14 Philosophy Books for Beginners, Ordered So You Finish One

Warburton gives every major figure in Western philosophy a few pages: what they were reacting against, what they argued, what was wrong with it, and who turned up next to say so. There is no jargon and no showing off, and each chapter hands you to the following one, so the whole thing runs like a story with a very long cast. You will not become a philosopher by finishing it. You will finally know what the words mean, which is the actual blocker for most beginners.

De Botton takes six thinkers and puts each one to work on a specific complaint. Socrates on being unpopular, Epicurus on not having enough money, Seneca on frustration, Montaigne on feeling inadequate, Schopenhauer on heartbreak, Nietzsche on difficulty. Every chapter mixes biography, argument and pictures, which academic philosophers found irritating and which is precisely why beginners finish the book. It is not a survey and never claims to be. It is a demonstration that these arguments were built for use, by men who were also miserable on ordinary Tuesdays.

Sophie Amundsen finds a note in her letterbox asking who she is, then another asking where the world came from, then a correspondence course from a philosopher she has never met. Over a few hundred pages she receives the entire Western tradition in order, wrapped inside a plot that turns very strange in a way I will not spoil. The teaching sections are genuinely good. The novel around them is odd and slightly creaky, and the twist divides readers permanently, but a lot of people got their first philosophy here.

Marcus Aurelius wrote this around 170 CE in army camps on the frontier, for nobody but himself, which is why it repeats and doubles back and never tries to impress anybody. He reminds himself that people will be rude tomorrow, that fame is worth nothing, that he will die and so will everyone who remembers him, and that none of this excuses behaving badly today. Gregory Hays put it into plain modern English in 2002, and that is the edition to buy, because the Victorian versions read like scripture and put readers off for life.

Seneca wrote these letters to Lucilius around 65 CE, and the Penguin selection gathers the ones worth your evening. He is on grief, on staying busy as a way of avoiding your own life, on how we suffer more in imagination than in fact, on spending money to impress people who are not watching. He was also enormously rich and advised Nero, which makes the passages about simplicity hard to take entirely straight, and the letters are better for that tension rather than worse.

Arjuna stops on the battlefield because the army facing him holds his cousins, his teachers and his elders, and Krishna answers him for eighteen chapters. The subject is not really war. It is what to do when every available option damages somebody, and how to act without being owned by the outcome. Easwaran keeps it in plain modern English and puts a long introduction in front of it, which matters, because most Indian readers first meet this text as something recited at home rather than something to argue with.

Rahula presents the core of early Buddhism as a set of propositions rather than a faith: what suffering means in the technical sense, where it comes from, why the self you defend all day may not be the solid object you assume, and what the eightfold path actually asks of you. He quotes the older texts constantly and lets them speak. The tone is a careful scholar who happens to be a monk, so nothing is sold to you and nothing is softened for a western reader.

The Tao Te Ching runs to eighty one brief chapters, most of them under a page, arguing that the yielding thing outlasts the rigid one and that the best ruler is the one nobody notices. It contradicts itself deliberately and refuses to define its central term, which makes it either the deepest thing you will read this year or an elaborate way of saying nothing, depending on your mood that week. D. C. Lau's Penguin translation from 1963 keeps it spare and does not decorate it, which is what you want the first time.

Hamilton lays the Indian schools out as what they were, rival positions arguing with each other for centuries about knowledge, perception, the self and liberation. You get the vocabulary, the disagreements, and enough structure to place the Gita, the Buddhist material and the Upanishads relative to one another. It is compressed and reads like a very good lecturer with limited time, so expect to reread chapters. For the fuller version, the old Chatterjee and Datta textbook is still in print in India and still does the job.

Sandel built this out of the course he teaches, and the method is the value. He hands you a hard case, lets you pick a side, then produces a second case where the principle you just chose gives an answer you hate. He works through utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kant and Rawls in that order, always through real arguments about money, war, markets and who deserves what. It is the most immediately useful book on this list if you argue about politics with anybody.

Russell begins with a table and asks what you actually know about it as opposed to what you assume, and by the third chapter the floor has quietly gone. He covers appearance and reality, induction, whether we know anything about other minds, and what philosophy is for given how little it has settled. The prose is beautifully plain and the book is short. Written in 1912, it is still the standard first taste of the questions professional philosophers spend whole careers on.

Camus asks whether a life with no built in meaning is worth continuing, and refuses both of the usual exits. He will not invent a god to supply the meaning, and he will not accept despair as an answer either. The closing image is the man condemned to roll a rock uphill forever, whom Camus asks us to imagine happy, because the rock is his and he is awake to it. The middle chapters on other writers are hard going, and the argument earns the effort.

The Penguin volume collects Euthyphro, the Apology, Crito and Phaedo: Socrates arguing about what holiness is, defending himself before the city that is about to execute him, turning down a friend's offer of escape on principle, and then discussing death with his friends while the poison is prepared. Plato wrote these in the fourth century BCE. This is the best entry to him, much better than starting with the Republic, because you watch the method working on questions with a man's life attached.

This is Nietzsche's strangest book: part sermon, part parody of scripture, part poem, with a hermit descending to preach the overman to a crowd that would rather watch a tightrope walker. The famous ideas are all here, the death of god, eternal recurrence, the attack on pity and herd morality, and they arrive as images rather than as arguments you can check. Hollingdale's Penguin translation is the standard English one. Nietzsche's sister later attached his work to politics he had spent his life attacking, so read the book instead of the legend.