“What David Chalmers wants to say is that the reality that we seem to experience if we see a table in front of us is in some important sense real: it’s not an illusion. That goes against the Cartesian way of seeing those imaginary or created worlds. That’s the main thrust of it. He’s very clever because he’s managed to then rehearse many of the key arguments that you would encounter in most philosophy courses, but through that lens of virtual reality. It genuinely is thought-provoking (or virtual thought-provoking). It’s well-written too.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2022

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is a personal favorite. Diogenes was Plato’s contemporary, and a kind of performance artist. He lived a very frugal existence. He slept in a barrel—well, they say it was a barrel but it was actually probably an amphora—just outside Athens and had only a cloak as a possession. He originally had a wooden bowl to drink from as well but when he saw a boy drinking from a waterfall with his hands, he realized he didn’t need it and got rid of it. He famously masturbated and defecated in public and defied other conventions too.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2022

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This book was first published in 1936 and has long been out of print. It was finally republished this year. Susan Stebbing was a very brilliant, hardcore, analytic philosopher, logician, and philosopher of science. She was amazing in that she was a respected contributor to philosophy in the 1930s, when academic philosophy was almost completely inimical to women in Britain. Probably because she died during the wartime, her reputation was affected by not being part of that post-war recovery in society, and she got forgotten.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2022

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Wright has a degree of evangelism about him, but he’s not saying this is the only way to achieve a better life. He says it’s a way of eliminating suffering from many people’s lives, and it worked for him.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2017

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Socrates felt that the written word was a bad thing for philosophy (and life) because although it looked intelligent, every time you asked a question it always gave the same response, whoever asked the question.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2019

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Theophrastus was slightly younger than Aristotle and came to Plato’s Academy when Plato was quite an old man. Then, when Plato died, he traveled with Aristotle, and was involved in Aristotle’s non-philosophical projects looking very closely at the nature of the world: the biological world, the geological world and so on. Theophrastus is probably best known for a book called The Characters. It’s not really famous amongst philosophers, although he was a philosopher. The Characters consist of descriptions of types of people in terms of their psychological patterns of behavior and so on, which seem very modern. But what Laura Beatty has done is take the bare bones of his life—because not all that much is known about him—and made a literal journey through the places where Theophrastus lived and tried to understand more about him.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2022

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“It’s a book about what we do with our limited time on Earth, how we decide to prioritise and proportion our time. To that extent it’s a book of ethics in the face of inevitable death. It’s a combination of sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying exploration of the human condition, and at the same time an antidote to those time management books that tell you how you can maximise your productivity, taking on more and more tasks and completing them efficiently.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2021

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“She’s taken a series of topics from the history of travel, from the 17th century onwards, and showed why this is a really interesting and important area for philosophers to consider…Emily combines a personal voice with highly informative, well-researched glimpses of particular philosophical travellers. And she’s pulled off a really good book that is directed at the general public. It’s accessible and it’s entertaining, but also opens up interesting philosophical ideas. It’s very original.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2020

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This book is quite brilliantly done. It’s a very concise book, but it’s intelligible and precise in the way it describes the varieties of utilitarianism. It’s very readable and it covers a lot of ground. It covers what you would cover in a university undergraduate course on utilitarianism, but you can read and take it in in four or five hours or so. Because Peter Singer is a co-author, it has a certain authority in its description of thinkers and positions. It’s got a bias, obviously, because it’s written by people who are extremely sympathetic to utilitarianism.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2017

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Becoming Beauvoir is not just an outstanding philosophy book, it’s one of the best books I’ve read for a while. It’s of interest far beyond the narrow area of philosophy. Whether you love her or hate her, Simone de Beauvoir was a really significant cultural figure and it’s great to have such an interesting new biography of her.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2019

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Andy is a teacher of philosophy in prisons but he’s also somebody who’s had a lot of family experience in prisons from the inside, because his father, his uncle, and his brother, have all spent time in jail. So he’s got an ambivalent attitude to prisons and I think his family said, ‘What on earth are you going teaching in prisons for? That’s another one that ended up inside!’ He has a particularly interesting take on all this. It’s partly constructed memoir: he discusses the sessions where he teaches philosophy to prisoners, but for reasons of privacy, he hasn’t revealed too much about the identities of particular prisoners.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2022

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“He’s a professor of humanities, not a card-carrying philosopher, which probably liberated him to write about something which is very prominent in the history of philosophy but gets largely neglected in philosophical teaching, which is the aphorism.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2019

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is the book of the year for me. Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting are both graduate students in philosophy and they’ve co-edited this amazing book, which is basically the book that they wish had existed when they started thinking about studying philosophy. It’s a book that has 20 short essays about significant women philosophers. It’s skewed towards political philosophy and ethics, which is where their interests lie, but not exclusively, and it goes from ancient Greece to more or less the present day. It’s a selection of philosopher queens, women philosophers who’ve been neglected by mainstream curricula in philosophy. It’s also an illustrated book, which is unusual in philosophy.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2020

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Free does all the things you could ask of a family memoir plus at least one hundred more. You’ve got the finely drawn family portraits, the novelistic reimaginings of dialogue, the master antagonisms of history—and History with a capital ‘H’.” Read more...

