order
• All Ray Dalio Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• All Robert Greene Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• All Ryan Holiday Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• All Simon Sinek Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• All Tim Ferriss Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)
• All Walter Isaacson Books, Sorted Chronologically (and by Popularity)

Last Updated on February 20, 2023

*Four Minute Books participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon. We also participate in other affiliate programs, such as Blinkist, MindValley, Audible, Audiobooks, Reading.FM, and others. Our referral links allow us to earn commissions (at no extra cost to you) and keep the site running. Thank you for your support.

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Best Book Lists, Award Aggregation, & Book Data

The Best Philosophy Books of All-Time

“What are the best Philosophy books of all-time?” We looked at 24 lists and 248 different books, aggregating the 27 titles appearing multiple times so we could find out which book really is the “best”.

What can be found in a “Best Philosophy Book” Listicles:

• Lots and lots of men
• Lots and lots of very old books
• Everything or nothing
• Talking points for your freshman year of college

The Top 27 Philosophy Books of All Time

27)  after virtue by alisdair mcintyre.

Appears On: 2 Lists Learn more about title

26)  Candide by Voltaire

25)  Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok

24)  Metaphysics by Aristotle

Appears On: 2 Lists Learn more about title

23)  Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

22)  The Central Question of Philosophy by A.J. Ayer

21)  The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

20)  The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

19)  The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

18)  Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous by George Berkeley

17)  A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Appears On: 3 Lists Learn more about title

16)  Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

15)  Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

14)  Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

13)  On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

12)  The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

11)  What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel

10)  A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Appears On: 4 Lists Learn more about title

9)  Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

8)  Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas

7)  Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

6)  Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes

Appears On: 5 Lists Learn more about title

5)  Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder

4)  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

3)  Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Appears On: 6 Lists Learn more about title

