The Best Philosophy Books of 2024

Has 2024 been a good year for philosophy books?

It’s been a good year in the sense that some very good books have been published, but it hasn’t been a golden year. There weren’t hundreds of outstanding philosophy books to choose between for the 2024 selection. I don’t know whether that’s a delayed effect of Covid, something that has happened to me as a critic of philosophy books, or if there is some other explanation. But that is certainly my impression. We haven’t been inundated with really amazing philosophy books.

That’s interesting. But you’re satisfied with this selection of five?

Oh yes. Some great books were published. I’ve heard there will be a flurry of interesting books coming through next year.

Well, talk us through your 2024 philosophy book recommendations. Let’s start with Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People? Am I saying that right—Berg-son?

Berg-son. Emily is Anglo-French, and she has the perfect pronunciation of the name, not how English people pronounce it. Not that they pronounce his name very often, because Bergson is not well known in the UK and America, although he is still well known in France.

Actually, in this biography, Emily gives some possible explanations for that. One is that Bertrand Russell absolutely hated Bergson, was very dismissive of his philosophy, possibly because Bergson was such a popular public speaker. He eclipsed Bertrand Russell in that in some ways. He was very much a public philosopher. Bergson, as Emily discusses, was responsible for the first recorded traffic jam in Broadway in New York when he spoke there. He was that popular! People used to hang onto the windowsills outside the lecture hall, ears pressed against the glass trying to hear what he was saying.

So even though he doesn’t look charismatic, he was an extremely charismatic speaker, though sadly no recordings of his lectures exist. Something else that Emily brings out is that he had many, many woman followers. Perhaps this was due to his more poetic approach to philosophy, the language he used, and the openness to hinting at ideas rather than pinning them down in a strict, analytical way. This made him an appealing figure to a general audience, and particularly to women.

Maybe you could give our—primarily Anglophone—audience a brief introduction into the key ideas or arguments that Bergson made.

Okay, so one of his most famous ideas has to do with time. He talked about the notion of durée, which is sometimes translated as ‘duration’ but more or less equates to ‘lived time,’ which is felt time, and very differently from clock time which is divided into equal length units and measured strictly.

He thought that a lot of discussion of time absolutely neglected the most important thing about time, in that it’s something that we live within, not measure, as it were. That’s quite a crude summary, but his notion of durée was in some ways a plea for acknowledging the subjective experience of time in an age of obsessive measurement and quantification. It certainly was influential and, for example, could have had some influence on the best man at his wedding, Marcel Proust.

Proust!

They were distant relatives. Proust was the younger of the two. Proust, according to Emily, was at pains to distance himself from the ideas of Bergson. Because Bergson was so well known at the time, and because people knew of their relationship, the novelist was frightened of his work being thought to be derivative of Bergson’s in his approach to memory and time in Remembrance of Things Past. And there are similarities and probably more influence than Proust suggested.

Bergson was also very interested in evolution, and in the latest developments in science of his day too. He was a polymath. As a young man he was, as emerges from this book, a very brilliant mathematician; but he’s usually thought of as at more poetic end of philosophy.

I’m no expert on Bergson. What I know about Bergson, I’ve learned from Emily, and I feel that, having read this book, I know enough to approach some of Bergson’s writing in a way that I didn’t before. But I wouldn’t want to summarise Bergson’s ideas only to get them wrong. So I recommend readers to go and read Emily’s book to get a foothold there.

“It’s been a good year in the sense that some very good books have been published, but it hasn’t been a golden year”

She’s a reliable source. Her PhD was on Bergson. But what I love about the book is she’s a great writer with a light touch. She finds ways of telling stories and relating ideas and thinkers and thoughts and social events that are completely compelling. This book has been very widely reviewed and universally praised. She’s just broken into the publishing world with this, and I expect she’ll write other biographies or philosophically-tinged books after this. It is a really significant debut and she is a writer to watch.

I have to say I’ve got a slight vested interest, because I commissioned Emily to write a few essays for Aeon magazine that led to this book being commissioned, so I’m not completely disinterested. But The New York Times, Washington Post, TLS, and many of the major reviewing media have written very enthusiastically about the book. John Banville selected it as one of his books of the year for New Statesman as well.

