book of philosophical essays

1st Edition

Philosophical Essays

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First published in 1910, Philosophical Essays is one of Bertrand Russell’s earliest works and marks an important period in the evolution of thought of one of the world’s most influential thinkers. This selection of seven essays displays Russell's incisiveness and brilliance of exposition in the examination of ethical subjects and the nature of truth. Insightful and highly accessible, these essays are as illuminating today as they were on first publication.

Table of Contents

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was one of the most formidable thinkers of the modern era. A philosopher, mathematician, educational innovator, champion of intellectual, social and sexual freedom, and a campaigner for peace and human rights, he was also a prolific writer of popular and influential books, essays and lectures on an extensive range of subjects. Considered to be one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell is widely renowned for his provocative writings. These definitive works offer profound insights and forward-thinking perspectives on a changing western society progressively shaped, most significantly, by two world wars, the decline of British imperialism and an evolving moral landscape.

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Philosophical Essays, Volume 1

• Scott Soames

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Philosophical Essays, Volume 1: Natural Language: What It Means and How We Use It

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The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world’s foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics—including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

"Soames's work is of an exceptionally high quality, the selections made here are truly excellent, and the organization is well thought out. Having these papers available in this form is a great boon to scholars."—Stephen Neale, CUNY Graduate Center

"Since many of these important papers are relatively inaccessible, it is particularly useful to have them collected together, and Soames has done an excellent job of selecting and arranging them. These two volumes are really terrific."—Alex Byrne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, 5th Edition

ISBN: 978-1-394-19340-0

August 2024

Wiley-Blackwell

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

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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

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

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Philosophical Essays

Gottfried wilhelm von leibniz , roger ariew  ( translator ) , daniel garber  ( translator ).

366 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1716

About the author

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

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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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Philosophy.boat’s Newsletter

Five quotes that highlight the power of books

Philosophy.boat #47.

Hallo dear readers,

Last week we talked about five key lessons from Chinese philosophy and today we will talk about five quotes that highlight the power of books.

Let's dive in :)

Books are misunderstood in our world today. Most people find them boring and that's why they don't read any books in their entire life. This is because they have not realized the great power they have. Here are five quotes that highlight the power of books:

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) :

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

Bacon, an English philosopher and statesman, saw books as essential for personal and intellectual growth. He believed that reading enriches the mind and character, contributing to a person's completeness. Bacon argued that while reading expands knowledge, discussion prepares one to express and use this knowledge effectively. Writing, in turn, sharpens clarity of thought. His focus on these three elements highlights the important role of books in developing wisdom and enhancing intellectual abilities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) :

"A book is a delivery room for the birth of ideas."

Emerson, an American essayist and philosopher, saw books as fertile ground for new ideas and breakthroughs. He viewed them as catalysts for generating and sharing thoughts that can inspire and transform people and societies. Emerson’s view shows that books are not just stores of knowledge but active participants in the creative process, nurturing and producing new concepts and innovations.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) :

"Without books, the development of civilization would be impossible."

Nietzsche, a German philosopher known for critiquing traditional values and exploring existential themes, recognized the vital role of books in the evolution of human culture and society. He understood that books are not just a way to preserve and share knowledge but also a key force behind cultural and intellectual progress. Nietzsche's recognition of the essential nature of books highlights their importance in the ongoing development and change of civilization.

Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BCE) :

"Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."

The ancient Greek philosopher and Socrates' pupil Plato held great regard for the transformational potential of literature. He believed that books were essential to the development of human mind and creativity. Books arouse intellectual curiosity and impart knowledge, which in turn animates the mind and spirit. According to Plato's metaphorical language, books are essential for the growth of individual souls as well as the larger intellectual and philosophical landscape, enhancing our capacity for knowledge and creativity.

Cicero (106–43 BCE) :

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

Cicero, a Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, valued the role of books in human life. He believed that books are essential for the intellectual and moral strength of individuals and societies. Cicero compared a room without books to a soulless body, showing his belief that books add intellectual and spiritual richness to spaces. His view highlights that books are key to a meaningful life, adding depth to both personal and community experiences.

Until next time,

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Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism

Patrick Hassan, Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism , Cambridge University Press, 2023, 278 pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781009380287.

Reviewed by Julian Young, Wake Forest University and University of Auckland

A familiar way of writing a book about Nietzsche is to follow a particular topic through the corpus: art, religion, or truth, for instance. Patrick Hassan’s topic is pessimism. This is a good choice. Nothing is more central to Nietzsche than his “struggle” against the pessimism of his always revered “educator”, Arthur Schopenhauer. What is distinctive of Hassan’s discussion, however, is that he focusses not on Schopenhauer, but on the post-Schopenhauerian pessimists of whom Nietzsche had some knowledge: philosophers such as Julius Bahnsen, Eduard von Hartmann, and Philipp Mainländer. The confrontation between neo-Schopenhauerians such as these and critics such as Eugen Dühring constituted the “pessimism dispute” that endured from Schopenhauer’s death in 1860 until the end of the century. Though Nietzsche hardly even mentions such figures in the published texts—evidence of Nietzsche’s knowledge of them relies almost entirely on the  Nachlass— Hassan justifies this change of focus by quoting Frederick Beiser (9). Unless we study Nietzsche’s “dialogue” with such contemporaries, he claims, “Nietzsche, despite the vast literature about him, will remain largely unknown” (9). [1]

The book is divided into three parts corresponding to the three phases into which Nietzsche’s career is usually divided: an early Wagnerian phase, a middle, positivistic phase, and a final mature phase that one might think of as a synthesis of the two earlier phases.