2)  Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

1)  The Republic by Plato

Appears On: 7 Lists Learn more about title

The 221 Additional Philosophy Books Appearing on a Single List

• 101 Philosophy Problems Martin Cohen
• A Clockwork Orange
• A Cyborg Manifesto
• A Guide for the Perplexed
• A New Dictionary of Christian Ethics Edited by John Macquarie and James Childress
• A REASON FOR LIVING (the way to fulfillment against great odds)
• A TREATISE CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
• A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
• Analects of Confucius by Confucius
• Analysis and Metaphysics
• Arguments for the Existence of God (Hick)
• Basic Writings of Nietzsche
• Beast and Man by Mary Midgley
• Being and Nothingness
• Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
• Being Good Simon Blackburn
• Brave New World
• Causing Death and Saving Lives
• Communist Manifesto
• Complete Works by Plato
• Concerning Human Understanding
• Corpus Aristotelicum by Aristotle
• Crime and Punishment
• CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
• Darwin’s Pharmacy
• DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
• DISCOURSE ON METHOD
• Doing Philosophy
• Education of Henry Adams, The
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
• Eksistensie en Gestalte
• Enchiridion by Epictetus
• Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• ENQUIRY CONCERNING THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
• ESSAY CONCERNING THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, SECOND TREATISE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT
• Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer
• Essays by Montaigne
• Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Ethical Studies (Bowie)
• Ethics: A Very Short Introduction
• Existentialism and Human Emotions by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Exploring Philosophy
• Fahrenheit 451
• Falling in Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose
• Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
• For your own good?
• FOUNDATIONS OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS
• Four Feet, Two Sandals by Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed – See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/naturalwonderers/12- best-philosophical-books/#sthash.MakEbM3R.dpuf
• Fragments by Heraclitus
• Frederick by Leo Lionni
• Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel
• George MacDonald Ross, and Danielle Lamb Doing Philosophy a Practical Guide for Students
• Gnosis A Philosophical Psychology concerning the Emergence of Individuated Holistic Intelligence
• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
• Heart Blossoms A commentary and Analysis of the Exalted Mahayana Sutra on the Profound Perfection of Wisdom called the Heart Sutra
• How Free Are You? Ted Honderich
• How to Be a Philosopher — or How to Be Almost Certain that Almost Nothing is Certain
• How to Read Wittgenstein‘ by Ray Monk
• If Aristotle Ran General Motors
• Immersion Into Noise
• Individuals by PF Strawson
• Introducing Persons
• INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION
• Invisible Man
• Invitation to Philosophy
• Issues in Philosophy
• Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters Ted Cohen
• JS Mill On…
• Justice by Michael Sandel
• Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems
• Lancelot’s Brother – A Champion’s Chronicle
• Language, Truth and Logic
• Lao Tsu: Tao Te Ching – Laozi
• Lectures on the Philosophy of History by G.W.F. Hegel
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men : 3 Tenant Families
• Let’s Do Nothing by Tony Fucile
• Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
• Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
• Man’s Search for Meaningby Viktor Frankl
• Manual for Living by Epictetus
• Mastering Philosophy
• Modern Philosophy
• Morris the Moose by B. Wiseman
• Mysticism and Logic Bertrand Russell
• Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies
• Nietzsche and Zen
• Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
• OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
• On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers
• On the Genealogy of Morality
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• On the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Phenomenology of Spirit
• Philosophical Investigations
• Philosophical Propositions
• Philosophy Goes to the Movies, An Introduction to Philosophy
• Philosophy Matters
• Philosophy of Religion for A-Level (Jordan, Lockyer and Tate)
• Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide
• Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject
• Philosophy: The Basics
• Plato and A Platypus Walk into A Bar
• Principles of Human Knowledge
• Psymbols- Logos for the Mind
• Reaching Out
• Reading Philosophy
• Released Into The Wild
• Religion and Darwinism
• Religious Schools – The Case Against
• Right to Object? Conscientious Objection and Religious Conviction
• Second Treatise of Government
• Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation
• Secretum by Petrarch
• Seeds Of Violence
• Sense and Sensibilia by JL Austin
• Six Questions of Socrates
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Stellaluna by Jannell Cannon
• The Age of Reason
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Awakening
• The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater
• The Blue and Brown Books
• The Bounds of Sense by PF Strawson
• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Case for Secularism
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle
• The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
• The Critique of Pure Reason
• The Death of Vishnu
• The Democracy of Objects
• The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance Anthony Gottlieb
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog
• The Essential Epicurus by Epicurus
• The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
• The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• The Incoherence of the Incoherence by Abu I-Walid Muhammad bin Ahmad bin Rushd
• The Intentional Stance
• The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• The Metamorphosis
• The Metaphysics of the Healing by Abu Ali ibn Sina
• The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
• The Object of Morality by GJ Warnock
• The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
• The origins of the modern world, Robert B. Marks
• The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson
• The Perennial Philosophy
• The Philosopher at the End of the Universe
• The Philosopher’s Habitat
• The Philosophy Book
• The Philosophy Files Stephen Law
• The Philosophy Shop: Ideas, Activites and Questions to Get People, Young and Old, Thinking Philosophy
• The Presocratic Philosophers
• The Prison Notebooks
• The Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell
• The Questions of Life — An Invitation to Philosophy
• the reason of things
• The Roads to Freedom trilogy by Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Simpsons and Philosophy Edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conrad and Aeon J. Skoble
• The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch
• The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism
• The Spell of the Sensuous
• The Spirit of Creativity
• the spiritual practices of jellaludin rumi
• The Stranger
• The Three Questions by Jon Muth
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• The Young Marx
• Things Fall Apart
• Think Simon Blackburn
• Think Outside The Box
• Thinking About Death
• Thinking Philosophically: an introduction to critical reflection and rational dialogue
• Thought Probes
• Through The Looking Glass
• Treatise on the Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately by Anton Wilhelm Amo
• Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Under the Net
• Utilitarianism
• UTILITARIANISM
• Walden; Or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
• What is Humanism?
• where was GOD when i needed him most
• Why? by Lindsay Camp and Tony Ross
• You Must Change Your Life

