Philosophy · 12 modules · 36 steps
Western Philosophy
A guided self-education in the Western philosophical tradition, read as a single long argument rather than a gallery of great men. You start with the whole story in outline, learn what an argument is and how to take one apart, then follow the questions from Athens through the Christian, Islamic and Jewish middle ages into the modern self, Kant, the nineteenth century, existentialism and the analytic turn. The promise is not memorising philosophers; it is being able to recognise an argument, reconstruct it honestly, test it, and say why you accept or reject it.
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The Shape of the Argument
Before any primary text, get the whole story in outline. You will not remember all of it, and that is fine. The point is to have a map in your head so that every later reading has somewhere to sit.
A Little History of Philosophy
Nigel WarburtonForty short chapters running from Socrates to Peter Singer. The best single overview in English, and deliberately written for people with no background.
The entire tradition at speed. Watch it once now and again at the end of the pathway.
Open companionThe Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand RussellNot a history. Russell takes a table and asks whether you can know it is there, and by the end you understand what philosophical work actually consists of.
A working philosopher on what Russell was doing and why it mattered.
Open companionThe illustrated version of the same map, if you would rather see the tradition laid out visually.
How to Read an Argument
Philosophy is a skill before it is a subject. These two short books hand you the equipment: how to find the claim, find the reasons, and tell a good move from a bad one.
Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
Simon BlackburnBlackburn walks through the central problems while showing you the moves. Read it as a demonstration of method rather than for conclusions.
Seven minutes on how the field divides up, so you know which kind of question you are looking at.
Open companionA Rulebook for Arguments
Anthony WestonUnder a hundred pages, and the most useful thing on this list. Rules for constructing an argument and for spotting when someone is not making one.
A philosopher demonstrating the single most transferable skill here: separating what is being claimed from what is offered in support.
Open companionThe Greeks
Western philosophy begins as conversation, not doctrine. Read Plato for the method before you read anyone for conclusions, and notice that Socrates almost never reaches an answer.
Euthyphro and Meno
PlatoTwo short dialogues that show the method in miniature. A definition is offered, tested and destroyed, and the destruction is the point.
Kaplan takes the dilemma apart slowly. Watch after reading and you will see what you missed.
Open companionThe Republic
PlatoThe most ambitious book in the tradition: justice, the soul, education, art and the ideal state, all from one question about whether it pays to be good.
Open the core textA famous lecture by a professor who clearly loves the text. Long, and worth every minute.
Open companionNicomachean Ethics
AristotleAristotle asks what a good human life is and answers with character rather than rules. The origin of virtue ethics and still its best statement.
Open the core textA close, patient reading of what Aristotle means by virtue, which is not what the word suggests today.
Open companionHow to Live
Philosophy as practice rather than theory. Three Roman writers who assumed the point of the subject was to change how you behave on an ordinary Tuesday.
Meditations
Marcus AureliusA Roman emperor's private notes to himself, never meant for publication. The most personal document in ancient philosophy.
Open the core textOn how to approach a book that has no argument structure and was not written for you.
Open companionDiscourses and Selected Writings
EpictetusEpictetus was born a slave. His distinction between what is up to you and what is not is the hardest idea in Stoicism to actually apply.
An animated walk through the core of the Discourses.
Open companionLetters from a Stoic
SenecaLetters to a friend on grief, money, crowds and dying. Seneca was fabulously rich and advising on poverty, which is worth holding in mind as you read.
Open the core textThe main themes of the letters, and the tension between Seneca's advice and his life.
Open companionFaith and Reason
For a thousand years the central question was whether reason and revelation could both be true. The answers built the vocabulary that later philosophy would use to attack religion.
Confessions
Augustine of HippoThe first autobiography in the Western tradition, and an argument about time, memory and desire disguised as a life story.
Open the core textA full Yale lecture on what Augustine is doing beneath the confessional surface.
Open companionThe Consolation of Philosophy
BoethiusWritten in prison while awaiting execution. Philosophy appears as a woman and argues him out of self-pity. The most read book in medieval Europe after the Bible.
Open the core textThe circumstances of the book, which are inseparable from its argument.
Open companionProslogion
Anselm of CanterburyContains the ontological argument, which tries to prove God exists from the definition of the word alone. Almost everyone thinks it fails and nobody agrees on why.
The argument stated clearly, then the standard objections.
Open companionSumma Theologiae: Selected Questions
Thomas AquinasAquinas absorbs Aristotle into Christian theology, having received him through Arabic commentators. Read the Five Ways and the structure of the objections.
The Five Ways in ten minutes, with the objections Aquinas himself anticipated.
Open companionThe Modern Self
Philosophy turns inward and asks what a single mind can know on its own. The question produces both the rationalist and empiricist traditions, and they end up in very different places.
Meditations on First Philosophy
Rene DescartesSix days of systematic doubt, discarding everything that can possibly be doubted, to see what survives. What survives is the thinker doing the doubting.
A slow walk through the first Meditation, which is where the whole thing is set up.
Open companionObservations upon Experimental Philosophy
Margaret CavendishCavendish argued against Descartes and Hobbes in print in the 1660s, when no woman was admitted to the Royal Society whose experiments she was criticising.
Her materialism, and why she was written out of the story for three centuries.
Open companionAn Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John LockeThe mind as a blank sheet written on by experience. Long, so read the first two books and the chapter on personal identity.
Open the core textWhere Locke sits between Descartes and Hume, and what Berkeley did to him.