Part I discusses Nietzsche’s initial engagement with pessimism in The Birth of Tragedy . [2] The form of pessimism it considers is an argument from description to evaluation. “Descriptive pessimism” claims that “life’s sufferings essentially outweigh life’s pleasures” (34), while “evaluative pessimism” concludes that “Life is not worth living; non-existence is preferable to existence” (21). The suppressed premiss is “axiological hedonism”: “The only thing good for its own sake is pleasure or the absence of pain” (227). Not only Schopenhauer but also Hartmann and Mainländer subscribe to the hedonic principle.

The Birth accepts the truth of descriptive pessimism, but rejects the evaluative conclusion. It approaches the problem through art. According to Schopenhauer’s quasi-Kantian metaphysics to which The Birth subscribes, the world of spatio-temporal individuality is a realm of mere appearance, behind which is hidden the single, genuinely real entity, “the primal unity”. Nietzsche claims that in the Greek tragic festival we are carried away by the hypnotic singing of the chorus and as a result penetrate the illusion of individuality. We “become one” with the primal unity and share in its “creative delight” in the world of appearance (89). As Hassan puts it, the tragic audience “experiences a rapturous dissolution of their individuality and takes up a certain third-person, cosmic perspective on life as a whole, akin to an “artist-god” looking at existence as if it were a painting of a battlefield, and each individual was a soldier depicted in the spectacle (BT 5)” (91). From this Nietzsche concludes that as, but only as, an “aesthetic phenomenon” is existence “justified” (91). In transcending individuality, “the primal source of all evil” (BT 10), we transcend pain. Pessimism ceases to be our problem.

Hassan calls this “ the artistic approach” (93: my emphasis) that The Birth takes to pessimism. This is odd since the whole point of the work is to explain the “Dionysian-Apollonian genius” (BT 5) that gave birth to Greek tragedy, a duality that never appears in Hassan’s discussion. In The Birth , there are, in fact, two kinds of art: the purely “Apollonian” art of Homer that covers over the horrors of life with a “veil” of glamorous illusion, and the art of the fifth-century tragedians. Here, while the singing of the Dionysian chorus gives us the “metaphysical comfort” of sensing our identity with the primal unity, the “healing balm” (BT 19) of Apollonian illusion make us incapable of understanding why we are comforted. The words and actions produce the “noble deception” (BT 21) that the world of individuals is the only real world, so that we exit the festival deceived into thinking that existence in the world of individuals is worth having (which implies that subjectively at least, it is worth having).

The problem with Hassan’s failure to recognise the element of Apollonian deception is that, as he presents Nietzsche, there is not even the appearance of a response to pessimism. On his account, life as the “artist god” is indeed enjoyable. But that is irrelevant to evaluative pessimism which claims that life as an individual (as one of the “soldiers” on the “battlefield”) is not worth having. And so the noble lie is an essential element in The Birth ’s “solution” to pessimism. Needless to say, it is not a very good solution, if only because smart people like Nietzsche cannot help seeing through the deception. This is why the “struggle” against pessimism has to continue.

Part II of the work focusses on Nietzsche’s middle period. In Human-All-Too-Human , its central work, Nietzsche rejects neo-Kantian metaphysics and turns instead to naturalism, positivism, and axiological non-cognitivism. Influenced by Dühring and Paul Rée, he decides that the question of whether life is worth living is not a question of fact: “the world is neither good nor evil” because “‘good’ and ‘evil’ possess meaning only when applied to men” (120). Value judgments are “projections” of feeling, the varying ways which “paint” the world of facts (113). The only cognitive information they disclose concerns the psychology of the judger. The issue between life affirmation and life denial thus reduces to the familiar glass of beer: half-empty or half-full, depending on one’s psychological disposition.

Part III of the book begins with The Gay Science in which, says Hassan, Nietzsche’s attitude to pessimism takes its final form. As Human-All-Too-Human suggests, pessimism is “not really a philosophical theory at all but rather a non-cognitive state rooted in and expressive of the adherent’s character” (155). This sets the stage for an inquiry into the difference between the life-denier’s and the life-affirmer’s character. Nietzsche’s claim is that while the pessimist’s life-denial is the expression of a sick, “degenerate” character, life-affirmation is the expression of psychic “health”. Though Hassan goes into great detail concerning the “degeneration theory” circulating among Nietzsche’s contemporaries, his presentation of pessimism as pathological is really just an elaboration of the commonsense knowledge that while an increase in psychic energy brightens the world, a decrease darkens it. After a good night’s sleep the world sparkles and our problems are trivial; infected by the flu, the world is black and our problems are insurmountable. Pessimism and pessimistic worldviews such as Christianity are, says Nietzsche, the products of a lack of energy, of exhaustion: “Weariness . . . creates all gods and afterworlds” (184). Nietzsche’s (non-physiological) account of weariness and vigour as character traits seems to me an elaboration of Plato’s claim that to achieve anything significant one must become “one man”. The vigorous, puissant person has disciplined his or her drives into a hierarchy under the command of a single “master-drive” (168), the weary pessimist is someone who is exhausted by the effort of trying to make the horses of the soul pull in the same direction.

