Nigel Warburton

Many of us aspire to do the right thing when faced with ethical choices, but for ancient philosophers being a good person involved a much broader look at our behaviour and life choices. Here, Massimo Pigliucci, a practising Stoic and philosophy professor at City College of New York, recommends books on being good, from the ancient sages to modern thinkers.

Philosophy is a subject of abstract concepts and arguments, traditionally focusing on ideas about the soul or the mind and less so on the body. However, as modern science has made ever more apparent, very little makes sense without it. Philosopher and historian of ideas Noga Arikha recommends books on philosophy, science and the body.

In many philosophical and religious traditions, anger is regarded as a useless emotion that’s best avoided but it can play a vital role in the fight against injustice. American philosopher Myisha Cherry, author of The Case for Rage, recommends books that shed light on how to be angry productively.

Successful musicians don’t necessarily need formal training or 10,000 hours of practice under their belt; what they must have is a feel for music, an innate gift. But many of rock’s brightest burning stars were lost to drugs. Here, Peter Lawlor—who combined a career as a senior economic advisor with that of an award-winning songwriter, producer and record label executive—selects five of the best books on rock music, focusing on revelatory biographies that peer behind the veil.

By teaching philosophy in prisons, British philosopher Andy West was not only able to engage with core issues of the human condition, but also to come to terms with members of his own family’s experience of being in prison. Here, he talks us through some books that deal with being locked up, from Auschwitz to Vancouver Island, as well as one by a victim of violent crime.

Serious philosophy need not take the form of a journal article or monograph, argues the philosopher and U.C. Riverside professor Eric Schwitzgebel, as he selects five science fiction books that succeed both as novels and provocative thought experiments that push us to consider deep philosophical questions from every angle.

Knowledge is power and nowhere has it been better preserved down the millennia than in libraries. Here Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books and the librarian in charge of Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries, talks us through books that shed light on what libraries are and what they do, and why they remain absolutely vital in our digital age.

Nearly every human has a sense of self, a feeling that we are located in a body that’s looking out at the world and experiencing it over the course of a lifetime. Some people even think of it as a soul or other nonphysical reality that is yet somehow connected to the blood and bones that make up our bodies. How things seem, however, is quite often an unreliable guide to how things are, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. Here he recommends five key books that led him to his own understanding of consciousness, and explores why it is that what is likely an illusion can be so utterly convincing.

Albert Camus was born in northern Algeria in extreme poverty, but went on to become one of the best-known French philosophers of the 20th century. In 1957, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for illuminating “the problems of the human conscience in our times.” Here, Camus expert Jamie Lombardi talks us through the books that best capture his work and the moral dilemmas he sought to explore.

The author Philip Pullman—creator of the beloved His Dark Materials trilogy, and one of the world’s great storytellers—recommends five of his favourite books: from a fragmentary masterpiece by Fernando Pessoa to P. G. Wodehouse’s comic triumphs.