Awesome philosophy

A curated list of awesome philosophy

Contributions and criticism are welcome. (See: Contributing.)

Table of contents

• Ethics

  • Classical ethics

  • Christian and Medieval ethics

  • Modern ethics

  • Postmodern ethics

  • Bioethics

• Meta-ethics (Metaethics)

• Epistemology

• Logic

• Aesthetics

• Metaphysics

• Philosophy of the mind

• History of philosophy

  • Western Civilization

    • Classical philosophy

    • Christian and Medieval

    • Early modern

    • Contemporary

      • Phenomenology and existentialism

      • Hermeneutics and deconstruction

      • Structuralism and post-structuralism

      • Critical theory and Marxism

  • Eastern Civlization

    • Chinese philosophy

    • Indian philosophy

    • Islamic philosophy

    • Japanese philosophy

• Philosophy of other disciplines

  • Education

  • Religion

  • Science

    • Mathematics

    • Physics

    • Computer science

    • Neuroscience

    • Chemistry

    • Biology

    • Sociology

    • Psychology

    • Economics

  • Arts and Humanities

    • Art

    • Music

    • Literatue

    • Language

    • History

  • Medicine

  • Law

  • Politics

Ethics

Classical ethics

• Aristotle "Nichomachean Ethics" "On Virtues and Vices"

Christian and Medieval ethics

• Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologica"

• Saint Bonaventure "Commentary on the Sentences"

• Duns Scotus "Philosophical Writings"

• William of Ockham "Sum of Logic"

Modern ethics

• G. E. M. Anscombe "Modern Moral Philosophy"

• David Gauthier "Morals by Agreement"

• Alan Gewirth "Reason and Morality"

• Allan Gibbard "Thinking How to Live"

• Susan Hurley "Natural Reasons"

• Christine Korsgaard "The Sources of Normativity"

• John McDowell "Values and Secondary Qualities"

• Alasdair MacIntyre "After Virtue"

• J. L. Mackie "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong"

• G. E. Moore "Principia Ethica"

• Martha Nussbaum "The Fragility of Goodness"

• Derek Parfit "Reasons and Persons"

• Derek Parfit "On What Matters"

• Peter Railton "Facts, Values, and Norms"

• W. D. Ross "The Right and the Good"

• Thomas M. Scanlon "What We Owe to Each Other"

• Samuel Scheffler "The Rejection of Consequentialism"

• Peter Singer "Practical Ethics"

• Michael A. Smith "The Moral Problem"

• Bernard Williams "Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy"

Postmodern ethics

• Zygmunt Bauman "Postmodern Ethics"

• Terry Eagleton "The Illusions of Postmodernism"

Bioethics

• Don Marquis "Why Abortion is Immoral"

• Paul Ramsey "The Patient as a Person" "Fabricated Man"

• Judith Jarvis Thomson "A Defense of Abortion"

Meta-ethics (Metaethics)

• P. F. Strawson "Freedom and Resentment"

Epistemology

• Laurence Bonjour "The Structure of Empirical Knowledge"

• Luc Bovens "Bayesian Epistemology"

• Stanley Cavell "The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy"

• Roderick Chisholm "Theory of Knowledge"

• Keith DeRose "The Case for Contextualism"

• René Descartes "Discourse on the Method", "Meditations on First Philosophy"

• Edmund Gettier "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"

• Alvin Goldman "Epistemology and Cognition" "What is Justified Belief?"