This presentation of the pessimist as a negative role model is part of Nietzsche’s “project of life-affirmation” (197). The problem, however, is that Schopenhauer, the zestful, flute-playing eviscerator of Hegel is anything but a low-energy type. Recognising the problem, Nietzsche resorts to a desperate expedient: Schopenhauer played the flute; therefore Schopenhauer was “not a pessimist” (193). But, of course, Schopenhauer is not an exception: the philosophical pessimists in general are likely to be reasonably vigorous types—it takes a lot of energy to write a book—so it seems clear to me, if not to Hassan, that Nietzsche is on a losing wicket here. “Assassinating” (EH III 2) the pessimist’s character will not do; if it is to be defeated, philosophical pessimism must be accorded theoretical status and subjected to rational critique. [3]

Recall that, in the main, Nietzsche confronts pessimism in its hedonistic form: (1) life’s suffering outweighs its pleasures; (2) the only thing that makes life worth living is pleasure; therefore (3), life is not worth living. Hassan says that the “mature” Nietzsche never questions (1) (a claim to which I shall return). Instead, he attacks (2). There are “sources of value other than hedonism on the basis of which life can be found worth living” (228–9). Specifically, there is “greatness”, high, “history-shaping” achievement (245). Stereotypically, the lives of great individuals—Beethoven, van Gogh, tortured poets in general—are filled with suffering. Yet at least some of that suffering is “constitutive” of their greatness. Just as winning a race would not be a great achievement without stiff competition, so writing a “brilliant symphony” would not be a great achievement without “resistance”, i.e., suffering, without the achievement being, both subjectively and objectively, very difficult (248–9). I am sceptical of the analogy between athletics and art—Mozart’s Symphony no. 41 was called the “Jupiter Symphony” because it seemed (and perhaps was) tossed off with the effortless ease of a god—but Hassan is surely right that (at least in the case of military heroes such as Caesar and Napoleon), suffering is constitutive of their stature. And so since we allegedly admire great individuals more than any other while recognising that their lives often contain more pain than pleasure, greatness is a value we recognise as making a life worth living even though it contains more pain than pleasure.

One of the problems with this response to pessimism is that it seems to confine the possibility of a worthwhile life to the great, leaving the rest of us to live lives that are actually worthless.

Nietzsche deals with this problem, says Hassan, by allowing ordinary people to find derivative value in their lives either by committing themselves to the production of greatness (someone other than Goethe needs to wash his socks) or by basking in the reflected glory of the great (234–5). This is Nietzsche’s “aristocratism” that most people will find repellent—Hassan hastens to emphasise that his book is “wholly exegetical” (263). What he misses, however, is a quite different element in the “mature” Nietzsche’s response to pessimism according to which all of us, great and non-great alike, can, in fact, live worthwhile lives.

To become healthy life affirmers we must, says Nietzsche, become “poets of our lives” (GS 299). We must (long story short) narrate our lives as Bildungsromanen , stories of progress towards a life-defining goal in which the traumatic events—“the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to arrive, the straining of an ankle”—turn out to be things that have a “profound significance and use precisely for us” so that they “must not be missing” (GS 277). In a well-narrated life, traumas turn out to be causal contributions to (or possibly constitutive of) one’s life-defining goal: it was the injury to the ankle, perhaps, that turned me from the nasty, brutish, and short life of professional football to the wonderful life of professional philosophy. Here, the key concept is not “greatness” but rather “meaning”. “If you have your ‘ why? ’ of life”, says Nietzsche, “you can put up with almost any ‘ how? ’: man does not strive for pleasure ( Glück ); only the Englishman does that” (TI I 12).

This critique of hedonistic utilitarianism is clearly a rejection of the second premiss in the pessimist’s argument (only pleasure makes life worth living). But I think that Nietzsche also rejects the first premiss (life’s suffering outweighs its pleasures). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra , the hero is asked by his “animals” whether he is “searching” for happiness. “What matters happiness to me”, he replies, “I have my work”—his mission to redeem humanity. “But”, reply the animals, “do you not dwell in a sky-blue lake of happiness?” Smiling at their unexpected perspicacity, Zarathustra admits that he does (Z IV 1). This is the “paradox of happiness”. As psychologists increasingly recognise, happiness is achieved not by its “pursuit” but is rather the by-product of absorbed dedication to a project, best of all, to a life-defining project. This, however, is precisely what is achieved in a life of meaning, a life constructed and lived as a Bildungsroman . And so—barring some unsurmountable tragedy—the life of meaning is a happy life. What follows from this is that Nietzsche has an impressive, and in my view conclusive, argument against descriptive pessimism. Most well-constructed lives will be, on balance, happy—i.e., “pleasurable”—lives, [4] in which traumas are all “redeemed” (TI IX 49) as essential parts of a happy whole. Barring catastrophe, those who live lives of suffering will be those who narrate their lives badly, or not at all.