That’s a wonderful first recommendation. Perhaps next we could talk about Edith Hall’s Facing Down the Furies. It’s a book with philosophical aspects but drawn from personal experience. Perhaps you would tell us more.

Edith Hall is a very interesting writer and thinker. She’s a Classicist and she’s a philosopher. She’s an Aristotle enthusiast.

Previously she’s appeared on Five Books to discuss the best Aristotle books.

She also writes about poetry. She seems to publish the book almost every six months.

This is a very personal one. It’s a mixture of autobiography, family memoir, analysis of Greek tragedy, philosophy and confession. It’s a book about suicide that arises from her own family history of suicide.

I think her great grandfather, mother and first cousin all died by suicide.

And Edith herself talks about her own suicidal ideation at various points. She’s open about having been depressed and having seriously considered suicide herself. The big theme of the book is not just trying to understand her family and the impact the suicides have had upon subsequent generations, but also how much better the ancient Greeks were at discussing the impact of suicide than our contemporary commentators, including philosophical commentators.

Better in what way?

For Edith, ‘better’ means recognizing the generational impact of a suicide in a family. She quotes Sophocles line from Oedipus The Tyrant ‘The tragedies that hurt the most are those that sufferers have chosen themselves.’ Edith is very clear that the liberal account of suicide, where it’s an individual’s decision that doesn’t affect anybody else, is just not accurate. What really happens when a suicide takes place is that even people who don’t know that person very well can be deeply affected. People who know them, their family, and even people who haven’t yet been born, are all hugely impacted—almost inevitably.

In ancient Greece people would talk about being being ‘chased by Furies.’ There could be a sense of a curse on the family. And there is a modern day equivalent. I know this from personal experience: my grandfather’s attempted suicide that resulted in him being put in a psychiatric hospital that thirty years before my birth, has affected me deeply even though I never knew him. For Edith, the deaths by suicide in her family have very much hung over her whole life.

So one of her themes is that somebody who decides to commit suicide should, if at all possible, take that into account. There’s a sense in which moral decisions around suicide should acknowledge the complexity of relationships that we have with one another. Our decisions deeply affect those around us, particularly something as significant as the decision to kill oneself.

Like all of Edith’s books, this is extremely easy to read, despite the subject matter. It oscillates between dark personal memoir and really illuminating discussions of passages of ancient Greek tragedy.

I wanted to include this book because I think it’s important to have a broad conception of what philosophy is. In an academic philosophy department in the UK, this probably wouldn’t be classified as philosophy. But so much the worse for philosophy departments!

This book grapples with deep questions about life and death, just as Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus does. She does this by drawing upon ancient philosophy as well as Greek tragedy. It’s richly embedded in real life, in literature, and in philosophy. For me, it’s much more authentic than many abstract philosophical discussions about putative suicide attempts and what the implicit ethical implications might be, and it’s written with passion and honesty.

I think this is also reflected in the interested you’ve shown in the past in philosophical novels, and other ‘non-standard’ philosophical texts.

It’s reassuring that she can write a book like this while remaining a British academic—she’s in a Classics department. But it’s very encouraging that she hasn’t been knocked off her path by obligations to produce a certain kind of monograph or series of journal articles. Having said that, she is a very dynamic person and no doubt is also producing academic research of a high quality alongside this.

The next 2024 philosophy book you’ve elected to recommend is Jaime Edwards and Brian Leiter’s Marx.

Yes, this is a very different kind of book. It’s from the Routledge Philosophers series. It has a textbook format. It’s an introduction to the work of Karl Marx. There’s also an interesting one on Henri Bergson in the same series by Mark Sinclair. I’d recommend that too for those who want to go a bit deeper after Emily Herring’s biography.

What Edwards and Leiter’s book does is introduce Marx to the intelligent reader, as if you’ve never encountered Marx before. Which might be the case for many readers.

The term ‘Marxist’ is thrown around a lot, but often quite loosely.

Some people come to Marx through economics. They might come through politics and The Communist Manifesto. Others come through philosophical ideas about alienation or ideology. This book offers a superbly clear overview of Marx’s life, and most importantly his key ideas.

I particularly like the chapter on ideology. Ideology, in Marxist terms, is the way in which the structure of society conditions all aspects of our lives without us realising it, and privileges the interests of the ruling class. But there are are different notions of ideology within Marx’s writing, different emphases. Questions that are difficult for some Marxist theorists to answer are addressed here too—this isn’t a neutral summary.