The 24 “Best Philosophy” Book Lists Consulted

• 12/3/2000: The Guardian – Mary Warnock’s top 10 philosophy books 
• 12/16/2010: Online Universities – 15 Philosophy Books Every Business Student Should Read 
• 1/10/2011: Online Degree Programs – 25 Works of Fiction Every Philosophy Student Should Read 
• 12/19/2011: Online College Courses – 30 Essential Reads for Philosophy Majors 
• 9/11/2012: Five Books – Nigel Warburton on Introductions to Philosophy 
• 8/15/2013: Critical Theory – 5 OPEN ACCESS THEORY & PHILOSOPHY BOOKS YOU SHOULD BE READING 
• 11/5/2013: Thought Catalog – 9 Mind-Expanding Books Of Philosophy That Are Actually Readable (A Guide To Practical Philosophy) 
• 5/29/2014: Why To Read – Philosophy Books: 10 Best Philosophy Books Of All Time 
• 7/29/2014: Hub Pages – My top 10 philosophy books – the best philosophical books I’ve read 
• 1/8/2015: Robert Paul Wolff – THE 25 MUST READ PHILOSOPHY BOOKS FOR GRAD STUDENTS
• 2/5/2015: Book Riot – Five Fun Philosophy Books. Yes, Really. 
• 3/27/2015: Patheos – 12 Best Philosophical Picture Books for Kids — And How to Get the Most Out of Them
• 4/23/2015: Ink Tank – Mind blown! 10 philosophy books guaranteed to make you think differently
• 7/29/2015: Books to eat – Philosophy Books | 8 Essential Philosophy Books to Read 
• 9/2/2015: Philosophyzer – TOP 5 PHILOSOPHY BOOKS FOR THE NEW TERM 
• Bloomsbury – The Twenty Greatest Philosophy Books 
• James Clear – Best Philosophy Books
• Big issue Ground – The Best Philosophy Books to Read 
• Board of Wisdom – The Best Philosophy Books 
• Mystic Minds – Best Philosophy Books
• Scottish Book Trust – 8 Philosophy Books For Teens 
• Pathways to Philosophy – Pathways to Philosophy introductory book list 
• British Humanist Association – Philosophy Books
• High Existence – 5 Mind-Blowing Books That Are Worth The Struggle To Read 

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Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, the greatest philosophers of all time – ranked.

I found more than 20 lists of the greatest philosophers and combined them into a single meta-list.  The results are below: every philosopher on three or more of the original source lists, presented in rank order (that is, with the philosophers on the most lists at the top).  Although most of the lists were heavily focused on Western philosophy of various sorts, I was also able to find lists of Eastern philosophers and some lists that included both Eastern and Western philosophy.  For each philosopher, I have provided key philosophical schools, ideas and concepts, as well as a list of important books and articles.

NOTE: These are not my personal opinions.  This meta-list is the result of collating multiple lists made by other people.

To see the same list organized chronologically by the philosopher’s date of birth, go here .

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How to Write a Philosophy Essay: Ultimate Guide

What Is a Philosophy Essay: Definition

Philosophical writing isn't your typical assignment. Its aim isn't to provide an overview of professional philosophers' works and say whether you agree with them.

Philosophy demands becoming a philosopher for the time of writing, thinking analytically and critically of ideas, pondering the Big Questions, and asking 'Why?'. That's why it requires time and energy, as well as a lot of thinking on your part.

But what is philosophy essay, exactly? If you're tasked with writing one, you'll have to select a thesis in the philosophical domain and argue for or against it. Then, you can support your thesis with other professional philosophers' works. But it has to contain your own philosophical contribution, too. (This is only one definition of philosophy essay, of course.)

What's a Good Philosophy Paper Outline?

Before you start writing your first line, you should make a philosophy essay outline. Think of it as a plan for your philosophy paper that briefly describes each paragraph's point.

As for how to write a philosophy essay outline, here are a few tips for you:

• Start with your thesis. What will you be arguing for or against?
• Read what philosophical theory has to say and note sources for your possible arguments and counterarguments.
• Decide on the definitions of core concepts to include precise philosophical meanings in your essay.
• After careful and extended reflection, organize your ideas following the structure below.