If one is interested in nineteenth-century German intellectual history, Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism is a fascinating book. The reader will have noticed, however, that despite Hassan’s claim that without a close examination of Nietzsche’s “dialogue” with Schopenhauer’s epigones he remains “largely unknown”, I have managed to summarise most of the content of his book with virtually no reference to the epigones. Apart from the treatment of Hartmann’s philosophy as a joke in the second Untimely Mediation (which Hassan does not discuss) and two other glancing references to him, GS 357 is the only place in which the epigones appear in the published texts. This raises the question of why, if there really was a “dialogue”, Nietzsche never allowed it to become public. He was, after all, far from unwilling to interact with those he recognised as “significant others”—Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Spinoza, Goethe, Darwin, Wagner, and, of course, Schopenhauer—in the published texts. In GS 357 he says that while Schopenhauer is an essential figure who really understood what pessimism was, neither Hartmann, Bahnsen, not Mainländer did—and are thus discountable. I have not been convinced that he was wrong about this.

[1] Frederik C. Beiser. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12.

[2] Abbreviations: BT The Birth of Tragedy , trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 1999); EH Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ , Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols , trans. J. Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005); GS The Gay Science , trans. J. Neuhoff (Cambridge University Press, 2001); TI Twilight of the Idols , Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra , both in The Portable Nietzsche trans. W. Kaufmann. Numerals refer to sections not pages. I have made minor modifications to some of the translations.

[3] Hassan recognises that Nietzsche indeed provides such a critique but sometimes (though not always) treats it as a falling away from the official and best view, as something Nietzsche “often cannot help himself” from doing (262).

[4] As the above reference to the English utilitarians indicates, neither the Germans nor Nietzsche draw a sharp distinction between “happiness” and “pleasure”. The translation of Glück —usually “happiness”—as “pleasure” is Walter Kaufmann’s.

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Rachel Kushner on Crafting a Philosophical Spy Novel For an Age of Environmental Anxiety

Jane ciabattari talks to the author of “creation lake”.

Rachel Kushner’s latest, Creation Lake , is a brilliantly provocative mix—part sardonic espionage novel, part philosophic commentary on human prehistory, part exploration of the evolution of French activist movements from the 1960s through end-stage capitalism. Her narrator, code named Sadie, is a sensual, cynical undercover agent privately contracted to surveil and infiltrate Le Moulin, a radical eco-activist collective in Southwestern France. Her point of entry? Bruno Lacombe, their mentor, who is exploring life in caves, positing via email a theory that the Neanderthal would have been a better path forward than Homo sapiens. It is a thrillingly original, eerily prescient novel. She was in Southern California, I was in Northern California, for our leisurely late-summer email conversation.

Jane Ciabattari: How have these recent years of pandemic and ongoing conflicts affected your life, your work, the writing of and launch of your new novel?

Rachel Kushner: Life’s streams meet a person where they are, in their own current, and I’m into middle age and bewitched and pleased by the world and determined to make art and puff on joy (I don’t smoke). The pandemic affected people so differently and to be honest I don’t think of it much; if I do, it is out of deep concern for kids who were stuck in bad situations while their schools were closed, and I wonder about the future impact from that. My own child did fine, because he was born into a middle-class family that could weather the pandemic without any real hitches; he mostly went fishing in the lakes of our manmade creation: the reservoir system northeast of here, in the San Gabriel Mountains.

There are other things to say, such as about how disaster capitalism sprang into action and the pandemic accelerated certain dystopic features of contemporary life, but also that there was a thrilling mass movement in the summer of 2020. But where we are and where we are going isn’t clear to me. The war, which I believe you refer to, if that is even the right word for it—seems horribly one-sided, and to have no strategy or goal beyond more war, maybe permanent war. But this question reminds me that I tend to plumb ideas that are under what’s topical, perhaps harder to hear, and yet, to me, resonant and relevant. In this case, who we are, where we have come from, where we are going, how to live with grace and in harmony, and questions of nature, of betrayal and nihilism and truth. But there is, alas, a topical component: some of what I wrote about in the novel has kind of erupted, with farmers and protestors battling police in rural France.

JC: What drew you to take on the spy thriller as a shape for this novel?

RK: It was a process—the novel’s shape or nod to genre was not at all the first thing that sparked what became the book. I had a world—young people who had decamped from Paris to live communally in a remote outpost—and a conflict—their collision course with the French state—and I had this idea for an elder of theirs, who has rejected civilization as the only recourse, as he sees it, to the modern world and its self-elimination, but I didn’t have someone who could report on these, who had occasion to be in this world, and access to the elder, Bruno. I worked for three years, thinking, trying things out, and honestly nothing was really working.

