Best Books: Philosophy and Classics

I wasn’t going to make a best books list for philosophy or for classics, but then I received a comment on my last best books list (religion and Christianity) that got me thinking. Philosophy books and classics—genres that I have read a lot of—were included in the very first best books list that I did, the comprehensive one that goes for thousands of titles down the main page. But, since they’re basically the only sub-categories that I didn’t then parse out, I thought it would be easiest for browsers to have them as separate lists.

(I’ve also decided, thanks in part to my writers’ group—full of short story writers who are always chatting about short fiction—that I am going to make a list for short stories and short story collections. I’ll post that in the next few days, and I can’t imagine there will be any more, with the exception of movies, but that’s not a best books list.)

There’s not too much to say about these two lists. Just remember, I am not recommending these books: they are lists compiled from other online lists of books in the genre. I would like to read them, and as I do, you can find links to the reviews by clicking on those titles.

This philosophy list got really long, really quick. It’s so long that I can’t imagine I’ll even get through them all. (I will have some fun times trying, however.) Some of the books are about philosophy, like histories of philosophy, and a handful are anthologies. There are even some novels that popped up on here, and there are several titles that, should you know the genre, you might think, “That’s not even philosophy.” Well, when I get there, hopefully it’ll at least be an interesting read. I was looking for the traditional philosophy books, yes, but I was also looking for more. And I included books from many branches of philosophy, like ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, logic, etc, including practical and modern philosophy. I fear some titles from religion and psychology might have slipped in there. There are most definitely misspellings, repeats, and no end of non-italicizing.

PHILOSOPHY

A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder[image error]
Philosophy As a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot
Aristotle’s Way, Edith Hall
What Does It All Mean?, Thomas Nagel
The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Julian Baggini
Think, Simon Blackburn
The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer
Justice, Michael Sandel
Causing Death and Saving Lives, Jonathan Glover
The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits
The Last Days of Socrates, Plato
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, Epictetus
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
Three Philosophical Dialogues, Anselm of Canterbury
Selected Writings, Thomas Aquinas
Meditation on First Philosophy, Renee Descartes[image error]
Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Republic, Plato
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
World As Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Being and Nothing, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne
The Dialogues of Plato
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume[image error]
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
The Four Agreements, Ruiz and Mills
The Book of Joy, Dalai Lama and Tutu
The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
The Path, Puett and Gross-Loh
How to Live, Sarah Bakewell
The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
The Art of Strategy, Dixit and Nalebuff
Flow, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
Five Dialogues, Plato
Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi
An Eternal Golden Braid, Godel, Escher and Bach
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus[image error]
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
The Big Picture, Sean Carroll
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
The Moral Sayings, Publius Syrus
Fragments, Heraclitus
Nature and Selected Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer
The Essential Epicurus, Epicurus
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
Ethics, Benedict de Spinoza
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
Everything Is F*cked, Mark Manson
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
Reasons and Persons, David Parfit
The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell[image error]
On Liberty, John Mill
The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant
Logic Primer, Allan and Hand
Logic, Wilfrid Hodges
Paradoxes, R.M. Sainsbury
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius
Analects, Confucius
Early Greek Philosophy, Heraclitus
Pensees, Blaise Pascal
The Gay Science, Friedrich Neitzsche
300 Arguments, Sarah Manguso
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Factfulness, Hans Rosling
The Veil of Isis, Pierre Hadot[image error]
The Way and the Word, Lloyd and Sivin
The Lost Age of Reason, Jonardon Ganeri
Atoms and Alchemy, William Newman
Native Pragmatism, Scott L. Pratt
Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett
Principles of Psychology, William James
Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith
Socrates in Love, Armand D’Angor
The Complete Philosophy Files, Stephen Law
Basic Writings, Chuang Tzu
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
Diaspora, Greg Egan
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Early Writings, Karl Marx
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls[image error]
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, G.A. Cohen
Violence and the Word, Robert Cover
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin
A Guide to the Good Life, Robert B. Irvine
Existentialism, David Cooper
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Existentialist Reader, Paul S. MacDonald
Phenemology of Spirit, Hegel
The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
Understanding Philosophy of Science, James Ladyman
Candide, Voltaire
A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M. Armstrong
Varieties of Meaning, Ruth Garrett Millikan
A Survey of Metaphysics, E.J. Lowe[image error]
Art, Clive Bell
Aesthetics, Monroe Beardsley
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Mengzi
Zhuangzi
The Bodhicaryavatara, Santideva
Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy Bauermeister
Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith
Evil Men, James Dawes
Down Girl, Kate Manne
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Making Sense of Human Rights, James Nickel[image error]
The Idea of Natural Rights, Brian Tierney
The Law of Peoples, John Rawls
On Human Rights, James Griffin
The Crisis of the European Mind, Paul Hazard
The Enlightenment in America, Henry May
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas
Practical Ethics, Peter Singer
80,000 Hours, Benjamin Todd
Destined for War, Graham Allison
Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
Descartes’ Error, Antonio Demasio
The Really Hard Problem, Owen Flannagan
The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubormirsky
The Complete Text, Xunzi
The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, Solomon and Higgins
All About Love, Bell Hooks[image error]
The Symposium, Plato
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot
Heartificial Intelligence, John Havens
The Technological Singularity, Murray Shanahan
Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neill
Moral Machines, Wallach and Allen
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Elbow Room, Daniel C. Dennett
Four Views of Free Will, Fischer, Kane, Pereboom and Vargas
In Our Prime, Patricia Cohen
Moral Questions, Thomas Nagel
Utilitarianism, For and Against, Smart and Williams
The Skeptical Feminist, Janet Radcliffe Richards[image error]
The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege
Naming and Necessity, Saul A. Kripke
The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt
The Forest People, Colin M. Turnbull
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Animal Machines, Ruth Harrison
Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
In the Name of Eugenics, Daniel Kevles
The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kuhl
Eugenic Nation, Alexandra Minna Stern
Heredity and Hope, Ruth Schwartz Cohen
Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Killing in War, Jeff McMahan[image error]
A Theory of the Drone, Gregoire Chamayou
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
The Language of Genes, Steve Jones
The Ordeal of Integration, Orlando Patterson
The Ethics of Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Annotated Alice, Carroll and Gardner
The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides
Winnetou, Karl May
Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace
Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle
Tiny Life, Julian Dibbel
Lying, Paul J. Griffiths
How to Think About Weird Things, Schick and Vaughn
Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
The Women’s Room, Marilyn French[image error]
The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi
Wetland, Charlotte Roche
Pragmatism, William James
Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell
Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy
An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
Tweets from Tahrir, Nunns and Idle
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes
On Art and Life, John Rushkin
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett
Fault Lines, Raghuram G. Rajan
Chavs, Owen Jones
Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle
Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel[image error]
How to Use Your Eyes, James Elkins
An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
Flim-Flam!, James Randi
The Psychology of Superstition, Gustav Jahoda
Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer
Spook, Mary Roach
The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menard
The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
The Warrior Within, Bruce Lee
Philosophy in Seven Sentences, Douglas Groothuis
Seeking Wisdom, Peter Bevelin
The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
The Principia , Isaac Newton
The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
Exact Thinking in Demented Times, Karl Sigmund
Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, Simon Critchley[image error]
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
As If, Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Meaning of Life, Klemke and Cahn
The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (anthology)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, George Muntau
The Nature of Consciousness, Rupert Spira
The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir
How Philosophy Works, DK
The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottleib
I Am Not a Brain, Markus Gabriel
The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
To Fight Against the Age, Rob Rieman
After the Natural Law, John Lawrence Hill
Aesthetics II, Dietrich von Hildebrand
Big Ideas for Curious Minds, Anonymous
The Coherence of Theism, Richard Swinburne[image error]
Philosophy Here and Now, Lewis Vaughn
Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sam Chase
An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, Roy W. Perrett
A Critical History of Western Philosophy, Stace W.T.
Wisdom from Ancient Greek Philosophy, George Tanner
The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant
The Stone Reader, Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments
The Critical Thinking Toolkit, Wiley Blackwell
Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Brownstein and Saul
Stolen Legacy, George G.M. James
Phenemology, Dan Zahavi
Seeing Through the World, Jeremy D. Johnson
Socrates’ Children, Peter Kreeft