How To Structure a Philosophy Paper?

Like any other essay, a philosophy paper consists of an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. Sticking to this traditional philosophy essay structure will help you avoid unnecessary stress.

Here's your mini-guide on how to structure a philosophy essay:

• Introduction - Clarify the question you will be answering in your philosophy paper. State your thesis – i.e., the answer you'll be arguing for. Explain general philosophical terms if needed.
• Main body - Start with providing arguments for your stance and refute all the objections for each of them. Then, describe other possible answers and their reasoning – and counter the main arguments in their support.
• Conclusion - Sum up all possible answers to the questions and reiterate why yours is the most viable one.

What's an Appropriate Philosophy Essay Length?

In our experience, 2,000 to 2,500 words are enough to cover the topic in-depth without compromising the quality of the writing.

However, see whether you have an assigned word limit before getting started. If it's shorter or longer than we recommend, stick to that word limit in writing your essay on philosophy.

What Format Should You Use for a Philosophy Paper?

As a service we can attest that most students use the APA guidelines as their philosophy essay format. However, your school has the final say in what format you should stick to.

Sometimes, you can be asked to use a different college philosophy essay format, like MLA or Chicago. But if you're the one to choose the guidelines and don't know which one would be a good philosophy argumentative essay format, let's break down the most popular ones.

APA, MLA, and Chicago share some characteristics:

• Font: Time New Roman, 12 pt
• Line spacing: double
• Margins: 1" (left and right)
• Page number: in the header

But here's how they differ:

• A title page required
• Sources list: 'References' page
• No title page required
• Sources list: 'Works cited' page
• Sources list: 'Bibliography' page
• Footnotes and endnotes are required for citations

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Guideline on How to Write a Philosophy Essay

If you still don't feel that confident about writing a philosophy paper, don't worry. Philosophical questions, by definition, have more than one interpretation. That's what makes them so challenging to write about.

To help you out in your philosophical writing journey, we've prepared this list of seven tips on how to write a philosophy essay.

• Read Your Sources Thoughtfully

Whether your recommended reading includes Dante's Divine Comedy or Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism , approach your sources with curiosity and analytical thinking. Don't just mindlessly consume those texts. Instead, keep asking yourself questions while you're reading them, such as:

• What concepts and questions does the author address?
• What's the meaning behind key ideas and metaphors in the text?
• What does the author use as a convincing argument?
• Are there any strange or obscure distinctions?

As for which sources you should turn to, that all depends on your central question; philosophy topics for essay are diverse and sometimes opposed. So, you'll have to do your fair share of research.

• Brainstorm & Organize Your Ideas

As you're reading those texts, jot down what comes to your mind. It can be a great quote you've stumbled upon, an idea for an argument, or your thoughtful, critical responses to certain opinions.

Then, sort through and organize all of those notes into an outline for your essay in philosophy. Make sure that it holds up in terms of logic. And ensure that your arguments and counterarguments are compelling, sensible, and convincing!

Now, you might be wondering how to write a philosophy essay introduction. Don't worry: there's an explanation right below!

• Craft Your Introductory Paragraph

Think of your introduction as a road map preparing your reader for the journey your essay will take them on. This road map will describe the key 'stops' in your essay on philosophy: your topic, stance, and how you will argue for it – and refute other stances.

Don't hesitate to write it out as a step-by-step guide in the first or third person. For example: 'First, I will examine... Then, I will dispute... Finally, I will present….'

Need an example of an excellent introduction for a philosophy paper? You’ll be thrilled to know that we have one of our philosophy essay examples below!

• Present Your Key Arguments & Reflections

Philosophy papers require a fair share of expository writing. This is where you demonstrate your understanding of the topic. So, make your exposition extensive and in-depth, and don't omit anything crucial.

As for the rest of the main body, we've covered how to structure a philosophy essay above. In short, you'll need to present supporting arguments, anticipate objections, and address them.