And then I started over, one day, with a sentence that became the first line of the novel: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.” And suddenly I knew that while this was my elder, Bruno, who is against civilization, his ideas were being conveyed to the reader by someone else, someone who is not sympathetic to those ideas, and might even ridicule them. Very quickly I started to see this woman, and to understand that she’s working in the shadowy world of privately contracted surveillance, and that she would attempt to entrap the young people. Her past became, for me, a series of her prior dissimulations. Her personal autobiography, a set of guises. It was so much fun.

JC: Did you have particular books in mind as models? And, no spoiler intended, did you always intend  Creation Lake  to end this way?

RK: For the spy aspect, I was definitely influenced by the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, even if I don’t consider my novel to belong within the genre, although I did borrow certain aspects. Manchette is the master of the full-blown fiasco as denouement. He is a high bar. I aimed for my own version of such. How it would shake out wasn’t entirely clear to me until I got there. In truth, I’d had an idea that things would end quite differently for my narrator. It was going to be, in effect, a much meaner book, and then again, a more “moral” book, where bad deeds would be punished. It’s less mean, and also, less moralizing. The ending was really pleasurable when I got there. It brought me an intense and rare feeling, almost hallucinogenic. To arrive at the end of a novel is to arrive at a destination I could never have seen without having written the thing. To finish is to “traverse the fantasy,” as they say in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In terms of pace and rhythm, Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God was strangely critical. I kept looking at the first few pages. His chapters are really short, like a page and half, and indelible. I wanted to produce an effect like that book had on me, and make chapters that would be kind of spring-loaded. Cormac’s tone is absurdist—the novel is about a hillbilly necrophiliac—but it’s elegiac, too. It also takes place in caves. I haven’t unraveled the link, there.

There were lots of books that inflected what I was doing, but in terms of an espionage novel featuring a homespun philosopher living in a cave, there weren’t any models, although maybe DeLillo’s The Names was there on the horizon as a novel by a mentor that deals with very deep history and its eruption to the surface of a contemporary realm. Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq came out while I was writing Creation Lake , and here I was trying to write a novel with key scenes concerning the struggles of French farmers, and Houellebecq had just published a rather hilarious novel that dealt to some degree with this subject. For a moment I felt defeated, until I recognized certain possibilities that were right there in front of me, and exploited them.

JC: What’s the process through which you settled on your title?

RK: The title came sort of late, but immediately seemed right. It’s from outside the book, rather than inside it. Some titles are a small piece of the whole that stands for the whole, in this case no. In truth it auditioned itself in the car, while driving with my husband, who long ago was friends with this Los Angeles band called the Movies that should have been famous but wasn’t. They have a song called Creation Lake. But the song has no relation to this book. I took only those two words and they suddenly seemed perfect for the world of this novel.

Creation: the great mystery of origins, of how it all began, the obsession with some sense of an origin, and the nagging idea that somewhere along the way, we took a wrong turn, and when? How far back? And Lake: water, the blessed and elemental substance of life, which no grim technological “progress” can replace. And lake as primordial reserve, the original water. The deep secret of life on planet earth, a reserve that plenishes and replenishes. Creation here could also refer to Sadie and her guises and fictions. And Bruno and his mythmaking. As a title, for me it had vitality, it could travel. I still love it.

JC:  Your narrator’s “secret agent” name is Sadie. She’s working for an anonymous client, after messing up a government agency contract. Her mission: to infiltrate Le Moulin, a radical group led by Pascal Balmy intending to sabotage a corporate water project. Her voice is knowing, ironic, in control. How did you develop this character?

RK: She came to me as I wrote the first page of the book. After that first line about Neanderthals and depression, I realized, as I mentioned above, that someone was conveying Bruno’s ideas—an intermediary. At first I was borrowing permission from the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil , and the narrator’s tone, a woman as intermediary of a shadowy man: “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness.” So mysterious. I love the double valence in that film, of the woman who speaks, and the man (a fictional creation of Marker’s, an alter ego) whose letters she conveys. I decided I was going to write Bruno as someone who could only communicate through the intermediary of a woman.

But very quickly I realized the woman would pull back and editorialize, and say, Wait a minute, Neanderthals? She meant harm, it became clear to me, and a few pages in, I understood that she would go in to surveil and disrupt the world inside this novel, and that many if not most of her views would be 180 degrees from my own. I did borrow some features from a couple of scenarios I’d seen take place in real life, in cases where undercover agents were spying on leftists and ended up entrapping them, or otherwise taking certain liberties, and experiencing blowback, then disappearing into the private sector. I even had a glimpse of the prosecution’s discovery in one of those cases, had seen people I knew being photographed secretly in profile as they walked down a city street, and I had wondered, stunned, What kind of person would do this sort of thing? Sadie—or so she claims is her name—is my answer.

JC: Sadie has entered into an affair with an unsuspecting Lucien Dubois, after an encounter at a bar in Paris, where he thinks he’s meeting her randomly, not by her careful planning. As  Creation Lake begins, she is driving to his family’s manor in a wooded area of the Guyenne Valley and settling in with a hilltop vantage from which she can see the entire valley. Why is she with Lucien? Because he can connect her to Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin. The Guyenne, where Le Moulin is based, is known for caves holding evidence of early humans, including prehistoric paintings, and also massive reservoirs of water. How did you establish this setting for  Creation Lake ?