The book doesn’t shy away from engaging with Marxist arguments as well as spelling out what the mainstream interpretations of Marx’s writings are. It benefits from the huge secondary literature on Marx, but doesn’t get bogged down in it. Sometimes, in just a sentence or two, the authors illuminate things that I’ve never fully understood before.

There’s a section on Georg Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher and political exile who was a significant Marxist thinker. In a few paragraphs, they gave me an overview that helped me understand references to his writing that I’d seen before and put them in a better perspective. Similarly, on Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian philosopher. There are well-written summaries and insights into other Marxist thinkers too.

Including the glossary—which is, again, very useful—it is 275 pages. This is not a book that people would usually read all the way through. It’s a reference book. And it’s not the last word on Marx by a long shot. No doubt some Marxist philosophers will find fault with some aspects of it. But it is certainly an extremely useful book that should become a standard book for students and anybody interested in understanding Marx. Other books purport to do that, but not usually with this level of communicative skill. It’s written by philosophers who can write and who are thinking critically about what they are writing about. It’s not an inert summary, but something that brings Marxist ideas alive, and shows their strengths and limitations.

The next title on your list of recommended 2024 philosophy books is Jonathan Birch’s The Edge of Sentience.

Yes. This is an unusual book in that it’s available free online as an open-access PDF, but you can buy a hardback copy too.

Jonathan Birch is a philosopher with a research team at the London School of Economics. He’s particularly interested in the idea that we ought to base our ethical interactions with animals on scientific studies of what animals are actually like. So he works with zoologists, ethologists, people who look very closely at animal behaviour.

There are amazing studies that reveal for instance, that individual honey bees are able to learn and are even capable of playing. An insect, which doesn’t seem highly intelligent, and which normally functions as part of a hive, can exhibit surprising abilities if you look closely at what it’s actually doing, or put it in laboratory situations that allow those capabilities to emerge.

Jonathan’s interested in a very wide range of species, and often in species that don’t have cute faces. We don’t tend to attribute the same sensitivity and capacity to feel pain to an insect that we might to a sweet puppy or a baby chimp. Take lobsters. They are killed in quite gruesome ways for culinary purposes. He’s been involved in research that suggests that lobsters have quite sophisticated neural networks and seem to exhibit pain-like behaviour in certain situations. There is sufficient evidence, he believes, to exercise what he calls ‘the precautionary principle.’

That we should assume they feel pain, just in case?

Yes. The precautionary principle is this: once you get over a threshold of evidence, treat animals as if they are sentient even though there is still some doubt. He’s not saying they are sentient, but that there is sufficient evidence to be more careful about how we treat them. So, you don’t want to drop them in boiling water and let them die slowly, for example. If we are set on killing them and it’s possible to stun lobsters or kill them electronically, then we should do this rather than resort to the boiling water in a saucepan method of killing them.

As I say, he’s not conclusively arguing that they do feel pain. This is the driving force in the way he approaches moral issues around how we treat other animals. If it seems they have the capacity, and there’s scientific evidence to back that up,, then let’s be more careful than we have been to date. Obviously, a lot of factory farming would be beyond the pale for him.

Quite rightly, I think.

Agreed. But many people find it difficult to imagine that, say, fish or insects have sophisticated capacity for pain, even though the evidence supports the idea that they probably do.

Birch is a superbly clear writer, and he’s very careful to adjust his belief according to the evidence. He’s not a sentimental animal ethicist who thinks, gosh, killing a mosquito is the same as killing a fox. He bases everything that he writes on the available science and sound reasoning from the best data we have.

He’s one of the most interesting public philosophers around today because of his willingness to engage with ideas which have a very broad interest across the world. He’s also adept at dissemination those ideas. By making his book freely available online he has guaranteed a wide readership. He appears on podcasts, radio, and television and is frequently interviewed, more often these days on the potential sentience of AI than on animals. But his deep interest is in sentience in animals.

You mentioned earlier that it was a bit of a toss-up between this book and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s latest book Living on Earth. They address quite similar issues.

Well, yes, but Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book builds up to a discussion of how we should treat other animals in a different way. For Peter Godfrey-Smith, it’s all about the evolutionary story.