Use your own words when writing a philosophy paper; avoid pretentious or verbose language. Yes, some technical philosophical terms may be necessary. But the point of a philosophical paper is to present your stance – and develop your own philosophy – on the topic.

• Don't Shy Away from Critical Ideas

Whenever you examine a philosophical theory or text, treat it with a fair share of criticism. This is what it means in practice – and how to structure a philosophy essay around your critical ideas:

• Pinpoint what the theory's or idea's strengths are and every valid argument in its support;
• See the scope of its application – perhaps, there are exceptions you can use as counterarguments;
• Research someone else's criticism of the theory or idea. Develop your own criticism, as well;
• Check if the philosopher already addressed those criticisms.
• Ponder Possible Answers to Philosophical Questions

Writing an essay in philosophy is, in fact, easier for some students as the topic can always have multiple answers, and you can choose any of them. However, this can represent an even tougher challenge for other students. After all, you must consider those possible answers and address them in the paper.

How do you pinpoint those possible answers? Some of them can come to your mind when you brainstorm, especially if you'll be writing about one of the Big Questions. Others will reveal themselves when you start reading other philosophers' works.

Remember to have arguments for and against each possible answer and address objections.

• Write a Powerful Conclusion

The conclusion is where you sum up your paper in just one paragraph. Reiterate your thesis and what arguments support it. But in philosophical writing, you can rarely have a clear, undebatable answer by the end of the paper. So, it's fine if your conclusion doesn't have a definitive verdict.

Here are a few tips on how to write a conclusion in a philosophy essay:

• Don't introduce new arguments or evidence in conclusion – they belong in the main body;
• Avoid overestimating or embellishing the level or value of your work;
• Best conclusions are obvious and logical for those reading the paper – i.e.; a conclusion shouldn't be surprising at all;
• Stay away from poorly explained claims in conclusion.

Philosophical Essay Example

Sometimes, it's better to see how it's done once than to read a thousand guides. We know that like no one else, so we have prepared this short philosophy essay example to show you what excellent philosophy papers look like:

Like this example? Wondering how to get a perfect philosophy essay as great as it is? You're in luck: you can leave " write my philosophy paper " request and buy online essay at EssayPro without breaking the bank! Keep in mind: this example is only a fraction of what our writers are capable of!

30 Philosophy Paper Topic Ideas

Philosophical writing concerns questions that don't have clear-cut yes or no answers. So, coming up with philosophy essay topics yourself can be tough.

Fret not: we've put together this list of 30 topics for philosophy papers on ethics and leadership for you. Feel free to use them as-is or tweak them!

15 Ethics Philosophy Essay Topics

Ethics deals with the question of right and wrong. So, if you're looking for philosophy essay topic ideas, ethics concerns some of the most interesting – and most mind-boggling – questions about human behavior.

Here are 15 compelling philosophy essay topics ethics has to offer you:

• Is starting a war always morally wrong?
• Would it be right to legalize euthanasia?
• What is more important: the right to privacy or national security?
• Is justice always fair?
• Should nuclear weapons be banned?
• Should teenagers be allowed to get plastic surgery?
• Can cheating be justifiable?
• Can AI algorithms behave ethically?
• Should you abide by an unfair law?
• Should voting become mandatory?
• When can the right to freedom of speech be limited?
• Is it the consumers' responsibility to fight climate by changing their buying decisions?
• Is getting an abortion immoral?
• Should we give animals their own rights?
• Would human gene editing be immoral?

15 Leadership Philosophy Essay Topics

You're lucky if you're tasked with writing a leadership philosophy essay! We've compiled this list of 15 fresh, unconventional topics for you:

• Is formal leadership necessary for ensuring the team's productivity?
• Can authoritative leadership be ethical?
• How do informal leaders take on this role?
• Should there be affirmative action for formal leadership roles?
• Is it possible to measure leadership?
• What's the most important trait of a leader?
• Is leadership an innate talent or an acquired skill?
• Should leadership mean holding power over others?
• Can a team function without a leader?
• Should you follow a leader no matter what?
• Is leader succession necessary? Why?
• Are leadership and power the same?
• Can we consider influencers contemporary leaders?
• Why do people follow leaders?
• What leadership style is the most ethical one?