• Susan Haack "Evidence and Enquiry"

• Hilary Kornblith "Knowledge and its Place in Nature"

• Jonathan Kvanvig "The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding"

• David K. Lewis "Elusive Knowledge"

• G. E. Moore "A Defence of Common Sense"

• Willard van Orman Quine "Epistemology Naturalized"

• Richard Rorty "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature"

• Bertrand Russell "The Problems of Philosophy"

• Jason Stanley "Knowledge and Practical Interest"

• Stephen Stich "The Fragmentation of Reason"

• Peter Unger "Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism"

• Timothy Williamson "Knowledge and its Limits"

Logic

• Donald Davidson "Truth and Meaning"

• Gottlob Frege "Begriffsschrift"

• Kurt Gödel, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems"

• Saul Kripke, "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic"

• Charles Sanders Peirce "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"

• Alfred Tarski "The Concept of Truth"

Aesthetics

• Theodor Adorno "Aesthetic Theory"

• R.G. Collingwood "The Principles of Art"

• Arthur C. Danto "After the End of Art"

• Nelson Goodman "Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols"

• George Santayana "The Sense of Beauty"

Metaphysics

• Aristotle "Metaphysics"

• D.M. Armstrong "Universals and Scientific Realism"

• A. J. Ayer "Language, Truth, and Logic"

• Rudolf Carnap "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology"

• David Chalmers "Constructing the World"

• John Dewey "Experience and Nature"

• William James "Pragmatism"

• Immanuel Kant "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals"

• James Ladyman, Don Ross, David Spurrett, John Collier "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized"

• John McDowell "Mind and World"

• David Kellogg Lewis "On the Plurality of Worlds"

• Stephen Mumford "Dispositions"

• Derek Parfit "Reasons and Persons"

• Willard Van Orman Quine "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" "On What There Is"

• Theodore Sider "Writing the Book of the World"

• Alfred North Whitehead "Process and Reality"

• Timothy Williamson "Modal Logic as Metaphysics"

• Ludwig Wittgenstein "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (a.k.a. The Tractatus)

Philosophy of the mind

• D. M. Armstrong "A Materialist Theory of the Mind"

• Peter Carruthers "The Architecture of the Mind"

• David Chalmers "Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings" "The Character of Consciousness" "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory"

• Paul Churchland "Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind"

• Andy Clark "Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension"

• Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained"

• Jaegwon Kim "Philosophy of Mind"

• Ruth Millikan "Varieties of Meaning"

• Gilbert Ryle "The Concept of Mind"

History of philosophy

Western civilization

• Bertrand Russell "A History of Western Philosophy"

Classical philosophy

• Marcus Aurelius "Meditations""

• Plato "Symposium" "Parmenides" "Phaedrus"

Christian and Medieval

• Augustine of Hippo "Confessions" "The City of God"

• Anselm of Canterbury "Proslogion"

Early modern

• Sir Francis Bacon "Novum Organum"

• Jeremy Bentham "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation"

• Henri Bergson "Time and Free Will" "Matter and Memory"

• George Berkeley "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge"

• Auguste Comte "Course of Positive Philosophy"

• René Descartes "Principles of Philosophy" "Passions of the Soul"

• Desiderius Erasmus "The Praise of Folly"

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte "Foundations of the Science of Knowledge"

• Hugo Grotius "De iure belli ac pacis"

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel "Phenomenology of Spirit" "Science of Logic" "The Philosophy of Right" "The Philosophy of History"

• Thomas Hobbes "Leviathan"

• David Hume "A Treatise of Human Nature" "Four Dissertationss" "Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary" "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals"

• Immanuel Kant "A Critique of Pure Reason" "Critique of Practical Reason" "A Critique of Judgement"

• Søren Kierkegaard "Either/Or" "Fear and Trembling" "The Concept of Anxiety"

• Gottfried Leibniz "Discourse on Metaphysics" "New Essays Concerning Human Understanding" "Théodicée" "Monadology"

• John Locke "Two Treatises of Government" "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding"

• Niccolò Machiavelli "The Prince"

• Karl Marx "The Communist Manifesto" "Das Kapital"

• John Stuart Mill "On Liberty "Utilitarianism"

• John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill "The Subjection of Women"

• Michel de Montaigne "Essays"

• Friedrich Nietzsche "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" "Beyond Good and Evil" "On the Genealogy of Morals"

• Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" "Emile: or, On Education" "The Social Contract"