Briefly: Living on Earth is a book about how human beings have come to have consciousness. But other animals have different levels of ability to sense the world in sophisticated ways, and some have a concept of themselves doing that, or seem to have a concept of that.

It’s the third book in a trilogy that he’s spun out of his interest in observing animals—mostly, in the past, aquatic animals. He’s particularly known for his brilliant first book in this area Other Minds, which was a bestseller. That one focused on the minds of octopuses.

I absolutely loved that book

This is an excellent book too and could easily have made the list. But I think, in the slot on animal minds, Birch’s sentience book is a really important new book by a thinker who will be much better known in the future. Peter Godfrey-Smith is already very well-known and has a serious following. Like Emily Herring, Jonathan Birch has really broken into the public consciousness in 2024.

That’s a good tip, thanks. Let’s move on to Lindsay Stonebridge’s philosophical biography We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. You mentioned that you were looking forward to this book when we spoke last year.

Yes, and in 2021 I chose Samantha Rose Hill’s biographical book about Arendt as well. It’s been a good few years for books about Hannah Arendt.

This is another book written by a real writer. I mean, she’s a thinker as well as a writer, but the writing makes this an excellent read. She’s approached Arendt in a slightly different way from a straightforward birth to death and beyond biography, combining the events in Arendt’s with thematic questions. She has chapter titles like: ‘How to think like a refugee,’ ‘How to love,’ ‘How not to think about race’ (Arendt made some apparently racist comments at one point about segregation in American schools), ‘How to change the world,’ ‘Who am I to judge?’, ‘What is freedom?’.

So, there are a series of questions rather than a sequence of events from Arendt’s life. But it’s richly informed by the biographical study of Arendt, because you can’t really understand Hannah Arendt except by tying her into her times and the places she lived, the people she interacted with. She wrote about totalitarianism as somebody who’d experienced it. She emphasized the importance of freedom and resisting dominant ways of thinking, having lived through Nazi Germany, and survived exile in Paris, and later a certain degree of alienation as an exile in America.

She responded to her times. She was very keen that philosophy should respond to the present. She didn’t even see herself as a philosopher, strangely. This is something that Simone de Beauvoir said of herself as well. I think this was because the concept of a philosopher that both were working with was of someone who builds a grand scale metaphysical system, an Immanuel Kant or a Jean-Paul Sartre, or a Martin Heidegger (Heidegger was her tutor and lover).

As well as writing books, Arendt was an intellectual journalist. She didn’t have a grand system. Lindsay Stonebridge finds very elegant ways through her work, making it seem relevant to today, teaching us to read Arendt not just as a historical phenomenon of the 20th century. She builds in autobiography as well. You get Lindsay’s personal take on Arendt through her interactions with places. Lindsay is there in the archive, or visiting a somewhere Arendt visited or lived. It’s not an impersonal book in that sense.

It’s also an excellent book in the way that it doesn’t presuppose that you know almost everything about 20th century history. When she introduces ideas, she explains the context as she goes. Not in a patronizing way, but so that you don’t have to be a historian to understand references to, I don’t know, the revolution in Portugal, or who a particular thinker was. This is a very accessible book, even though it’s informed by deep scholarship.

It complements Samantha Rose Hill’s book on Arendt as well. So, just as I’ve said: if you want two books on Bergson, get Emily Herring’s and Mark Sinclair’s; if you want two on Arendt, get this and Samantha Rose Hill’s.

Like paired wines. Thank you. Just to close, you mentioned that next year is looking pretty exciting in terms of new philosophy books. Could you point us to a couple of titles that you are looking forward to?

Well, one is Agnes Callard’s book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Agnes Callard is an unusual, independent thinker. She’s a Classicist as well as a philosopher, and she’s passionate about the ideas she discusses. She’s quirky, and an excellent writer. That book is coming out in January and is one I’m looking forward to.

Jonathan Webber has edited a collection The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy—that’s due out at the end of February in the UK. I definitely want a copy of that.

And, further ahead, I’m looking forward to David Bather Woods’ new book on Schopenhauer. He’s written several very interesting essays on Schopenhauer, a philosopher who is not so much discussed these days. I’m not sure if that will be out next year, but I know it’s in the pipeline. Like Emily Herring’s book on Bergson, this should be another young writer breaking into the mainstream with an interesting take on a major thinker.