7 Helpful Tips on Crafting a Philosophical Essay

Still, feeling stuck writing a philosophical essay? Here are seven more tips on crafting a good philosophy paper that can help you get unstuck:

• Write the way you would talk about the subject. This will help you avoid overly convoluted, poor writing by using more straightforward prose with familiar words.
• Don't focus on having a definitive answer by the end of your philosophical essay if your conclusion states that the question should be clarified further or that there are multiple answers.
• You don't have to answer every question you raise in the paper. Even professional philosophers sometimes don't have all the answers.
• Get straight to the point at the start of your paper. No need to warm up the reader – and inflate your word count.
• Avoid using quotes. Instead, explain the author's point in your own words. But if you feel it's better to use a direct quote, explicitly state how it ties to your argument after it.
• Write in the first person unless your assignment requires you to use the third person.
• Start working on your philosophical essay well in advance. However much time you think you'll need, double it!

7 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Philosophy Writing

Sometimes, knowing what you shouldn't do in a philosophical essay is also helpful. Here are seven common mistakes that often bring down students' grades – but are easily avoidable:

• Appealing to authority – in philosophy, strive to develop your own stance instead;
• Using convoluted sentences to appear more intelligent – instead, use simpler ways to deliver the same meaning;
• Including interesting or important material without tying it to your point – every piece of evidence and every idea should explicitly support your arguments or counterarguments;
• Inflating your word count without delivering value – in the writing process, it's crucial to 'kill your darlings';
• Making poorly explained claims – explicitly present reasons for or against every claim you include;
• Leaving core concepts undefined – explain what you mean by the words like 'free will' or 'existentialism' in the introduction;
• Worrying about being wrong – no one can be proven wrong in philosophy!

Realize that your draft contains those mistakes, and it's too late to fix them? Then, let us help you out! Whether you ask us, 'Fix my paper' or ' Write my paper from scratch,' our philosophy writers will deliver an excellent paper worth the top grade. And no, it won't cost you a fortune!

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/r/askphilosophy aims to provide serious, well-researched answers to philosophical questions.

The best-written papers in the tradition of analytic philosophy

What are, in your opinion, some of the best-written famous analytic philosophy papers, regardless of the topic? What are the papers which made you think: "This is the way these should be written" if there are any at all. I am mainly thinking of qualities such as clarity, the structure of the paper, the way that the arguments were presented in, and overall, the quality of the arguments, obviously. Simply the ones that made you say "This is some great philosophical work". I've seen topics on this sub in which people were discussing some of the "bad" writers (I remember Sellars and Dummet being mentioned). What are the good ones? The ones that really tend to write in the way it's supposed to be written, and that could be a good example for students to follow. Thanks!

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The best essay collections for proving how amazingly well-read you are

Hearing the word “essay” probably filled you with dread at school, because it generally meant you had to write one. Chances are, that’s changed. The best essay collections – by proper writers and critics, rather than students pulling all-nighters – aren’t just celebrated in the literary world. They’re kind of cool . The modern critic, dispatching sharp analyses of the social media age from their New York or Berlin flat, has become a cult figure.

Of course, the essay and the essayist long preceded the viral online article. The best writing in the tradition can be both inward- or outward-looking, but it has to have an inquisitive, speculative spirit – two of the books below have “suppose” in their title, after all. And, most importantly, the prose has to be faultless. Here’s our pick of the best essay collections, from undisputed classics to underappreciated gems.

For all Zadie Smith ’s talents and successes as a novelist, some in the literary world think her real strength is non-fiction. They have a strong case: Feel Free , Smith’s second essay collection, is full of superb writing. She’s razor-sharp at times, but also unafraid to confess genuine love and admiration for the subject at hand. The book and exhibition reviews are deft, but the highlights come with weirder subjects: a meditation on joy, in relation to ecstasy and British rave culture, and an improbable but brilliant comparison between Justin Bieber and the philosopher Martin Buber.