Making the following list, I realized that classics are the genre that I read the most. By far, really. I also realized that it can be a little difficult to define a classic (especially the when about it), and that there are so very many of them. Some of the books below, I was surprised by because I hadn’t heard of them, which begs the question, can they be a classic then? And then there was also the issue of I’m sure I missed some. There were a dozen that crossed my mind as I made the list, and I just popped those on there for you. You could always go to my Recommended Reading page and see what classics I have included there. It is a much shorter list. Also, there are plenty of children’s classics included on the children’s list.

CLASSICS

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain[image error]
Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Odyssey, Homer
To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee
1984 , George Orwell
The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
I Capture the Castle , Dodie Smith[image error]
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Animal Farm , George Orwell
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Duman
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Lorna Doone, R.D. Blackmoore
Jamaica Inn, Daphne du Maurier
Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Moonfleet, J. Meade Falkner
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickenson
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy[image error]
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Lewis Carroll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carre
Anne of Green Gables , L.M. Montgomery
The Children of the New Forest, Frederick Marryat
Heidi, Johanna Spyri
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Fahrenheit 451 , Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
Bitter Lemons, Laurence Durrell
Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowatt[image error]
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
Travels with a Donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
19 Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , Anne Bronte
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
Scarlet and Black, Stendhal
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad[image error]
Tristam Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Emma, Jane Austen
Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac
The Old Wive’s Tale, Arnold Bennett
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
The Outsider, Albert Camus
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Stories, Anton Chekov
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe[image error]
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Sybil , Benjamin Disraeli
Berlin Alexander-Platz, Alfred Doblin
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Adam Bede, George Eliot
The Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskill
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
New Grub Street, George Gissing
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck[image error]
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
The Old Man and the Sea , Ernest Hemingway
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Going Solo, Roald Dahl
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Brave New World , Aldous Huxley
The Book of Khalid, Ameen Rihani[image error]
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkein
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Lolita, Vladimir Nobokov
A Wrinkle in Time , in Madeleine L’Engle
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grimm
Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine l’Engle
Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh[image error]
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
West with the Night, Beryl Markham
The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Stoner, John Willaims
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Mambo King Plays Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez[image error]
Wide Sargasso Sea , Jean Rhys
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe[image error]
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Iliad, Homer
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
Another Country, James Baldwin
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Roald Dahl
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
Diary of a Nobody, The Grossmiths
Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy
The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni
Orland, Virginia Woolf
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
The Art of War, Sun-Tzu[image error]
The Forsythe Saga, John Galsworthy
Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
Staying On, Paul Scott
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
A Christmas Carol , Charles Dickens
Silas Marner, George Eliot
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Castle, Franz Kafka
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie[image error]
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Heart of Darkness, John Conrad
Suite Francaise, Irene Nemerovsky
What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hard Times, Charles Dickens