• Arthur Schopenhauer "The World as Will and Representation"

• Henry Sidgwick "The Methods of Ethics"

• Adam Smith "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" "The Wealth of Nations"

• Herbert Spencer "System of Synthetic Philosophy"

• Baruch Spinoza "Ethics" "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"

• Max Stirner "The Ego and Its Own"

• Mary Wollstonecraft "A Vindication of the Rights of Women"

Contemporary

Phenomenology and existentialism

• Simone de Beauvoir "The Second Sex"

• Albert Camus "Myth of Sisyphus"

• Martin Heidegger "Being and Time"

• Edmund Husserl "Logical Investigations" "Cartesian Meditations" "Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy"

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty "Phenomenology of Perception"

• Jean-Paul Sartre, "Being and Nothingness" "Critique of Dialectical Reason"

Hermeneutics and deconstruction

• Jacques Derrida "Of Grammatology"

• Hans-Georg Gadamer "Truth and Method"

• Paul Ricœur "Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation"

Structuralism and post-structuralism

• Michel Foucault "The Order of Things"

• Gilles Deleuze "Difference and Repetition"

• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari "Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

• Luce Irigaray "Speculum of the Other Woman"

• Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish"

Critical theory and Marxism

• Theodor Adorno "Negative Dialectics"

• Louis Althusser "Reading Capital"

• Alain Badiou "Being and Event"

• Jürgen Habermas "Theory of Communicative Action"

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno "Dialectic of Enlightenment"

• Georg Lukacs "History and Class Consciousness"

• Herbert Marcuse "Reason and Revolution" "Eros and Civilization"

Eastern civilization

Chinese philosophy

• "The Record of Linji"

• Han Fei "Han Feizi"

• Kongzi "Analects" "Five Classics"

• Laozi "Dao De Jing"

• Mengzi "Mengzi"

• Sunzi "Art of War"

• Zhou Dunyi "The Taiji Tushuo"

• Zhu Xi "Four Books" "Reflections on Things at Hand"

Indian philosophy

• "The Upanishads"

• "The Bhagavad Gita" ("The Song of God")

• Aksapada Gautama "Nyaya Sutras"

• Isvarakrsna "Sankhya Karika"

• Kanada "Vaisheshika Sutra"

• Patañjali "Yoga Sutras"

• Swami Swatamarama "Hatha Yoga Pradipika"

• Vyasa "Brahma Sutras"

• Tami "Thiruvalluvar"

Islamic philosophy

• Al-Ghazali "The Incoherence of the Philosophers"

Japanese philosophy

• Hakuin Ekaku "Wild Ivy"

• Honen "One-Sheet Document"

• Kukai "Attaining Enlightenment in this Very Existence"

• Zeami Motokiyo "Style and Flower"

• Miyamoto Musashi "The Book of Five Rings"

• Shinran "Kyogyoshinsho"

• Dogen Zenji "Shōbōgenzō"

Philosophy of other disciplines

Education

• John Dewey "Democracy and Education"

• Terry Eagleton "The Slow Death of the University"

• Paulo Freire "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

• Martha Nussbaum "Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities"

• B.F. Skinner "Walden Two"

• Charles Weingartner and Neil Postman "Teaching as a Subversive Activity"

Religion

• William Lane Craig "The Kalam Cosmological Argument"

• J. L. Mackie "The Miracle of Theism"

• Dewi Zephaniah Phillips "Religion Without Explanation"

• Alvin Plantinga "God and Other Minds" "Is Belief in God Properly Basic"

• William Rowe "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look"

• J. L. Schellenberg "Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason"

• Richard Swinburne "The Existence of God"

Science

• Paul Feyerabend "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge"

• Bas C. van Fraassen "The Scientific Image"

• Nelson Goodman "Fact, Fiction, and Forecast"

• Thomas Samuel Kuhn "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"

• Larry Laudan "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem"

