Seven Philosophy Books for Beginners: Where to Start

One espe­cial­ly appeal­ing aspect of phi­los­o­phy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go any­where to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to go there, now that so many philo­soph­i­cal texts have become freely avail­able on the inter­net. In the video above, phi­los­o­phy YouTu­ber Jared Hen­der­son rec­om­mends sev­en books through which any­one can get a sol­id intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject. They are as fol­lows: Bertrand Rus­sell’s The Prob­lems of Phi­los­o­phy, Simon Black­burn’s Think, the com­plete works of Pla­to, Mar­cus Aure­lius’ Med­i­ta­tions, St. Augustine’s Con­fes­sions, René Descartes’ Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy, and John Stu­art Mill’s On Lib­er­ty.

Why these books? Though writ­ten for the gen­er­al pub­lic, The Prob­lems of Phi­los­o­phy has also proven use­ful to Hen­der­son in teach­ing intro­duc­to­ry cours­es, not least thanks to Rus­sel­l’s elo­quent defense of philo­soph­i­cal study itself. Think, a more recent­ly writ­ten broad sur­vey, “intro­duces you to some top­ics that almost every­one is inter­est­ed in: free will, the prob­lems of knowl­edge and ratio­nal­i­ty, the exis­tence of God, the exis­tence of the self, the prob­lems of ethics.” And giv­en the scope of Pla­to’s writ­ings, if you care­ful­ly read through them all, you’ll be “a remark­ably dif­fer­ent per­son at the end of that process.”

The name of Mar­cus Aure­lius, who ruled the Roman Empire in the mid­dle of the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, has late­ly become an even bet­ter-known than it already was thanks to a resur­gence of pub­lic inter­est in Sto­icism. Hen­der­son rec­om­mends his Med­i­ta­tions as an exam­ple of “phi­los­o­phy as a way of life.” In the Con­fes­sions, Augus­tine blends “poet­ry, the­ol­o­gy, and phi­los­o­phy in a real­ly com­pelling way,” deal­ing with such mat­ters as “the nature of time,” “moti­va­tion and the will” and “the meta­physics of evil.” Descartes’ Med­i­ta­tions offers not just a primer on skep­ti­cism, but also the con­test for the famous line “I think, there­fore I am.” Mil­l’s On Lib­er­ty opens the path to trace mod­ern, much-thrown-around polit­i­cal notions (includ­ing the tit­u­lar one) back to their sources.

These books, as Hen­der­son stress­es, con­sti­tute a start­ing point, not a goal in them­selves. Read them, and you’ll get a much clear­er sense of what phi­los­o­phy deals with, but also where your own philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests lie. The field has a long his­to­ry, after all, and in that time it has grown so vast that no one, no mat­ter how seri­ous­ly ded­i­cat­ed, can walk all of its intel­lec­tu­al paths. What­ev­er the par­tic­u­lar realm of phi­los­o­phy to which your incli­na­tions take you, don’t be sur­prised if you find your­self revis­it­ing these very same books time and again. Nobody ever tru­ly mas­ters Pla­to, Mar­cus Aure­lius, Descartes, or Mill, and on some lev­el, phi­los­o­phy itself keeps its prac­ti­tion­ers eter­nal novices. The impor­tant thing is to cul­ti­vate and main­tain what the Zen Bud­dhists call “begin­ner’s mind” — but then, that’s a whole oth­er branch of phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Course

Philoso­phers Name the Best Phi­los­o­phy Books: From Sto­icism and Exis­ten­tial­ism, to Meta­physics & Ethics for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

A Flow­chart of Philo­soph­i­cal Nov­els: Read­ing Rec­om­men­da­tions from Haru­ki Muraka­mi to Don DeLil­lo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.