14 Great Philosophers and the Best Book to Start With by Each

Top 14 Greatest Philosophers And Their Books

If you want to start reading philosophy, the hardest part is choosing a first book. This guide picks fourteen of the most influential thinkers in history, from Socrates in fifth-century BC Athens to Albert Camus in twentieth-century France, and names one book by or about each that makes a good entry point.

The list is not a ranking, and it leans towards the Western tradition, with Confucius as the major exception. Two figures, Socrates and Jesus, wrote nothing themselves, so for them we point to the texts through which their ideas reached us. For every thinker you will find who they were, the big idea they are remembered for, and what to expect from the book. At the end there is a suggested reading order for beginners and a few myths worth dropping.

Ancient Greece: where Western philosophy began

Socrates (c. 470–399 BC)

Socrates spent his life in Athens questioning anyone who claimed to know what justice, courage or goodness were, and usually showing that they did not. He left no writings, so we know him mainly through his students Plato and Xenophon and through his critics. Aristophanes mocked him in the comedy The Clouds of Aristophanes, first staged in 423 BC, as a fraud who taught young men clever tricks.

In 399 BC, at about seventy, he was tried for impiety and corrupting the youth, found guilty by a large citizen jury and executed by drinking hemlock. The best place to meet him is Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Plato's version of his defence speech. ("Apology" here comes from the Greek apologia, a defence, not an apology.) It is short, readable in an evening, and contains his famous claim that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Plato (c. 428–348 BC)

Plato was Socrates' student, Aristotle's teacher and the founder of the Academy in Athens, one of the earliest known schools of higher learning in Europe. He wrote in dialogues, usually with Socrates as the main speaker, which makes his work feel more like a conversation than a lecture.

His best-known work is The Republic, written around 375 BC. It begins with a simple question, what is justice, and grows into a plan for an ideal city ruled by philosopher-kings. Along the way it covers education, art, family and war, and includes the Allegory of the Cave, still one of the most vivid images in philosophy. Plato's argument is that a city will not be free of trouble until those who rule truly love wisdom, an idea that remains provocative and much debated.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

Born in Stagira in northern Greece, Aristotle came to Athens at about seventeen and studied at Plato's Academy for nearly twenty years. After Plato's death he left for Assos and the island of Lesbos, where he studied marine life, and around 343 BC he was invited to Macedonia to tutor the teenage Alexander, later Alexander the Great. In 335 BC he returned to Athens and founded his own school at the Lyceum. He wrote on almost everything: logic, biology, physics, politics, poetry and rhetoric.

Where Plato looked to ideal forms, Aristotle started from observation. His Nicomachean Ethics, ten books probably based on his lecture notes and named after his son Nicomachus, asks how a person can live well. His answer centres on virtue as a habit and on the golden mean between extremes: courage, for example, sits between cowardice and recklessness. It is practical, surprisingly modern and a natural companion to his Politics.

Epicurus (341–270 BC)

Epicurus founded a school in a garden outside Athens, open to women and slaves as well as citizens. He reportedly wrote around 300 works, but only three letters, two lists of sayings and some fragments survive, so much of what we know comes from later followers such as the Roman poet Lucretius.

His name is now linked to fine food and luxury, which badly misreads him. Epicurus taught that the goal of life is ataraxia, a calm mind, and aponia, freedom from pain, best reached through simple living, friendship and clear thinking. Because the soul is made of atoms and ends at death, he argued, death is nothing to fear. The Essential Epicurus gathers the surviving letters and sayings in one slim volume.

Ancient China and the Gospels

Confucius (551–479 BC)

Confucius was a teacher and minor official in the state of Lu during China's Spring and Autumn period. He taught that a good society rests on personal virtue, sincere relationships and respect within the family, and that rulers should govern by moral example rather than force. A version of the Golden Rule appears in his teaching: do not impose on others what you would not want for yourself.

His ideas competed with many rival schools and were suppressed under the Qin dynasty, before becoming state orthodoxy under the Han. The Analects is a collection of his sayings and conversations, put together by his followers over several generations after his death. Its short entries make it easy to read a few at a time.

Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BC – c. AD 30–33)

Jesus is usually seen as a religious teacher rather than a philosopher, and he wrote nothing. Still, his ethical teaching, recorded in the Gospels, has shaped moral thought for two thousand years. In debates with critics he used sharp arguments: turning a trap question back on the questioner, reasoning from lesser to greater cases, and pointing to evidence and consequences.

The best place to start is the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5 to 7. It contains the Beatitudes, the call to love one's enemies and the Lord's Prayer, and it has influenced thinkers as different as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Reason and Enlightenment

René Descartes (1596–1650)

René Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy

The French thinker often called the father of modern philosophy was also a major mathematician. He developed analytic geometry, which joins algebra and geometry through the coordinate system that still bears his name, and he introduced the superscript notation for powers such as x². He also worked on optics, including the law of refraction.

Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) is set over six days. Descartes doubts everything he can, then rebuilds knowledge from the one thing he cannot doubt: that he is thinking. The famous wording "I think, therefore I am" comes from his earlier Discourse on Method (1637); in the Meditations the same insight is put as the certainty that I am, I exist, whenever I think it. The book also sets out his mind-body dualism, the view that mind and body are two different kinds of thing, a problem philosophers still argue about.

Voltaire (1694–1778)

François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was the sharpest wit of the French Enlightenment. He campaigned for religious tolerance, free speech and fair trials, and attacked the power of the Church and the cruelty of the courts. He was astonishingly productive, leaving plays, poems, histories and some 20,000 letters.

Candide (1759) follows a naive young man who has been taught by his tutor, Dr Pangloss, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Earthquake, war, slavery and shipwreck test that belief to breaking point. It is short, funny and savage, and its closing advice, that we must cultivate our garden, is still quoted today.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Born in Geneva, Rousseau first became famous in 1750 when his essay arguing that the progress of the arts and sciences had corrupted morals won a prize from the Academy of Dijon. His later Discourse on Inequality (1755) asked how private property and society had made people unequal and unhappy.

The Social Contract (1762) opens with the line "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." It argues that legitimate power comes from the people, expressed through the general will, not from kings appointed by God. Its ideas fed into the French Revolution and modern democratic theory.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Kant spent almost his whole life in Königsberg, then in Prussia, yet his ideas reshaped philosophy across the world. He tried to settle the long quarrel between rationalists, who trusted reason, and empiricists, who trusted the senses, by showing that the mind actively structures all experience through concepts such as space, time and cause.

The Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787) asks what reason can know on its own and where its limits lie. Kant credited David Hume with waking him from his dogmatic slumber. The book is notoriously difficult, so many readers start with his shorter Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and come back to it later.

The nineteenth century: will and value

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

Arthur Schopenhauer - The World As Will And Representation

Schopenhauer argued that beneath the world we perceive lies a blind, restless striving he called will, which drives all living things and leaves them endlessly unsatisfied. He was one of the first major Western philosophers to engage seriously with Hindu and Buddhist thought, and he saw art, compassion and the quieting of desire as ways to ease suffering.

The World as Will and Representation (first published 1818–1819) is his central work. It was ignored for decades but later influenced Nietzsche, Wagner, Tolstoy, Freud, Wittgenstein and Thomas Mann. His essays are a gentler introduction if the full book feels daunting.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Nietzsche trained as a classical scholar and was made a professor at the University of Basel at just 24. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and in January 1889 he suffered a collapse from which he never recovered. The cause is still debated: the old diagnosis of syphilis has been challenged, and suggestions include a brain tumour, a hereditary stroke disorder and dementia. He spent his last years in the care of his mother and then his sister, and died in 1900 after a series of strokes.

Beyond Good and Evil (1886), which he published at his own expense, attacks philosophers' hidden assumptions and the idea that moral values are fixed and universal. Written in short, punchy sections, it is one of the easier ways into his thought.

The twentieth century: freedom and the absurd

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

Jean Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness

Sartre was a philosopher, novelist, playwright and political activist, and the best-known face of existentialism. His central claim is that existence precedes essence: we are not born with a fixed nature, so we are free, and responsible, for who we become. He shared his life and work with the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and in 1964 he refused the Nobel Prize in Literature, explaining that a writer should refuse to become an institution.

Being and Nothingness (1943) is his major philosophical work, and it is long and dense. Many readers begin with his lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism or his novel Nausea.

Albert Camus (1913–1960)

Born in French Algeria to a poor family, Camus became a journalist, novelist and Resistance writer. He is linked with the idea of the absurd: the clash between our need for meaning and a universe that offers none. He rejected the existentialist label, saying in a 1945 interview, "No, I am not an existentialist." In The Rebel he argued against nihilism and the political violence justified in its name. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident three years later.

The Stranger, published in 1942 and also translated as The Outsider, follows Meursault, a man who seems indifferent to his mother's death and later kills a stranger on a beach. It is short, gripping and the easiest door into his thinking.

A reading order for beginners

Plato, Apology: short, dramatic and a perfect first taste.
Epicurus, letters and sayings: practical advice on living calmly.
Confucius, Analects: read a few sayings at a time.
Voltaire, Candide and Camus, The Stranger: philosophy in story form.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Descartes, Meditations: more demanding, very rewarding.
Plato, Republic; Rousseau, Social Contract; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Kant, Schopenhauer and Sartre once you are comfortable with the others.

A good modern translation with an introduction and notes makes a huge difference, especially for ancient and German texts.

Myths worth dropping

"Philosophy is only for academics." Many of these books began as speeches, letters, lectures or novels for ordinary readers.

"Epicureans just loved luxury." Epicurus recommended bread, water and friends.

"Nietzsche was a nihilist." He diagnosed nihilism as a problem and tried to find a way past it.

"Camus and Sartre were the same." They were friends who fell out publicly in 1952, and their views differed on freedom, politics and violence.

Sources: Aristotle (Wikipedia); Friedrich Nietzsche (Wikipedia); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Nobel Prize: Albert Camus, 1957; Nobel Prize: Jean-Paul Sartre, 1964.

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