Philosophy book series in reading order

Noam Chomsky

134 books• 4 series

Noam Chomsky (Avram Noam Chomsky, born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist and social critic, sometimes called the father of modern linguistics. Chomsky helped found cognitive science, is a major figure in analytic philosophy, and holds posts as laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and institute professor emeritus at MIT. The catalogue lists 134 books, starting with Syntactic Structures (1957) and reaching The Myth of American Idealism (2024). Subjects range from generative grammar to world politics and terrorism.

Umberto Eco

53 books• 4 series

Umberto Eco, who lived from 5 January 1932 to 19 February 2016, was an Italian novelist, philosopher, medievalist, semiotician and cultural critic. In English, Eco is best known for two novels. The Name of the Rose is a historical mystery that folds semiotics, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory into its plot. Foucault's Pendulum (1988) takes up the history of occultism and how the new age movement reinterprets it. The catalogue lists 53 books, opening with Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1959) and including The Open Work (1962), A Theory of Semiotics (1978) and The Role of the Reader (1979). Subjects include semiotics, aesthetics, philosophy of language and Italian essays.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a German philosopher. The catalogue lists 26 works, opening with The Birth of Tragedy (1871) and including Human, All Too Human, Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882) and Untimely Meditations. Aesthetics, ethics, Greek tragedy, Christianity, power and nihilism are the subjects the catalogue attaches. A Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche series is also listed.

Richard Dawkins

29 books• 2 series

Richard Dawkins, born 26 March 1941, is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, author and noted atheist. Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, serving from 1995 to 2008. Dawkins sits on the advisory board of the University of Austin, and awards include the 2005 Shakespeare Prize and the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize. Catalogued books include River Out of Eden (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (2000), A Devil's Chaplain (2003) and The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024). Evolution, natural selection, genetics and philosophy lead the subject tags.

Albert Camus

37 books• 2 series

Albert Camus wrote novels, plays and philosophy in French. L'envers et l'endroit (1937) is the earliest of 37 catalogued entries, which include The Outsider / The Stranger (1942), Caligula (1944), The Plague (1947), The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) and The Fall (1957). Existentialism, Algeria and French drama fill the subject tags, and much of the listing is English translation.

H.G. Wells

152 books• 8 series

H.G. Wells, born Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946), was an English writer of more than forty novels and dozens of short stories. Science fiction novels are the work Wells is most known for today, and Wells shares the title of father of science fiction with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. The non-fiction covers social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography. The catalogue opens with The Chronic Argonauts (1888) and includes The Time Machine (1895), The Wonderful Visit (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Utopias, civilization and philosophy appear among the subjects.

Philosophy and fiction sit side by side in Iris Murdoch's catalogue of 43 titles. The run opens with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), a study rather than a novel, and Under the Net follows. Good and evil, morality and the unconscious recur across the novels. Murdoch lived from 1919 to 1999, and collections such as Poems from an Attic continue to appear.

D.H. Lawrence

146 books• 3 series

David Herbert Lawrence, 11 September 1885 to 2 March 1930, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, travel writer, literary critic and painter. Lawrence's modernist writing examines modernity, social alienation and industrialisation while arguing for sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four novels went through censorship trials over their treatment of sex and their explicit language: The Rainbow (1915), Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The catalogue lists 146 entries, among them The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912) and the story collection The Prussian Officer (1914), and groups some of them under Sons and Lovers and the Brangwen Family.

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish historical novelist and poet read across Europe in his own lifetime, the first author writing in English to hold a genuinely international career, with readers in Europe, Australia and North America. Scotland's history and social customs are his subject, from the narrative poems The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) to the Waverley novels, Tales of My Landlord, Tales of the Crusaders and Chronicles of the Canongate. Toryism is often associated with Scott, though passages of Tales of a Grandfather take a liberal, progressive and Unionist view of Scottish history. Seventy-nine catalogued titles date from 1796 onward.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Ayn Rand

15 books• 4 series

Ayn Rand was the pen name of Alice O'Connor, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (1905-1982), a Russian-American novelist and philosopher who developed the philosophical system Objectivism. Rand grew up and studied in Russia before emigrating to the United States in 1926. Two early novels and two Broadway plays preceded the 1943 novel The Fountainhead, which made Rand famous, and Atlas Shrugged followed in 1957. The catalogue holds 15 books from The Night of January 16th (1936) to Ideal (2015), including Anthem (1938) and The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).

Kelly Oliver, born July 28, 1958, is an American philosopher of feminism, political philosophy and ethics. Oliver holds the W. Alton Jones Professorship of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, founded the feminist philosophy journal philoSOPHIA, and has written 16 scholarly books and edited 12 volumes. The 45 catalogued titles begin with Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing (1993). The listing also carries mystery series, among them Jessica James Mysteries, Fiona Figg Mystery and Pet Detective Mysteries, reaching The Case of the Christie Honeymoon Murder (2026).

Dorothy L. Sayers

68 books• 8 series

Lord Peter Wimsey, a private investigator, is the figure Dorothy L. Sayers is known for. Whose Body? (1923) opens the series, followed by Clouds of Witness (1926), Unnatural Death (1927), Strong Poison (1930) and Five Red Herrings (1931). Sayers wrote English detective fiction, short stories and non-fiction; the catalogue holds 68 titles, with collections dated as late as 2024.