Glenn O’Brien – a friend of Madonna , Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat – was a fixture of the Manhattan party scene for decades and surely one of the coolest men of the 20 th century. He also happened to be a phenomenal writer. Intelligence for Dummies is the only available collection of his work, which was published in a range of magazines including GQ . His acid, witty thoughts on politics, culture and style are still fresh decades after the events they describe. One essay on the Taliban blowing up religious images veers, masterfully, into O’Brien musing that America’s advertising billboards should be replaced with abstract paintings.

No essay list could omit the Sacramento-born master of literary non-fiction. Though Joan Didion’s books have become slightly overplayed signifiers of cool, their quality can’t be denied. The White Album , her second essay collection, is an obvious choice but the right one. All the cliches about the coolness and analytic power of her prose are accurate; so too is her reputation for getting to the core of 1960s counterculture, best seen in the masterly title essay.

Since its foundation in 2004, n+1 has established itself as one of America’s (and the Anglosphere’s) best literary magazines. This compilation, edited by the critic Christian Lorentzen, explains why that reputation is deserved. Highlights it picks out from the magazine’s early years include a polemic against exercise, a wry dispatch from the Miami party scene, and an examination of America’s warring literary cultures. The subtitle, “Say What You Mean”, sums up the dominant attitude of unpretentious intellectualism.

This compilation, co-edited by eminent New Journalist (and later novelist) Tom Wolfe, helped solidify the characteristics of The New Journalism: essentially, non-fiction with all the flashy prose and detailed characterisation of a novel. It provides a thrilling overview of the best magazine reporting from that era, and Wolfe’s introductory essay is very insightful too.

Along with Didion, the other obligatory feature for this list. Orwell is now best known for two of his novels, 1984 and Animal Farm , but he spent far more of his writing career on non-fiction. This bulky complete edition of his essays is great to browse through. Sometimes Orwell’s wrestling with grand questions of geopolitics and English identity; other times, he’s outlining his ideal pub , or meditating on the tradition of rude postcards in England’s seaside towns. Though his style is famously unflashy, it’s never short of insight or humour.

‘Unflashy’ is a word not often in the vicinity of David Foster Wallace, though, whose essays are just as expansive as his novels. This is the first of his non-fiction collections, and it includes a few of his career highlights: an intense, borderline-hallucinatory account of his visit to the 1993 Illinois State Fair; an analysis of the life and philosophical predicament of a mediocre professional tennis player; and the title essay, his dispatch from a Caribbean cruise, which spawned an entire mini-genre of journalists going on cruises and being snarky about them.

This collection has a simple premise: each essay analyses a single sentence. The sources of those sentences range from centuries-old writers like Shakespeare and John Donne to modern ones like Hilary Mantel. Many of them are, funnily enough, from essays themselves, although one of book’s highlights comes when Dillon looks at a Vogue picture caption written by Joan Didion at the beginning of her career. (“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” Not bad.)

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, a couple years after James Baldwin’s debut novel. It’s since become one of the main books confirming his reputation as a pivotal 20 th -century writer. He’s eloquent and endlessly well-read, but the essays never feel airless – in fact, their dissection of race relations in America (and in Europe, where Baldwin spent much of his time) are often brimming with cold fury. Highlights include the title essay, about Baldwin’s dysfunctional childhood, and one about the very different cultural heritages of Black Americans and Black people in France.

Wonder why the cinemas are always filled with sequels and reboots? This book by the late Mark Fisher, one of the most influential cultural theorists of the 21 st century, explains why. Ghosts of My Life ranges over all kinds of terrain: Jimmy Savile, the electronic producer Burial, Drake , John le Carré, primetime British TV and more. Fisher’s overriding thesis – encapsulated in the term “hauntology” – is that culture has become too exhausted to imagine the future. Instead, we’re dogged by “lost futures” in the form of what old sci-fi imagined our world would look like.