Philosophy Past Readings
2023–2024
- A. J. Ayer, Hume: A Very Short Introduction
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
2022–2023
- Kieran Setiya, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way
- Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
- Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
- Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought
2021–2022
- Julian Baggini, What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life
- Yvonnne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers
- Zena Hitz, Lost In Thought
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- Emily Katz Anhalt, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny
- Steven Pinker, Rationality
- Robert Wright, The Evolution of God
- Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us About Living Well
- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
- William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings (edited by Giles Gunn)
- A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope
- Aristotle, Poetics (preferably Oxford Classics edition)
2020–2021
- Martha C. Franks, Books Without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville, and Madison Go to China
- Wolfram Ellenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy
- Stephen Mumford, Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- Julia Annas, Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Intoduction
- Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives of the Stoics
- Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life
- Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How To Love and How To Die
- Lucretius, The Nature of Things
2019–2020
- Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life; and more writings by Thoreau such as “Civil Disobedience”
- Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics; plus a few essays by Emerson such as “The American Scholar” or “Divinity School Address”
- Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters
- Pre-Socratic Philosophers
2018–2019
- Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin edition preferred)
- Jules Evan, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations
- Carlin Romano, excerpts from America the Philosophical
- Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness
- Thomas Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)
- Brian Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher
- Ted Honderich, How Free Are You
- Michael Puett, The Path—What Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About The Good Life
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
- Mary Jane Jacob, Dewey for Artists
- Ralph Waldo Emerson miscellany such as The Heart of Emerson’s Journals (edited by Bliss Perry), and Emerson In His Journals (edited by Joel Porte)
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
2017
- Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
- John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men
- The Bhagavad Gita
- Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
- R. J. Hollingdale, editor, A Nietzsche Reader
2016
- Ancius Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
- Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic
- Arthur Herman, The Cave and The Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization
2015
- Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
- Simon Glendinning, Derrida: A Very Short Introduction
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
2014
- David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker
- Naomi Klein, No Logo
- Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
- William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Life
- Morris Dickstein, ed. The Revival of Pragmatism (first section)
- Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
2012–2013
- Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Henri Bergson
- Immanuel Kant
- Lucretius