Nigel Warburton's Top Book Recommendations

Nigel Warburton

This book is a really interesting, highly readable discussion of the friendship between the two. [source]

Nigel Warburton

This is the kind of philosophy that makes you think again. Whether or not you agree with him, he’s saying, ‘Here’s another way of looking at this.' [source]

Nigel Warburton

Wright has a degree of evangelism about him, but he’s not saying this is the only way to achieve a better life. He says it’s a way of eliminating suffering from many people’s lives, and it worked for him. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Stoicism in its modern form, as described by Massimo Pigliucci, is a philosophy for living. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It covers what you would cover in a university undergraduate course on utilitarianism, but you can read and take it in in four or five hours or so. [source]

Nigel Warburton

This is the best philosophy book that I’ve read this year. [source]

Nigel Warburton

He manages, in these essays, to address really deep questions in just two or three pages, often saying more than other people say in a whole book. [source]

Nigel Warburton

I don’t know of a better survey of this period. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Lurking behind it is Seneca: the Roman philosopher who talked about anger being a useless emotion. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It’s a very easy read, but it makes Chinese philosophy quite fresh. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Whether you accept D’Angour’s theory that the young Socrates was very different from the older man portrayed by Plato – lover, warrior, wrestler, dancer – the elegance of D’Angour’s prose, and the lightness of his touch, make this a very pleasurable read. [source]

Nigel Warburton

The reason I picked this book is because I think Michael Sandel is an outstanding speaker and writer in his ability to bring philosophy alive. He can take a thinker like Aristotle and make him completely relevant to the present day, to show how his ideas have applications in our everyday lives. [source]

Nigel Warburton

When I was an undergraduate, this book made me think philosophy was really worth studying. It showed me that philosophy isn’t nitpicking or school debating societies, but rather a subject that gets right to the heart of what matters. Like Peter Singer, Glover believes that your thinking about philosophical issues should make a difference to your life. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Clearly written and accessible. Chatfield teaches a point, then asks you to test yourself to see whether you’ve learnt the moves that he’s described. It’s very wide ranging: it includes material on cognitive biases as well as more logical moves and arguments. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Aristotle was a writer who was very much concerned with what will make a human life go well, and so Edith Hall treats him as a source for good advice on just that: good advice on how to be human. [source]

Nigel Warburton

At the heart of the book is the argument that misogyny is a structural phenomenon. This is a book which is timely and intellectually rigorous. It’s a book that will last as a serious contribution to philosophy, but is outward-facing because it’s talking about contemporary issues relevant way beyond the academic philosophy department. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Hiking With Nietzsche a very skillful combination of narrative about Nietzsche’s life intermingled with John Kaag’s past, but also his present, where he’s found a different kind of satisfaction. If you really want to fill in the details, you need to read American Philosophy: A Love Story because that explains some of the story about where he is now, who he’s married to, and how that came about. [source]

Nigel Warburton

What I loved about this book is that it takes you right into Nietzsche’s life. This is particularly important with him because the life and the work are not so easily separable. For Nietzsche, there’s a sense that his life is actually part of what he’s trying to do. [source]

Nigel Warburton

The broader aim of the book is to give accessible insight into some of the most interesting interdisciplinary research in the area of cognitive science, about how rather than being passive recipients of information, we project expectations on the world. According to Clark, we should rethink everything about human beings in terms of predictive processing, the ways that our senses supply correctives of our projections, and don’t give us a reliable picture of reality that we receive passively. [source]

Nigel Warburton

This is a fun book, but also a serious book. Rebecca Roache is very much a philosopher, and this is really a book on the philosophy of language. It actually draws upon some of the ideas of J.L. Austin, who we’ve already mentioned, the ordinary language philosopher who talked about performative utterances, acts which are performed by saying words—so, for instance, launching a ship by saying ‘I launch this ship’. Or the words ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony. These are linguistic acts. And one of the themes in Rebecca’s book is how linguistic acts are performed when people utter swear words in different contexts. [source]

Nigel Warburton

I don’t know any other writer who could pull off something like this…She’s covering the long history of humanism, not just the kind of humanism we think of as an agnostic or atheistic approach to life—humanist funerals that kind of thing—although that’s there. She includes humanism in the sense of the regeneration of interest in the Classical world that was characteristic of some writers of the Renaissance, and the humanistic traditions that can also be found within a religious context. What she’s managed to do is uncover common threads. All these thinkers, though diverse, are passionate in their interest in human beings, rather than in the physical world or the idea of the divine. She tells an interesting story and manages to do it in a very accessible way with humour and colour. It’s memorable, enjoyable to read, and full of insight all along the way. It’s quite brilliant. [source]