RK: The Guyenne is a name I dusted off and borrowed that for several hundred years was the name of a province of southwestern France and included some regions I know quite well, and where I spend part of every summer. There are caves all over southwestern France, and the area where we go has a lot of them, some famous ones with art, but mostly just caves with a barred grate that some farmer might have a key to, or that are covered by a metal lid and on public land, if you know how and where to find them. I don’t go into those caves.

My son is a caving expert and the last two summers guided French children into them at a summer camp in the department Lot. But I know the look and feel and natural elements of the above-ground world of the Guyenne, as I depicted it. The rivers. The social atmosphere. The difficulty of farming. The physical beauty. The environment of these rural agricultural fairs and the old farmers on their antique tractors. Also the almost American-style insanity of a European tractor pull. I kind of invented this idea that the pitched battle would be over water, and these “megabasins,” which I’d seen referred to on French news sites. But I didn’t anticipate what a real issue this would become, in the world outside my novel. But I often think of the world as merely the final outer dimension of novels, the substance that holds them in place, like the floor on which a sculpture sits, as if reality merely exists to support fiction.

JC: Part of Sadie’s back story is that she is from Priest Valley. It’s a wink of a location, a signpost, a deserted place she glimpsed once on a drive past and stashed away as an origin story. It’s also part of the scenery of her most recent operation, when a federal agency employed her to involve a young animal liberation activist in an act of sabotage, pursuing her higher-ups’ “drive to prove that eco-activists were terrorists.” Her mission fails, she’s looking for work, moves into the private sector in Europe. Priest Valley echoes throughout the book. What does it represent for you?

RK: There’s a place on highway 198 called that and it’s very beautiful. It’s green. It’s relatively remote. It’s just what you might imagine when you hear those words, Priest Valley, but no one lives there any longer, there’s just one collapsed building. And few use that route, which is a connector between the central Salinas Valley and the coast. The figure of the priest is kind of essential in this book. I was thinking a lot about social environments and this tripartite structure, from the French scholar Georges Dumézil, of “priest, peasant, and warrior.” There are various priests in the book: Pascal, Bruno, and maybe Jean Violaine.

Even ancient man, as a romanticized figure, is a kind of priest. If clad only in animal skins, still we look to him as if he’s in the vestments of wisdom, as if he’s closer to the source, the root of us. There are also some peasants, both historic and present-day. A warrior, who steps up, to Sadie’s glee, in the form of Burdmoore, the American. Priest and Valley together as a phrase, to my ear, is an Edenic place that has the beauty of unharmed nature and the ascetic clarity of monks. And if priests are attended by peasants and warriors, then you have life in the round, or least a novel in the round.

JC: Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin are a radical farming collective of climate activists who are not unwilling to use violence as a tactic. In recent years in western France groups like  Soulèvements de la Terre  (SLT or “Earth Uprisings”) have been involved in violent protests about giant water reservoirs that would privatize water resources. Not unlike Le Moulin’s sabotaging of earth-moving equipment at the site of a massive industrial reservoir being built not far from their headquarters, to irrigate the megabasins for corporate owned farms (“I had seen this corn,” Sadie muses, “vast fields of green, sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon”). (Great description; I’ve driven past those Nebraska “cornfields.”) Did SLT and others like it in France and now in the rest of Europe inspire Le Moulin? What research was involved in developing this element of your narrative?

RK: To me there’s a quite clear distinction between violence and the sabotage of property . I don’t believe it’s possible to commit an act of violence against property. And I see no evidence, as I look over my narrator’s shoulder at the people she’s surveilling, of a willingness on their part to use violence. They are coy and do not admit anything to her. They do seem comfortable with sabotage as a tactic, but that doesn’t seem so extreme to me. When Sadie suggests violence, in keeping with her mission as an agent provocateur, she only suggests it to one person, one of the Moulinards, whose reaction I would not want to give away, should someone be reading me for plot (hard to imagine, but then again, why not?). She early on deduces that Pascal has rather romantic ideas about militancy and violence, and very likely no close-up experience of it. The strange thing about physical violence is how different it is in person, as it’s happening, from what one might imagine about it. That’s my own experience of it, at least, that it’s horrible and traumatic. My narrator, meanwhile, is someone who suggests she has an intimate capacity for it.

In any case, I’m so glad you mentioned Les Soulèvements de la terre , which were only kind of getting organized around the time I was completing this novel but now seem to be a movement with serious momentum. That all was happening as I was finishing my novel, in 2022, or at least SLT was not really yet on my own radar then. So it was kind of strange how this unfolded, that some of the battles over these megabasins in a novel seem kind of similar to what’s happened in actual France.

I had chosen the megabasin as a flashpoint issue in the region where my characters were based for reasons of personal familiarity with farming in places where the rivers are relied upon for irrigation, and climate crisis has made that a challenge, meanwhile everyone is suddenly growing corn, which requires huge amounts of water, because it’s the only way to really make a living, or that seems to be the case in some regions, like the Dordogne. And any monocrop has a kind of post-human energy, the sense it is replacing crops that are about life and sustaining it, with crops that are only about profit and sustaining it.

