• The Best Philosophy Books of All Time - Republic by Plato
  • The Best Philosophy Books of All Time - Dialogues and Natural History of Religion by David Hume
  • The Best Philosophy Books of All Time - On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  • The Best Philosophy Books of All Time - Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries by Mengzi
  • The Best Philosophy Books of All Time - Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Best Philosophy Books of All Time, recommended by Nigel Warburton

Over the past decade our philosophy editor, Nigel Warburton, has been interviewing philosophers asking them to recommend the best philosophy books. After hundreds of interviews, this is our list of the books that have come up again and again. It reveals if not the best philosophy books ever written, at least a collection of very important and influential books.

  • The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 - Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
  • The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 - The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic by Jean-Manuel Roubineau, Malcolm DeBevoise & Phillip Mitsis
  • The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 - Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality by David Edmonds
  • The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 - The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark
  • The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 - For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun by Rebecca Roache

The Best Philosophy Books of 2023, recommended by Nigel Warburton

The genre of philosophical biography is flourishing, as we pay attention not only to what philosophers said and wrote but also to how they lived and the intellectual context in which they developed their ideas. Nigel Warburton, our philosophy editor, picks out some of the best philosophy books of the year, from the man who lived in a storage jar in 5th century Athens to the latest contributions of cognitive science to our understanding of how we experience the world. Read more philosophy book recommendations on Five Books

  • Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon - Republic by Plato
  • Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon - Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
  • Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
  • Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon - On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  • Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon - Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon, recommended by Nigel Warburton

Even if you’ve never studied philosophy, it’s nice to be able to read a few books and get a sense of what it’s all about. Here, we asked our philosophy editor, Nigel Warburton, to talk us through five key works of Western philosophy—many of them in the public domain and available for free as ebooks—and explain why, despite one or two odd conclusions or quirky writing styles, they’ve played such an important role in expanding our understanding of the world.

  • The best books on The History of Philosophy - The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature by Pierre Hadot
  • The best books on The History of Philosophy - The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece by Geoffrey Lloyd & Nathan Sivin
  • The best books on The History of Philosophy - The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700 by Jonardon Ganeri
  • The best books on The History of Philosophy - Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution by William Newman
  • The best books on The History of Philosophy - Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy by Scott L. Pratt

The best books on The History of Philosophy, recommended by Justin E. H. Smith

Today, we think of scientists and philosophers as distinct, but it wasn’t always this way. Back when the Royal Society was founded in the 1660s, figures like Newton, Descartes and Boyle all thought of themselves as ‘natural philosophers’. Justin E. H. Smith, professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris, introduces us to what he sees as the real history of philosophy.