• David K. Lewis "How to Define Theoretical Terms"

• Karl Pearson "The Grammar of Science"

• Karl Popper "The Logic of Scientific Discovery"

• Hans Reichenbach "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy"

Mathematics

• Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell "Principia Mathematica"

• Paul Benacerraf "What Numbers Could not Be" "Mathematical Truth"

• Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam "Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings"

• George Boolos "Logic, Logic and Logic"

• Hartry Field "Science without Numbers: The Defence of Nominalism"

• Imre Lakatos "Proofs and Refutations"

• Penelope Maddy "Second Philosophy"

Physics

• Aristotle "Physics"

• Michel Bitbol "Mécanique quantique : Une introduction philosophique" "Schrödinger’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics"

• Chris Isham and Jeremy Butterfield "On the Emergence of Time in Quantum Gravity"

• Tim Lewens "The Meaning of Science: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science"

Computer science

• Scott Aaronson "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity"

• Judea Pearl "Causality"

• Ray Turner "The Philosophy of Computer Science" "Computational Artefacts-Towards a Philosophy of Computer Science"

Neuroscience

• John Bickle "Revisionary Physicalism" "Psychoneural Reduction of the Genuinely Cognitive: Some Accomplished Facts" "Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave" " Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account"

• Patricia Churchland "Brain-Wise : Studies in Neurophilosophy" "Neurophilosophy : Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain"

• Carl Craver "Explaining the brain : mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience"

• Georg Northoff "Philosophy of the Brain: The brain problem"

• Henrik Walter "Neurophilosophy of Free Will: From Libertarian Illusions to a Concept of Natural Autonomy"

Chemistry

• Jaap van Brakel "Philosophy of Chemistry"

Biology

• Daniel C. Dennett "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"

• Ruth Garrett Millikan "Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories"

• Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell"

• Elliott Sober "The Nature of Selection"

Sociology

• B. F. Skinner "Science and Human Behavior"

Psychology

• Donald Davidson "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"

• William James "The Principles of Psychology"

Economics

• Kenneth Arrow "Social Choice and Individual Values"

• Ludwig von Mises "The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science"

• Elizabeth S. Anderson "Value in Ethics and Economics"

Arts and Humanities

• Bernard Williams "Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline"

Art

• Clive Bell "Art"

• George Dickie "Art and the Aesthetic"

Music

• Roger Scruton "Music as an Art"

Literature

• Aristotle "Poetics"

Language

• J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses" "How To Do Things With Words"

• Robert Brandom "Making it Explicit"

• Stanley Cavell "Must We Mean What We Say?"

• David Chalmers "Two Dimensional Semantics"

• Cora Diamond "What Nonsense Might Be"

• Michael Dummett "Frege: Philosophy of Language"

• Gottlob Frege "On Sense and Reference"

• H. P. Grice "Logic and Conversation"

• Saul Kripke "Naming and Necessity"

• David K. Lewis "General Semantics"

• Willard Van Orman Quine "Word and Object"

• Bertrand Russell "On Denoting"

• John Searle "Speech Acts"

• Ludwig Wittgenstein "Philosophical Investigations"

History

• R.G. Collingwood "The Idea of History"

• Karl Löwith "Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History"

Medicine

• Mario Bunge "Medical Philosophy: Conceptual Issues in Medicine"

• R. Paul Thompson and Ross E. G. Upshur "Philosophy of Medicines"

Law

• Ronald Dworkin "Law's Empire"

• John Finnis "Natural Law and Natural Rights"

• Lon L. Fuller "The Morality of Law"

• H.L.A. Hart "The Concept of Law"

Politics

• Aristotle "Politics"

• Isaiah Berlin "Two Concepts of Liberty"

• Robert Nozick "Anarchy, State, and Utopia"

• Plato "Republic"

• Karl Popper "The Open Society and Its Enemies"

• John Rawls "A Theory of Justice"

• Michael Sandel "Liberalism and the Limits of Justice"