After I finished my book, I kept finding stuff online about these pitched battles taking place in rural areas over the issue of water and megabasins. It was to some degree a coincidence, or maybe Bruno’s second sight was loaned to me to get a very small peek at the future? Being underground, he has a better understanding than I ever did, about water, and how it sluices down into the earth and is filtered and stored there rather ingeniously.

But the question of resistance, and collective action, and these kind of battles with the state and movements like Les Soulèvements de la terre , there’s a long history of this in France. I looked at the ZAD, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the movement in the Susa Valley to prevent the construction of a high-speed rail line, and the book of oral histories that Verso published about these movements, The ZAD and noTAV. But also, spending time in rural France, one is aware of the history of the Larzac, which was occupied in the 1970s by hippies and farmers and clergy to stop the building of a military base. There’s also Tarnac, which Sadie mentions as another commune, but in the Corrèze, which was raided in 2008, initiating a long court case against some of its members, creating quite a saga, before all the charges were eventually dropped.

JC: We know Bruno Lacombe’s voice only through Sadie’s secret reading of his emails to Le Moulin. It’s a steady beat in your narrative, beginning with Bruno’s origin theories, his “fanatical belief” in the Neanderthals (“Thals,” as he dubs them), a failed species who had very large brains, were good at math, did not enjoy crowds, had strong stomachs and sturdy bones, and, he believes, might have been superior to Homo sapiens. He sees the Neanderthal traces in DNA as a precious heirloom from “before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.” Bruno, the former 1968 radical relocated to the quiet countryside, represents the thinker behind the activists. How did you build this character, his quirks, theories, interpretations of the past?

RK: It’s hard for me to say at this point how Bruno evolved, before the collapse of my methods into a single character. He started as someone who had retreated to the countryside in the 1970s, in the wake of the failures of mass movements in the late 1960s to spark large-scale revolt. Maybe the rural populations are the heart of an authentic French radicalism, was the idea. Not just Bruno’s but a generation’s.

The peasant revolts in southwestern France make for bracing history. And these same places were active strongholds of the Resistance movement against the Nazis. The caves have played a role, for many hundreds of years, in various forms of retreat and resistance. Bruno I saw as someone who no longer believes in revolution and instead is trying to revolutionize consciousness, to change it. A lot of the book is about this so I’m hesitant to summarize it. But he came to me almost unbidden, after the first glimpse of him, deep in his cave, tuning in to the voices of ancient people as one might listen to shortwave radio (I used to be into shortwave radio, once upon a time). I felt he was real and I started to mark out his style of letter writing, even as the obnoxious Sadie is interrupting here and there to pull back and question his assertions.

I guess it even started as a kind of joke to say that the wrong turn Man took wasn’t the agricultural revolution, but much earlier, like 25 thousand years earlier, when there were various strains of human in Europe and Asia (and Africa too, where it turns out Neanderthals migrated), and the Homo sapiens somehow came to dominate with his appetite for large crowds, his efficient method of hunting game, his insistence on making art about it, and his rude vanquishing of everybody else, or so it would seem.

Once Bruno started expressing his ideas on things, it all took on a life of its own. It didn’t at all seem like a joke to me. He’s a man who has seen a lot, has been through wild hopes and bitter disappointments, had his entire family murdered by the Nazis, was an orphan who washed up on the streets of Paris, took to a life of crime, then of reading, then of radical politics, later lost a child. He has seen the world plunged into chaos, and he holds onto his own tenderness toward people, his own utopian values, as his main achievement in life.

I admire gentle people. I think tenderness is one of most holy and rare qualities. In terms of Bruno’s retreat from civilization, I was vaguely inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Camatte, but only in the most surface way, and not at all for the hue and style of Bruno’s ideas, which don’t have a source outside me. Some of his early biographical history is inspired by Jean-Michel Mension, who was a close associate of Guy Debord and wrote a memoir that I find really mysterious, even as it is simple and short. A Soviet scholar named Boris Porshnev, who wrote about seventeenth-century French peasant revolts and was cited by Michel Foucault on this subject, also later wrote two studies of “crypto-zoology,” cataloguing sitings of various strains of “Sasquatch” and what he believes are Neanderthals still living in his time (the 1960s is when he wrote about them) was kind of inspiring.

I mean, I have the books and have thumbed them, and I find it fascinating that Porshnev wrote a legitimate work of history about peasant uprisings and then plunged into crypto-zoology, a rather wild world of bold speculation, complete with drawings, charts and graphs. But really Bruno is not based on anyone. He’s his own man.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

RK: I just wrote an eleven-thousand-word article on the world of nostalgia drag racing and hot-rodding culture in America. It took several months of reporting plus all summer to write and was incredibly pleasurable from start to finish. In terms of fiction, I have two different ideas I’m mulling, but I need to get back into a more private headspace to pursue them. I also want to get a bit of hindsight on my own novel, assess what I’ve done before starting something new. Even as part of me thinks it’s better to just keep going, run, don’t look back, keep on running and let others sort out what you’ve made.

__________________________________

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Jane Ciabattari

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Book Reviews

'i just keep talking' is a refreshing and wide-ranging essay collection.

Martha Anne Toll

Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School . Painter’s latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon.

Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Author examines 'the history of white people'.

Painter’s The History of White People combines scholarship with readability to prove that “whiteness” is a relatively newly created sociological construct. Slavery has been around for millennia, as has war and conquering peoples, but whiteness, with its bizarre, insidious, and pervasive myths about racial superiority, dates from around the 15th century forward. The concept of whiteness is entangled with America’s mendacious justifications for its capture and trade in human beings, and the terrible, lasting consequences of chattel slavery.

Painter has been clear that she stands on the shoulders of others in naming whiteness as a construct. What makes The History of White People indispensable is that it collects the historical antecedents of whiteness in a compelling narrative, and calls out to readers, including myself, the need to unlearn whiteness as a norm, even — and especially — if it is an unconscious norm.

Author Interviews

'old in art school': an mfa inspires a memoir of age.

As Painter wound down from a full academic load at Princeton, she obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art. In Old in Art School, as well as this current volume, she recounts the putdowns and hazing she suffered from fellow art students and her art professors, just as The History of White People was hitting the bestseller lists. Painter acknowledges that book’s commercial success but does not hide her bitterness that it did not win any major prizes.

Painter’s tour through her life and interests makes for a fascinating journey. To introduce her essay collection, Painter writes, “My Blackness isn’t broken… Mine is a Blackness of solidarity, a community, a connectedness….” She grew up in an intellectual family in the Bay Area amidst the burgeoning Black power movement. Her studies took her to Ghana and Paris, before completing her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard.

Painter started making art at an early age. She threads that interest through the essays, wondering what would have happened if her professional life had started with art, instead of as a scholar.

Code Switch

Is beauty in the eyes of the colonizer.

Painter’s captivating mixed media illustrations in I Just Keep Talking speak to injustice. She combines words that blister — “same frustrations for 25 years” (a work from 2022), with blocks of color and figurative representations. I felt drawn in by these visual pieces with their trenchant messages. “This text + art is the way I work, the way I think,” she writes. In Painter’s hands, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Painter’s essays pose critical questions. She will not accept received wisdom at face value, refuses the status quo, and freely offers her expert opinions. The pieces in this book address such wide topics as the meaning of history and historiography; America’s false, rose-colored-glasses-interpretation of slavery; the appalling absence of Black people from America’s story about itself; how and where feminism fits in; southern American history; the white gaze; and visual culture.

She takes a hard look at Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy concerning Black people and slavery, and compares his viewpoint to that of Charles Dickens, who toured the U.S. 15 years after Jefferson died. Audiences cooled to Dickens after he “excoriate[d] Americans for…tolerating the continued existence of enslavement by shrugging their shoulders, saying nothing can be done on account of ‘public opinion.’”

Here are the new books we're looking forward to this fall

Painter was onto Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas well before Professor Hill delivered her explosive testimony at his confirmation hearing. In a chapter called “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” Painter delivers a withering takedown of Thomas’ manipulation of gender stereotypes to advantage himself.

Painter dates her essays and provides extensive endnotes, but I wanted more information about which essays had been previously published and which, if any, derived from unpublished journal entries. I wondered particularly about the shorter, less annotated pieces, which I could imagine her writing to develop analyses for longer efforts (though only speculation on my part).

The variety in length and scholarly sophistication is refreshing in this collection. Each entry deals with topics that are sadly as relevant today as they have been throughout America’s history.

Please keep talking Nell Painter, and we’ll keep listening.

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Martha Anne Toll is a D.C.-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses , won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One , is due out May 2025.

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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Everyday AI > Write your next book with AI help

Write your next book with AI help

Have a book idea that you’ve been putting off writing? Whether you’re looking to start your first book or need a helping hand with your tenth, learn how to use AI as your book-writing helper to get your words out to the world.

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AI can be a great resource for writing three-dimensional characters with depth. Start by describing the current characters you have in mind. List their personality traits, backgrounds, and story roles (protagonist, antagonist , supporting character) in your AI prompt. Then, ask for suggestions on how you can deepen your characters’ development, such as portraying their inner motivations, values, and relationships with other characters. Try doing AI character research with questions like, “Based on this character’s profile, how do you think they would react under high-pressure situations?”

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If your book takes place in a certain time period, you’ll want a strong research foundation rooted in fact. Turn to AI to gather information on historical events, societal norms, fashion, technology, and language from a particular era. Let’s say you’re working on a book that takes place during the Regency era. You can prompt AI with questions like, “What were common social customs and class structures during the Regency period in London?” or “Tell me about popular architecture and fashion styles during the Regency era in London, and provide resources to continue my research.”

Some worlds we want to recreate require a strong foundation in science to make them believable. If you’re working on a science fiction novel, start by telling AI the scientific elements involved in your world-building, whether your novel takes place on a made-up exoplanet or a dystopian society that extends far into the future. For example, if you’re writing the former, you could ask, “What scientific challenges would a human colony face on an exoplanet that resembles Earth, but has twice the gravity?”

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Ready to get to work with AI book-writing help? Head on over to Copilot or read more tips on ways to use AI in everyday life .

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