The best books on Family History

Thea Lenarduzzi, Journalist

“In a sense this book is just the tip of the iceberg of this philosopher’s public working through of ideas that really matter or really interest him.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2019

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included. As a result, we don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life but rather get to understand what really mattered.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2021

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Cherry’s argument is that the energy and the possibility of collective channelled action, inspired by rage, justifies this approach, and makes it superior to a more neutral response to something as outrageous as the cold-faced racism in Charlottesville, for instance.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2021

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“It’s a book about the nature of consciousness, one of the most intractable problems that human beings have come across. How do we understand how we, as apparently material beings made of flesh and bone—and, in particular, millions of neurones—get to the position of having qualitative experience, through the experience of the world through our senses, reflection and experience? Beautifully written, easy to read, hard to put down. It’s passionate, and it’s not patronising.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2021

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is a fantastic biography. Frank Ramsey was an extraordinary character, evidently brilliant from an early age. He made path-breaking advances in mathematics, philosophy and economics. In his spare time, he helped Keynes edit the Economic Journal, he translated Wittgenstein into English because nobody else could understand what Wittgenstein was saying. And he was a larger-than-life character who hung out with the Bloomsbury Group and had an extraordinary life, and who then died tragically young at the age of 26.” Read more...

The Best Economics Books of 2020

Diane Coyle, Economist

“What makes this such an interesting book for me is the combination of the first person and the more scientific and philosophical analysis. I’ve already mentioned that the author is a scuba diver. He’s brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2020

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“What David has managed to do is combine the biographical and historical with the philosophical, without getting too technical. A lot of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle was quite hard core, but he doesn’t get bogged down in the details. This is a book that’s accessible to a general reader. He’s very good about making clear what the importance of the debates they were having was, what their limitations were, why they were or were not influential, as well as telling these stories which connect very strongly with the rise of Nazism, including the murder of the title of the book.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2020

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“I think it’s a great book. He has real skill at explaining philosophical positions in an entertaining way, so that if you read this book, you’ll know quite a lot about contemporary philosophy of mind and you’ll pick it up quite effortlessly. I doubt you’ll be converted to panpsychism. I certainly haven’t been, but I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2019

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Lurking behind it is Seneca: the Roman philosopher who talked about anger being a useless emotion.” Read more...

Best Philosophy Books of 2016

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is a book that was published during the Second World War in occupied Paris by Sartre, who has since become known as a great existentialist thinker alongside his lifelong friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir. Being and Nothingness became the Bible of existentialism…Although this book is threateningly abstract in places, it’s also fundamentally practical. It’s about the nature of what it is to be human…For me personally, I became interested in studying philosophy because I wanted to try and understand some of Being and Nothingness and Sartre’s ideas…You’d be surprised how many philosophers have been inspired by Sartre, even though they’ve gone on to become very different sorts of philosophers from him.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2018

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“What I loved about this book is that it takes you right into Nietzsche’s life. This is particularly important with him because the life and the work are not so easily separable. For Nietzsche, there’s a sense that his life is actually part of what he’s trying to do.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2018

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Hiking With Nietzsche a very skillful combination of narrative about Nietzsche’s life intermingled with John Kaag’s past, but also his present, where he’s found a different kind of satisfaction. If you really want to fill in the details, you need to read American Philosophy: A Love Story because that explains some of the story about where he is now, who he’s married to, and how that came about.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2018

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Aristotle was a writer who was very much concerned with what will make a human life go well, and so Edith Hall treats him as a source for good advice on just that: good advice on how to be human.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2018

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“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

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“This is the kind of philosophy that makes you think again. Whether or not you agree with him, he’s saying, ‘Here’s another way of looking at this.'” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2017

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This book is a really interesting, highly readable discussion of the friendship between the two.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2017

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Stoicism in its modern form, as described by Massimo Pigliucci, is a philosophy for living.” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2017

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

” Based on Michael Puett’s incredibly popular lecture courses on Chinese Philosophy at Harvard University, this book provides a way into the ideas of a number of the great Chinese philosophers, including Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi. This makes it sound a tougher read than it is. In fact, this book is both entertaining and challenging at the same time” Read more...

Summer Reading: Philosophy Books to Take On Holiday

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“For me, Peter Singer is one of the best stylists alive in philosophy. Very few people realise this. People rarely remark on his writing style, but he is the most lucid of writers. He writes about complex matters very succinctly, very calmly, so that his writing is almost transparent to what he is saying. It is not flamboyant. It is almost invisible. He manages, in these essays, to address really deep questions in just two or three pages — often saying more than other people say in a whole book. He is controversial, of course. He’s a utilitarian thinker: he consistently emphasises that you should measure things by their consequences. He wants to make an impact on the world and has, for example, certain presuppositions about the importance of non-human, animal experience relative to human beings — assumptions that other people may not share. But whether or not you agree with him, it is very difficult to misunderstand him. His writing is so clear, and his arguments are so well expressed, that you can engage with him.” Read more...

Best Philosophy Books of 2016

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“I don’t know of a better survey of this period. What Gottlieb manages to do is to bring in just enough about the lives and background history to stimulate your understanding of the philosophy, and just enough of the philosophy not to get too technical or obscure. Again, it’s a book that required a very light touch to pull off in such a successful way…Anthony Gottlieb is a former executive editor of the Economist, and, not surprisingly, another very good writer. Writing in philosophy is very, very important because it can be difficult to read about philosophical ideas. Everything the writer does to help the reader is extremely valuable.” Read more...

Best Philosophy Books of 2016

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is the best philosophy book that I’ve read this year. What Sarah Bakewell has managed to do is combine the story of predominantly French existentialism (focusing on Sartre and de Beauvoir as well as Merleau-Ponty) with digressions about Heidegger and others. She’s combined that with some autobiographical elements and a real passion for the subject…only a truly exceptional writer could combine that many biographies, that many different, sometimes quite complex, philosophical positions, and still tell a plausible and engaging story. She’s done that, which is quite remarkable. In doing this she is resurrecting Sartre and the existentialism of the 1940s, which, in some ways, is considered passé, particularly in France. The result is empowering for people to read. So I think this is a superb book. Everyone should read it.” Read more...

Best Philosophy Books of 2016

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher