The Best Philosophy Books of 2025

Thank you for putting together your list of the best philosophy books of 2025. What is the philosophy publishing landscape looking like?

My impression is that there haven’t been as many books for the general reader that I would want to endorse wholeheartedly this year. Some years there is a glut of these and choosing five is very difficult. Of course, I only see a subsection of what is published. Publishers do send me quite a few books, but it did strike me that it wasn’t so rich in choice as I have been in previous years.

First of all, you’ve selected a book by a previous Five Books interviewee Angie Hobbs, Why Plato Matters Now.

Angie Hobbs is a leading public philosopher who has a background in classics. She actually wrote a really nice, very short, illustrated Ladybird book on The Republic that, for some bizarre reason, has gone out of print. She’s very good at explaining Plato at all leves.

This book is pitched higher—it’s not an academic book, but the scholarship is visible in the sense that she gives her sources and is careful to avoid oversimplifying. So you get some of the complexity of different readings of Plato. But her underlying theme is connecting his work to the present day, why we should read Plato now. Unfortunately much of what he wrote about politics and power is still very relevant.

Some of what is most pertinent relates to questions of what happens when a tyrant gets into power, the phases of development in society when an immoral authoritarian leader takes the reins. Some of Plato’s predictions are uncannily accurate about the present day.

Do you think it’s unusual for Classicists to work with one eye on the present?

Well, Classics is a really interesting subject area—or really a cluster of subject areas. Philosophers who study classical philosophy today are usually polymaths. They study history, they study theatre, they study poetry, they study philosophy, they study politics. Because they are studying Classical civilisation and all the intertwined elements of that, I think that probably makes them, as a group, more sensitive to context when they read a book of philosophy. Plenty of people read Descartes, but they don’t really contexualise him amongst his contemporaries.

A Classicist will not read Plato naively, as a close reading of a text, without being aware of the Athens within which he was writing and the political tensions and historical precedents, in terms not just of philosophy, but of things that have happened that have shaped the way in which the writer is expressing himself. Then, Classicists are constantly under pressure to justify their existence – why study an ancient civilization, why take years learning Latin and Greek? So they are often keen to demonstrate the continuing relevance of what they do. The combination means that they read works in context, but also look for parallels in the present.

Hobbs is someone who is very aware of the political aspects of Plato’s—and Socrates’—life (Socrates was Plato’s mentor). The Dialogues are based on the historical Socrates, to some extent. Not all of them. But I think it’s fairly natural for a Classical philosopher to look at the shape of things politically. It would be difficult, anyway, to read some of Plato without being aware of just how prescient many of his ideas are. There is, of course, the cliché that all philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato anyway (that was Alfred North Whitehead’s quip).

Hobbes outlines and explains and contextualises some of Plato’s key ideas. But there are so many parallels with the present. This is a rich book written by someone who has devoted much of her life to studying Plato. It’s not a rip-roaring read, I wouldn’t take it to the beach. It’s a serious book, that requires attention, but it is written for the general reader, and very rewarding.

While you mention Socrates, I think you wanted to give a hat tip to Agnes Callard’s book Open Socrates?

Yes. Callard’s book on Socrates is a much more personal take, and it focuses on Socrates more than Plato, although obviously what we know of him is largely through Plato’s writing. So there is an overlap, but perhaps not as much as you might expect.

For Callard, the emphasis is on the fallibility of reason and the humility of Socrates in recognising that he might be mistaken, and what that means in terms of the pursuit of knowledge and how you might go about it. She presents Socrates as a kind of hero of reasoning and a model of how we should live, in the sense of constantly revising our thoughts in the light of new evidence and reason. Hobbs is more focused on Plato’s text and on interpreting it.

They are both good books, but I’m choosing Hobb’s because I think it will last longer; it’s less idiosyncratic. You will either love or hate Agnes Callard’s way of writing and being. I think she’s a strong and sometimes quirky voice as a writer. If you know her, you hear her speaking as you read. But they are both in the same ballpark in the sense that they are looking at ancient philosophy and making it relevant to the present day.

Actually, in this vein, I’d also like to mention a much earlier book that isn’t as well-known as it should be. This is Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex. She’s a novelist as well as a philosopher.

That’s right, she spoke to Five Books about the best philosophical novels a few years back.

Yes. I really enjoyed interviewing her for that. Plato at the Googleplex is another book making Plato relevant to the present day. It’s very skilfully constructed in the sense that Plato is actually a character in the book moving through contemporary society, reacting to the present (hence the title).

These three books together would make a great combination. They complement one another.

Well, great. Shall I move us on to David Bather Woods’ Schopenhauer? It has an amusing subtitle, ‘The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist.’

It’s very interesting the way academia has treated Arthur Schopenhauer. He dropped out of academia, lived independently, and was a powerful literary-philosophical outsider figure in his day. He was a superb essayist, influenced heavily by Immanuel Kant and his metaphysics, but also by Eastern philosophy. He was a wonderfully clear writer, but he doesn’t get studied much in philosophy departments—not at all during my degree, and I think in most people’s philosophy degrees—and that’s a shame. This despite his most important book The World as Will and Idea being an acknowledged philosophical classic. He should be studied more, not least because he’s a model of clarity in how he writes. For a German philosopher of the 18th and 19th centuries (he straddled both), that’s pretty unusual.

The great champion of Schopenhauer in Britain was Bryan Magee. Schopenhauer, along with Popper, was one of his heroes and he wrote a very good introduction to his work The Philosophy of Schopenhauer that was published in 1983. But since then, there haven’t been many books about Schopenhauer at all, and nothing that I can think of that would appeal to a general reader.

This book by David Bather Woods, who is one of a new generation coming fresh to the history of philosophy, is superb. It reminded me of Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, which was a huge success, and very widely-read. That combined biography with Montaigne’s ideas. Bather Woods has an elegance of style and is a good storyteller too. He’s really immersed in the world of Schopenhauer—he’s an academic expert on him— but he’s never boring or pedantic. This is a very readable book that also combines biography and ideas. And it does it very well. This would make an excellent Christmas present for people who enjoy reading about philosophy and philosophers. It has plenty of anecdotes and interesting insights that make it a pleasure to engage with in addition to the philosophical discussion.

Next, you’ve chosen to highlight The Penguin Book of Existential Philosophy, edited by Jonathan Webber.

Webber is an expert on French Existentialism, the freedom-loving movement that emerged during and immediately after the Second World War and which is particularly associated with Parisian cafés and a rejection of bourgeois assumptions about how we should live. I interviewed Webber about underrated Existentialist classics for Five Books some time ago.

This book is an anthology of extracts, a selection of key passages from a range of Existentialist thinkers, with a very strong bias towards French philosophy (although for reasons that are not clear, he hasn’t included anything by Maurice Merleau-Ponty). The majority of the readings are from Sartre and de Beauvoir, apart from a section entitled “Inspirations’ that includes short extracts from Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and one from Heidegger. They’re there as proto-existentialists. There are also two pieces by the French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon. You might expect to find Albert Camus included too, and he almost is, but only as an interviewee for a magazine article in which he explains why he isn’t an existentialist and that he is surprised to find his work discussed alongside Sartre’s.

Experts might quibble about Webber’s choices here, and on his omissions, but for a general reader it’s wonderful to have this range of existentialist writings in a single affordable volume. Webber’s introduction ‘What existentialism and why it matters’ is useful too.

Do you want to talk about David Edmonds’ Death in a Shallow Pond next?

Yes. I should first disclose that he is my co-podcaster on Philosophy Bites. He’s quietly becoming a specialist commentator on thought experiments in philosophy. He previously wrote a book called Would You Kill the Fat Man?—I advised him against that title—about the so-called ‘trolley problem.’ The title comes from a variant of the trolley problem—the thought experiment in which you have to decide whether you would allow a runaway train, or trolley, to run over five people on the track, or divert it to kill only one. In the variant you are standing on a bridge with a very large person, and the train is running towards five people below, and you could push this person off the bridge, and the weight of that person would stop the train but kill him in the process. Would you push him over the bridge? Many people say no, despite being happy to switch points towards a person on a track. The thought experiment is meant to suggest that there’s more than just a question of sacrificing one person to save five going on here. Anyway, that’s where the title of David’s previous book came from.

Death in a Shallow Pond is also about a single thought experiment, Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about a child apparently drowning in a shallow pool of water while nobody else is around. You’re walking past—would you jump in to save the child, at minimal risk to yourself? It’s a shallow pond, but you happen to be wearing very expensive shoes, and they will be ruined in the process.

Most people say, yes, of course I’d save the drowning child, if there was nobody else around, even if it ruined my shoes, why do you even ask? But Peter Singer says, aha, then why don’t you give the value of the shoes you would be prepared to sacrifice for this child to save a child dying in sub-Saharan Africa for not having access to clean water or basic medicines? Consistency seems to demand that you should.

There are all kinds of arguments about whether that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw, but Singer’s suggestion is that you’re inconsistent in your principles if you wouldn’t give the money. He discussed many of the objections and psychological aspects of that thought experiment, trying to seal off objections. David has now put the various responses to Peter Singer under his microscope. He tells an interesting, accessible story. He’s also more sympathetic to Peter Singer’s overall consequenialist utilitarian outlook in relation to these cases than I am.

I should say, in passing, that he included a devastating counterargument that I previously raised with Singer. By this argument, if the shoes you were wearing were valuable enough, then you should walk past the drowning child and auction your shoes without getting them wet, and save five other children with the proceeds instead. The fact that Singer concedes that under certain circumstances that would be right should be sufficient to undermine this thought experiment, but Dave clearly didn’t as, as he only put my objection in a footnote.

Thought experiments do seem to be one trick of philosophical writing that really cuts through with the general public.

A lot of people have said that. They’re an area in which philosophers can demonstrate their creativity in fascinating and sometimes entertaining ways. Often they’re like short stories, pared back to the bones. The idea is that they eliminate the irrelevant aspects of the kind of case you are discussing so that you can then tweak features,and run different versions. In reality, the richer details of life are what makes moral reasoning complicated and difficult. Thought experiments attract the kind of philosopher who likes chess problems and crossword puzzles and can sometimes get so far removed from real life that discussing them becomes an end itself without obvious applications. They can also have a strong rhetorical element.

Right. I’ve seen the trolley problem with three people on the default line, other times five.

Philosophers assume, when they put forward a thought experiment, they can somehow intuit the reasonable response to that thought experiment. They often assume a universality of response. But experimental psychologists have shown that some sorts of thought experiments produce cultural differences of response —between different age and social class groups. So that element is slightly worrying too.

I also have a perhaps idiosyncratic worry about some of these thought experiments. They often involve drowning people, running them over in trams, torturing people. They’re presented as imagined schematic scenarios, but I think that shows a lack of imagination—they are so reduced that they allow us to make jokes about torture, or wiping out humanity, trivialise these things. If you really thought about the reality of torture and the rest, you wouldn’t use an abstract example using, or at least you wouldn’t relish the details in the way some thought-experiment-driven philosophers do. It feels wrong to be glib about extreme situations of suffering like this, and at worst reveals a lack of moral imagination.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but of course, they are often very unpleasant.

Sorry, I don’t want to bog this conversation down. I’m at risk of ranting. But one more quick thing: if philosophers remove too many details, it starts to become a kind of geometrical exercise, rather than something that connects in an important way with the messiness of real-life moral decision-making. There’s a big question about whether you can reduce moral reasoning to that kind of simulation, a simplistic set of rules. Some philosophers think you can. Others, the ones I prefer, move backwards and forwards between thought experiments and real examples. David Edmonds does this to some degree. Jonathan Glover is a very good example of a moral philosopher who takes this approach, particularly in his books Causing Death and Saving Lives, and his book Humanity focuses on historical examples.

Right, some thought-experiment-driven philosophers think that you can imagine yourself into finding a ‘right’ answer over who you should rationally kill first, for example.

When you’re dealing with actual complex human beings in far messier situations you might get a very different response. And that response might be the best one available given the specifics of the situation. I’m not sure that the thought experiments help us so much in those sorts of cases. There is a place for thought experiments in philosophy, and they have featured throughout its histroy, but I don’t believe they should provide the last word. Plenty of philosophers disagree with this, of course. And some make a career of constructing more and more elaborate thought experiments and not much else.

Let’s move on. You wanted to recommend Anthony Gottlieb‘s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This is in the Yale University Press ‘Jewish Lives’ series.

Ray Monk wrote the classic biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius. The subtitle is something of a giveaway. That’s an excellent read, which shows the influence of Wittgenstein’s background in Vienna and Cambridge in the early part of the 20th century on his thinking, writing, and life choices. Through that, we know various kinds of torments that he had as a man and as a thinker, and his intellectual interactions as an idiosyncratic genius with a difficult personality. Most people who have read that book think it unlikely to be bettered, even though it’s somewhat hagiographical in stance.

Wittgenstein was, to my mind, not very good with people. He prioritised his own conscience above the impact of his ruthless honesty on others. He could be deeply offensive in his comments, really hurtful. He seems to have believed that most of his judgments—on philosophy, aesthetics, ways of speaking, how to live – were infallible, perhaps a result of his very privileged upbringing. Apart from all that, he seems to have hit a young kid very hard around the head and then lied about it when he was working as a schoolteacher. So, he wasn’t a wholly wonderful person, although there is no doubt that he was a very original thinker with a distinctives style of writing about philosophy. He was often aphoristic, encouraging the reader to think through a series of imagined examples: like the example of the beetle in the box, or his pronouncement that ‘if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand him.’ He used phrases and imaginative examples that are very quotable and very memorable and these have resonated far beyond philosophy.

