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Reading paths
Short lists of books in the order to read them. Each step says why the book matters, where to start and roughly how long it takes. Pick a path that suits your level, and go at your own pace.
First steps in philosophy
This path is for readers who have never studied philosophy and want to begin with the questions rather than the names. It opens with a short book that treats the big problems as puzzles…
- What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy
- Apology
- Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
- How the World Thinks
- The Problems of Philosophy
- Meditations on First Philosophy
First steps in ethics
Ethics asks how we should live and what we owe one another. This path starts with a short dialogue that poses one of the oldest questions in the subject. Two clear modern guides then…
- Euthyphro
- Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics
- The Elements of Moral Philosophy
- Utilitarianism
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
- Mencius (Mengzi)
- Nicomachean Ethics
Understanding Islamic philosophy
Philosophy in the Islamic world grew from the translation of Greek works into Arabic in Abbasid Baghdad and continued for more than a thousand years. This path starts with a narrative history. Three short…
- Philosophy in the Islamic World
- Deliverance from Error
- Hayy ibn Yaqzan
- The Decisive Treatise
- The Muqaddimah
- The Incoherence of the Philosophers
An introduction to philosophy of mind
What is a mind, and how does it fit into a physical world? This path starts with two short books for newcomers, then reads Descartes and the princess who raised one of the sharpest…
- Minds, Brains and Science
- Meditations on First Philosophy
- Matter and Consciousness
- The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes
- The Concept of Mind
- Mortal Questions
- The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
Chinese philosophy: the classics and their readers
Much of Chinese philosophy has been done by reading and re-reading a small set of classics. This path begins with a modern introduction to the classical period, then reads the Analects, the Mencius, the…
- Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy
- Analects
- Mencius (Mengzi)
- Daodejing
- Zhuangzi
- Xunzi
- Reflections on Things at Hand
Indian philosophy: from the Upaniṣads to the darśanas
Classical Indian philosophy grew from the Upaniṣads into schools, the darśanas, that argued with one another and with Buddhists and Jainas for centuries. This path starts with a narrative history, reads the Upaniṣads and…
- Classical Indian Philosophy
- The Upanishads (the principal Upanishads)
- Bhagavad Gita
- Sāṃkhya Kārikā
- Yoga Sūtras
- A Thousand Teachings
- Nyāya Sūtra
Political philosophy: power, justice, freedom
Political philosophy asks when power is legitimate, what justice requires and how free people should be. This path starts with a lively modern introduction, then reads short classics before the longer works. Machiavelli and…
- Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
- The Prince
- On Liberty
- Annihilation of Caste
- Leviathan
- Four Essays on Liberty
- A Theory of Justice
African and Africana philosophy
This path reads philosophy from Africa and its diaspora, and the debate over what African philosophy is. It starts with Du Bois on double consciousness and with the Hatata, a seventeenth-century Ethiopian inquiry that…
- The Souls of Black Folk
- The Hatata Inquiries
- African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
- Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy
- Philosophy and an African Culture
- Black Skin, White Masks
- An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme