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.

Anthony Giddens writes sociology and social theory. The catalogue of 42 books opens with Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (1971) and closes with Key concepts of sociology (2018). Social structure, class, political sociology, globalization and capitalism are the standing subjects, and titles such as Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) sit in the middle of the run. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism is a multi-volume project, its second part being The Nation-State and Violence (1987). Textbooks form a separate group within the catalogue.

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).

Fred Van Lente writes comics, with subjects spanning superheroes, science fiction, fantasy, Conan, humour and philosophy. Series credited to Van Lente include Action Philosophers, Action Presidents, Archer & Armstrong (2012), Wolverine: First Class, Ivar, Timewalker, Brain Boy, Z Nation and Assassin's Creed: Templars. Action Philosophers! Giant-Sized Thing, Vol. 1 and Untold Tales of the New Universe date from 2006, and Bloodshot (2025) is the newest listing. Stuart Moore shares the credit on 2 titles.

Frank Lloyd Wright

32 books

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an American architect, designer, writer and educator who designed more than 1,000 structures across a 70-year career and taught hundreds of apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship. Wright called his approach organic architecture, designing in harmony with people and landscape, and Fallingwater (1935) is its clearest demonstration. The catalogue under his name holds 32 titles, from Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright (1910) through The Disappearing City (1932), The Natural House (1954) and A Testament (1957), to Unpacking the Archive in 2017.

Alan Lightman

30 books• 1 series

Alan Lightman, born in 1948, is an American physicist, writer and social entrepreneur who has taught at Harvard and at MIT, where he is a professor of the practice of the humanities and was among the first to hold a joint faculty post across the sciences and the humanities. Lightman contributes to The Atlantic and is a past member of the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board, and the writing works the seam between science, philosophy and religion. The catalogue holds 30 books, from a Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation (1975) to The Shape of Wonder (2025), taking in Einstein's Dreams (1992), Good Benito (1995) and The Diagnosis (2000). Cosmology, physics, philosophy and popular science head the recorded subjects.

David Graeber

16 books• 1 series

David Rolfe Graeber (12 February 1961 - 2 September 2020) was an American anthropologist and an anarchist active in social and political campaigns. Graeber's writing covers political and economic anthropology, bureaucracy, liberalism, the anti-globalisation movement and Occupy Wall Street, where Graeber took a leading part. The catalogue holds 16 books, opening with Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value (2001) and taking in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009), Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Democracy Project (2013), The Utopia of Rules (2013) and On Kings (2016). Titles have continued to appear since Graeber's death, the most recent catalogued in 2024.

Mark R. Levin

11 books

Mark R. Levin, born Mark Reed Levin on 21 September 1957, is an American conservative commentator, lawyer, columnist and radio host. Levin hosts The Mark Levin Show on syndicated radio and Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox News. Earlier roles include service in the Reagan administration as chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese, and the presidency of the Landmark Legal Foundation. Levin has edited Conservative Review since 2015. The catalogue lists 11 books, among them Men in Black (2005), Ameritopia (2012), American Marxism (2021) and On Power (2025), with subjects in politics, liberty, conservatism and the Supreme Court.

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.