Ray Monk published his biography back in 1990, and the consensus was that nobody will ever produce a better biography of this thinker. And I don’t know that Gottlieb’s is the better biography, but it’s a different sort of biography. For a start it’s shorter – fewer than 200 pages. Anthony Gottlieb, like Monk, is a skilled writer. This new book is very clear and lively and interesting. At times Gottlieb moves quickly—very quickly—through Wittgenstein’s life. For instance: Wittgenstein was captured during the First World War. He was a prisoner of war and wrote some of the Tractatus in captivity. But there’s almost nothing about that in his book.

So, this is a very good read but, necessarily, because it is so much shorter than Monk’s biography, it doesn’t go into depth on Wittgenstein’s philosophical contribution so much, particularly in relation to the Tractatus –  a notoriously difficult book, despite the apparent simplicity of its language. But I’d recommend it. It’s primarily for people who haven’t read Ray Monk’s book. It’s a palatable way of understanding a very interesting and tortured soul in his context.

There are some new things that Ray Monk didn’t know about or didn’t mention, too. One of my favourite insights comes from a description of the Wittgenstein family. They were immensely wealthy, a big family, but damaged hugely by an overbearing father. They would hold dinner parties, where guests always got a bit irritated because the Wittgensteins had the habit of talking to one another in fables and made-up stories to make a point, rather than just expressing themselves  straightforwardly. This is interesting, you can see where Wittgenstein got his often oblique style from.

In later life Wittgenstein was keen not to end up just writing a series of aphorisms. He explained why not in an aphorism: ‘Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake.’ (I call this Wittgenstein’s ‘Critique of Pure Raisin’).

Very good.

It’s a nice image, and something you could apply to many aspects of life. The things you most value, you might value because they are rare and enjoyable, not because you want a whole life of these and nothing else.

I would recommend the book. It is very nicely produced, and would make a great present—although it’s not an alternative to Ray Monk’s. More of a gateway drug.

Absolutely. I think you wanted to make a special mention: the 20th-anniversary edition of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.

Yes. Twenty years ago Princeton University Press very cleverly republished this 6000-word essay by Harry Frankfurt as a small hardback book. It became a massive bestseller. It’s a very clever analysis of a phenomenon that is distinct from lying. A liar knows the truth and tells you something else. A bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all. Harry Frankfurt explores that in this little book. Despite the title, this is not a jokey short read, but a serious work of philosophical analysis that gets more relevant by the day.

It has sold over a million copies worldwide, which is phenomenal for a philosophy book—especially for one that had already been published as an essay somewhere else without making big waves.

Now Princeton University Press have reissued an anniversary edition of the book. It’s definitely worth reading, a very significant contribution to public philosophy. In the age of AI, it has a different resonance. You might say that ChatGPT doesn’t seem to have a particular interest in the truth…

That’s been my experience of AI so far. It sounds confident but what it says is completely unreliable.

Yes, it may be more accurate to talk about it bullshitting, than hallucinating—though I’m wary about attributing agency to LLMs – I prefer the view of them as ‘stochastic parrots’, and think there are real dangers of talking loosely about them as if they were thinking beings.

Some claims about the value philosophy contributes to society by teaching critical thinking are overblown. If you begin with false premises, good thinking skills won’t guarantee you get a true conclusion. If you think of British politics, many if not most British politicians have studied PPE at Oxford—they’ve honed their thinking skills in philosophy tutorials. Has that produced better quality debate in Parliament? No. Many of these same individuals have resorted to mere rhetoric. This is certainly true of some of the most prominent politicians who have done much to make Britain a worse place, not a better one. Overconfidence in their ability to argue has sometimes been the problem, especially when that was tied with a cavalier attitude to the truth of their starting points. There are very few examples you can point to of books that focus on critical thinking, which could have a direct impact if their message is taken to hear. I think Bullshit is one of these, and should be compulsory reading for anyone becoming an MP.

It feels a timely recommendation.

Thanks. It’s a classic. Obviously, my five choices are somewhat idiosyncratic and to a degree subjective. There may be excellent books that I’ve missed. But the five core books I’ve chosen, and the others I’ve mentioned, are very good books, are accessible to a general reader, and certainly worth reading.