Open companionAn Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
David HumeHume points out that no amount of past evidence justifies a claim about the future, and no philosopher has fully answered him since.
Open the core textAn Oxford lecture on the argument that broke empiricism from the inside.
Open companionKant and Wollstonecraft
Kant tries to rescue knowledge from Hume by arguing that the mind supplies the structure of experience. Wollstonecraft applies Enlightenment reasoning to the half of humanity the Enlightenment ignored.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Immanuel KantKant's own attempt to make the Critique of Pure Reason readable. Start here, not with the Critique.
Six minutes on the single idea that makes Kant make sense.
Open companionGroundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Immanuel KantMorality derived from reason alone, with no appeal to consequences, God or feeling. The most demanding ethical theory anyone has proposed.
Open the core textThe categorical imperative worked through with examples, including where it appears to give the wrong answer.
Open companionA Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary WollstonecraftWritten in six weeks in 1792. Wollstonecraft accepts the Enlightenment premise that reason makes us human and asks why nobody applied it to women.
Open the core textThe argument and the political moment it was written into.
Open companionThe Nineteenth Century
Three attacks on the confident rational self: from utility, from faith, and from suspicion. After this century philosophy stops assuming that reason is in charge.
Utilitarianism
John Stuart MillThe greatest happiness of the greatest number, defended by someone who saw the obvious objections coming. Short and unusually honest about the difficulties.
Open the core textThe theory, the standard counterexamples, and Mill's attempts to survive them.
Open companionFear and Trembling
Soren KierkegaardAbraham is told to kill his son. Kierkegaard argues that if faith is real then ethics cannot be the highest thing, which is a genuinely disturbing conclusion.
The knight of faith, and why Kierkegaard thought Hegel had missed the point entirely.
Open companionOn the Genealogy of Morals
Friedrich NietzscheNietzsche asks where our moral feelings came from historically, and answers that they were invented by the weak. Whether or not he is right, the question was new.
Master and slave morality set out plainly, without the mythology that usually surrounds Nietzsche.
Open companionExistence and Freedom
If there is no given human nature and no external meaning, everything is your responsibility. Three writers who took that seriously, and one who showed the men had not noticed half the problem.
The Second Sex
Simone de BeauvoirOne is not born a woman, one becomes one. Nine hundred pages of philosophy, history and interview material that founded modern feminist theory.
Open the core textTwo academic philosophers on the introduction, which is where the argument is.
Open companionExistentialism Is a Humanism
Jean-Paul SartreA public lecture defending existentialism against the charge that it is gloomy and irresponsible. The clearest short statement of the position.
Open the core textWhat Sartre means by existence preceding essence, and the objections he was answering.
Open companionThe Myth of Sisyphus
Albert CamusCamus opens by saying the only serious philosophical problem is suicide, then spends the book arguing you should not.
Open the core textThe absurd as Camus defines it, which is neither pessimism nor despair.
Open companionThe Analytic Turn
A programme to make philosophy scientific, its demolition, and a man who decided the whole project was a misunderstanding of language. Read these three in this order and you have an argument, not a survey.
Language, Truth and Logic
A.J. AyerAyer at twenty-six declares that any statement that cannot be verified is literally meaningless, which disposes of theology, ethics and most of metaphysics.
The verification principle stated clearly, before anyone starts attacking it.
Open companionTwo Dogmas of Empiricism
W.V.O. QuineTwenty pages published in 1951 that took apart the distinction Ayer's whole programme rested on. Arguably the most consequential philosophy paper of the century.
A full lecture on the paper. Dense, and the only way to see exactly where the knife goes in.
Open companionPhilosophical Investigations
Ludwig WittgensteinWittgenstein rejects his own earlier work and argues that meaning is use, not reference. Written in numbered fragments, which is deliberate.
Open the core textLanguage games and the beetle in the box, explained at the pace the ideas actually need.
Open companionAfter the Canon
Three philosophers writing after 1945 who asked what the tradition had left out: politics as action, race as a philosophical problem, and attention as a moral act.
The Human Condition
Hannah ArendtArendt separates labour, work and action, and argues that modern life has quietly eliminated the third. A political philosophy built from a distinction nobody had drawn.
Open the core textFrom St John's College, whose entire degree is close reading of books like this one.
Open companionBlack Skin, White Masks
Frantz FanonA psychiatrist from Martinique on what colonialism does inside the mind of the colonised. Philosophy, clinical observation and autobiography at once.
Open the core textA philosopher working through the book chapter by chapter.
Open companionThe Sovereignty of Good
Iris MurdochMurdoch argues against the whole existentialist picture of morality as choice, and for morality as a matter of learning to see other people accurately.
A lecture by Cathy Mason on attention, which is Murdoch's central and least obvious idea.
Open companionPhilosophy Now
Three living or recent philosophers writing for readers rather than colleagues, on consciousness, justice and what a good life requires.
What Does It All Mean?
Thomas NagelNinety pages covering knowledge, mind, free will, death and meaning. Nagel refuses to simplify, and the book is still readable in an afternoon.
Nagel's most famous argument, on why consciousness resists scientific explanation.
Open companionCreating Capabilities
Martha NussbaumAn account of what a society owes people, framed as capabilities rather than resources or preferences. Developed with Amartya Sen and now used in real policy.
Nussbaum setting out the approach in her own words.
Open companionJustice
Michael J. SandelSandel runs the major theories against hard cases: trolleys, conscription, surrogacy, price gouging. The book of the most watched university course in the world.
The first lecture of the Harvard course, which is where the book came from.
Open companion