Ryan Holiday

17 books• 1 series

Ryan Holiday writes non-fiction about stoicism, marketing and success. Trust Me, I'm Lying (2012) opens a list of 17 catalogued books that holds The Obstacle Is the Way (2014), Ego Is the Enemy (2016), The Daily Stoic (2016), Stillness Is the Key (2019) and Lives of the Stoics (2020). Stoic Virtue is the one grouped series, and titles appear about every ten months.

Andy Andrews writes inspirational fiction and self-improvement books, and works as a corporate speaker. Success, motivation, perspective and Christian living run through the catalogue, alongside children's fiction. Andrews has 26 catalogued books published between 1995 and 2024, grouped into the Traveller's Gift, Noticer and Sawyerton Springs series. Tales from Sawyerton Springs (1995) opens the run; The Traveler's Gift (2002), The Lost Choice (2004) and Mastering the Seven Decisions (2009) follow; and Lost in the Swamp (2024) is the most recent title.

Creative non-fiction and essays on Native American life, American culture and spirituality make up Kent Nerburn's work. Nerburn, born in Minneapolis in 1946, opened the catalogue with Native American Wisdom (1991) and has reached 19 books, the most recent Lone Dog Road (2025). The Neither Wolf Nor Dog trilogy is the best known sequence: its first book took a Minnesota Book Award in 1995, The Wolf At Twilight took a second in 2010, and The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo closes the set. Dakota philosophy, biography and the spiritual life recur across the catalogue.

Jimmy Carter

51 books• 1 series

Jimmy Carter (1924-2024) served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, and wrote 51 books. Carter's subjects cover his own childhood and career, American politics and government, peace negotiation, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Christian faith. The catalogue opens with Why Not the Best?: The First Fifty Years (1975), two years before he took office, and takes in Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (1982) and The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East (1986). Later titles turn to the Bible and devotional writing, the most recent dated 2020. Books median 224 pages, and the 2000s were Carter's most productive decade.

Aldous Huxley

68 books• 5 series

Aldous Huxley (Aldous Leonard Huxley, 26 July 1894 to 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher from the prominent Huxley family. Huxley studied English literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and edited the magazine Oxford Poetry before turning to novels, both social satire and grimly serious work, as well as travel writing and screenplays. The bibliography comes to nearly 50 books. The catalogue begins with The Burning Wheel (1916), then Limbo (1918), Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Along the Road (1925). Huxley lived in Los Angeles from 1937 until death in 1963. Subjects include intellectuals, Italy, passivity and brainwashing.

Brian Greene

7 books

Brian Greene is an American physicist whose books take cosmology, physics and string theory as their subjects. Born in 1963, Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, directs its center for theoretical physics, and co-founded the World Science Festival in 2008. Seven books are catalogued: The Elegant Universe (1999), The Fabric of the Cosmos (2003), Icarus at the Edge of Time (2008), The Hidden Reality (2011), Al and Al and Light Falls (both 2016), and Until the End of Time (2020).

Jill Lepore

19 books• 2 series

Jill Lepore, born 1966, is an American historian and journalist who holds the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History chair at Harvard University. Lepore has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2005 and writes on American history, law, literature and politics, with work also in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs and the Yale Law Journal. The catalogue lists 19 books from The Name of War (1998) to The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (2026). New York Burning (2005), The Whites of Their Eyes (2010), The Mansion of Happiness (2012), Book of Ages (2013) and The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) are among them. Subject headings name politics and government, historiography and wars.

Thom Hartmann

42 books• 1 series

Thom Hartmann, born in 1951, is an American author, broadcaster and progressive political commentator. Two bodies of work sit in the catalogue: books on attention deficit disorder, from Attention Deficit Disorder (1993) through Beyond ADD (1996), Healing ADD (1998) and a complete guide to ADHD (2000); and political and historical writing, including the Hidden History series and The Last American President (2025). Hartmann has hosted The Thom Hartmann Program on syndicated radio since 2003 and presented the television show The Big Picture from 2010 to 2017. Forty-two titles are catalogued in all.

Niall Ferguson

26 books• 7 series

Sir Niall Ferguson, born 18 April 1964, is a British and American historian. Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and has held professorships at Harvard, the London School of Economics and New York University. Titles include Paper and Iron (1995), Virtual History (1997), The Pity of War (1998), The House of Rothschild (1998), The Cash Nexus (2001) and Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021). Series include Rothschild, Government and Niall Ferguson Biographies. Subjects include banking, imperialism, foreign relations and economic conditions.

Ralph McInerny (February 24, 1929 to January 29, 2010) was an American novelist and a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Father Dowling is the priest at the centre of the most popular McInerny mysteries, which were adapted as the Father Dowling Mysteries television series from 1987 to 1991. The catalogue holds 110 books from Jolly Rogerson (1967) to A Student's Guide to Philosophy (2014), including philosophy titles such as Thomism in an Age of Renewal (1968). Other series include Sister Mary Teresa, Andrew Broom and Notre Dame. McInerny also used the pen names Monica Quill, Harry Austin, Matthew FitzRalph, Ernan Mackey and Edward Mackin.

Mario Vargas Llosa

37 books

Mario Vargas Llosa, who lived from 1936 to 2025, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and politician, and one of the leading writers of the Latin American Boom. The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature cited his cartography of structures of power and his images of individual resistance, revolt and defeat. Thirty-seven titles are catalogued, opening with The Time of the Hero (1962) and taking in Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) and The War of the End of the World (1981). Peru, its social life and its history recur as subjects.