Nigel Warburton

His parents were literally missionaries. And Parfit had a sort of missionary zeal for proving and persuading people beyond doubt that morality was objective, meeting every possible objection and persuading his most eminent colleagues that this was so. Or at least trying to. He even said that his life would have been a waste if he didn’t succeed in showing that morality was objective. I think it’s generally accepted that he didn’t succeed in that. But he became obsessed … when I say obsessed, I mean he was obsessive as well. Quite a lot of the biography charts the fascinating arc of his life—from the good-looking, intelligent, young man, a brilliant student, who had always been exceptional in his intelligence, and the transformation that happened in later life. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Diogenes famously thought that human beings don’t need much to be happy, and owned just a cloak and a stick—he had a cup too at first, but he threw that away when he saw a boy drinking water with his hands and realised he didn’t really need it. Diogenes allegedly lived in a barrel at the edge of the city of Athens. One of the things I like about this very short book by Roubineau is that he has four or five pages discussing whether Diogenes did actually live in a barrel. It was more likely a big clay storage jar, and he wasn’t unusual in that, actually. [source]

Nigel Warburton

The big theme of the book is not just trying to understand her family and the impact the suicides have had upon subsequent generations, but also how much better the ancient Greeks were at discussing the impact of suicide than our contemporary commentators, including philosophical commentators. Like all of Edith’s books, this is extremely easy to read, despite the subject matter. It oscillates between dark personal memoir and really illuminating discussions of passages of ancient Greek tragedy. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Bergson is not well known in the UK and America, although he is still well known in France. He was very much a public philosopher…responsible for the first recorded traffic jam in Broadway in New York when he spoke there. He was that popular! People used to hang onto the windowsills outside the lecture hall, ears pressed against the glass trying to hear what he was saying…What I love about the book is she’s a great writer with a light touch. She finds ways of telling stories and relating ideas and thinkers and thoughts and social events that are completely compelling. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Jonathan Birch is a philosopher with a research team at the London School of Economics. He’s particularly interested in the idea that we ought to base our ethical interactions with animals on scientific studies of what animals are actually like. So he works with zoologists, ethologists, people who look very closely at animal behaviour…Take lobsters. They are killed in quite gruesome ways for culinary purposes. He’s been involved in research that suggests that lobsters have quite sophisticated neural networks and seem to exhibit pain-like behaviour in certain situations…Birch is a superbly clear writer, and he’s very careful to adjust his belief according to the evidence. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It follows a series of questions rather than a sequence of events from Arendt’s life. But it’s richly informed by the biographical study of Arendt, because you can’t really understand Hannah Arendt except by tying her into her times and the places she lived, the people she interacted with. She wrote about totalitarianism as somebody who’d experienced it. She emphasized the importance of freedom and resisting dominant ways of thinking, having lived through Nazi Germany, and survived exile in Paris, and later a certain degree of alienation as an exile in America. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Bather Woods has an elegance of style and is a good storyteller too. He’s really immersed in the world of Schopenhauer—he’s an academic expert on him— but he’s never boring or pedantic. This is a very readable book that also combines biography and ideas. And it does it very well. This would make an excellent Christmas present for people who enjoy reading about philosophy and philosophers. It has plenty of anecdotes and interesting insights that make it a pleasure to engage with in addition to the philosophical discussion. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Death in a Shallow Pond is also about a single thought experiment, Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about a child apparently drowning in a shallow pool of water while nobody else is around. You’re walking past—would you jump in to save the child, at minimal risk to yourself? It’s a shallow pond, but you happen to be wearing very expensive shoes, and they will be ruined in the process. Most people say, yes, of course I’d save the drowning child, if there was nobody else around, even if it ruined my shoes, why do you even ask? But Peter Singer says, aha, then why don’t you give the value of the shoes you would be prepared to sacrifice for this child to save a child dying in sub-Saharan Africa for not having access to clean water or basic medicines? Consistency seems to demand that you should. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Experts might quibble about Webber’s choices here, and on his omissions, but for a general reader it’s wonderful to have this range of existentialist writings in a single affordable volume. Webber’s introduction ‘What existentialism and why it matters’ is useful too. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It’s not an academic book, but the scholarship is visible in the sense that she gives her sources and is careful to avoid oversimplifying. So you get some of the complexity of different readings of Plato. But her underlying theme is connecting his work to the present day, why we should read Plato now. Unfortunately much of what he wrote about politics and power is still very relevant. [source]

Nigel Warburton

He’s somebody who deliberately tries to provoke you to thought, rather than doing the thinking for you. There are big gaps between what he says which you’re supposed to fill in by your own reasoning and either move along with him or disagree with him. It’s a really interesting, important book in the history of philosophy. It can be irritating too, because it’s far from obvious some of the time what he is getting at. And sometimes his style of writing can be a little too indirect. I think, though, that he would have been glad to know that people are still discussing it and arguing about what he meant nearly seventy years after it was published. [source]

Nigel Warburton

He’s a professor of humanities, not a card-carrying philosopher, which probably liberated him to write about something which is very prominent in the history of philosophy but gets largely neglected in philosophical teaching, which is the aphorism. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Becoming Beauvoir is not just an outstanding philosophy book, it’s one of the best books I’ve read for a while. It’s of interest far beyond the narrow area of philosophy. Whether you love her or hate her, Simone de Beauvoir was a really significant cultural figure and it’s great to have such an interesting new biography of her. [source]

Nigel Warburton

I think it’s a great book. He has real skill at explaining philosophical positions in an entertaining way, so that if you read this book, you’ll know quite a lot about contemporary philosophy of mind and you’ll pick it up quite effortlessly. I doubt you’ll be converted to panpsychism. I certainly haven’t been, but I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book. [source]

Nigel Warburton

In a sense this book is just the tip of the iceberg of this philosopher’s public working through of ideas that really matter or really interest him. [source]

Nigel Warburton

This is a man who died very young – he was only 26. He was a genius – no question. He made contributions not just to philosophy but to maths, game theory, and economics. He was taken seriously as an extremely young man by John Maynard Keynes and Wittgenstein, neither of whom suffered fools gladly. [source]

Nigel Warburton

What makes this such an interesting book for me is the combination of the first person and the more scientific and philosophical analysis. I’ve already mentioned that the author is a scuba diver. He’s brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes [source]

Nigel Warburton

What David has managed to do is combine the biographical and historical with the philosophical, without getting too technical. A lot of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle was quite hard core, but he doesn’t get bogged down in the details. This is a book that’s accessible to a general reader. He’s very good about making clear what the importance of the debates they were having was, what their limitations were, why they were or were not influential, as well as telling these stories which connect very strongly with the rise of Nazism, including the murder of the title of the book. [source]

Nigel Warburton

She’s taken a series of topics from the history of travel, from the 17th century onwards, and showed why this is a really interesting and important area for philosophers to consider…Emily combines a personal voice with highly informative, well-researched glimpses of particular philosophical travellers. And she’s pulled off a really good book that is directed at the general public. It’s accessible and it’s entertaining, but also opens up interesting philosophical ideas. It’s very original. [source]

Nigel Warburton

First published in 2016, but getting more relevant every day, Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World is the best book I’ve read on the topic by far, written with great elegance, and filled with fascinating examples. If you want to know why Trump’s attacks on the press are so damaging to democracy, or think more clearly about tensions between freedom of speech and national security, this is the place to begin. [source]

Nigel Warburton

If you want to understand what’s lurking behind the cruelty we’re seeing in the US political arena, try Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan. This short very readable book makes the link between the novelist/philosopher’s rather nasty attacks on concern for others and right-wing America’s contemporary greed and disdain towards the poor and those in need. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It’s a book about the nature of consciousness, one of the most intractable problems that human beings have come across. How do we understand how we, as apparently material beings made of flesh and bone—and, in particular, millions of neurones—get to the position of having qualitative experience, through the experience of the world through our senses, reflection and experience? Beautifully written, easy to read, hard to put down. It’s passionate, and it’s not patronising. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It’s a book about what we do with our limited time on Earth, how we decide to prioritise and proportion our time. To that extent it’s a book of ethics in the face of inevitable death. It’s a combination of sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying exploration of the human condition, and at the same time an antidote to those time management books that tell you how you can maximise your productivity, taking on more and more tasks and completing them efficiently. [source]

Nigel Warburton

It’s mostly a memoir about growing up in Albania. But that doesn’t adequately describe the book, because, as its title suggests, it’s really about different conceptions of freedom, told through experience and reflection on that experience. It’s very different from my other choices here. It’s a really fascinating and wonderful book, and beautifully written too. You won’t regret buying this one, for sure. [source]

Nigel Warburton

This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included. As a result, we don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life but rather get to understand what really mattered. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Cherry’s argument is that the energy and the possibility of collective channelled action, inspired by rage, justifies this approach, and makes it superior to a more neutral response to something as outrageous as the cold-faced racism in Charlottesville, for instance. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Theophrastus was slightly younger than Aristotle and came to Plato’s Academy when Plato was quite an old man. Then, when Plato died, he traveled with Aristotle, and was involved in Aristotle’s non-philosophical projects looking very closely at the nature of the world: the biological world, the geological world and so on. Theophrastus is probably best known for a book called The Characters. It’s not really famous amongst philosophers, although he was a philosopher. The Characters consist of descriptions of types of people in terms of their psychological patterns of behavior and so on, which seem very modern. But what Laura Beatty has done is take the bare bones of his life—because not all that much is known about him—and made a literal journey through the places where Theophrastus lived and tried to understand more about him. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Andy is a teacher of philosophy in prisons but he’s also somebody who’s had a lot of family experience in prisons from the inside, because his father, his uncle, and his brother, have all spent time in jail. So he’s got an ambivalent attitude to prisons and I think his family said, ‘What on earth are you going teaching in prisons for? That’s another one that ended up inside!’ He has a particularly interesting take on all this. It’s partly constructed memoir: he discusses the sessions where he teaches philosophy to prisoners, but for reasons of privacy, he hasn’t revealed too much about the identities of particular prisoners. [source]

Nigel Warburton

This book was first published in 1936 and has long been out of print. It was finally republished this year. Susan Stebbing was a very brilliant, hardcore, analytic philosopher, logician, and philosopher of science. She was amazing in that she was a respected contributor to philosophy in the 1930s, when academic philosophy was almost completely inimical to women in Britain. Probably because she died during the wartime, her reputation was affected by not being part of that post-war recovery in society, and she got forgotten. [source]