Personal Recommendations:
- Fragments by Heraclitus (Pre-Socratic philosophy, poetic expressions)
- The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche (Dionysian and Apollonian art, on Greek tragedies and poetry)
- Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake by Northrop Frye (A systematic methodology for life and art)
- All Desire Is a Desire for Being by Girard Rene (Mimetic desire, very relevant today)
- Existentialism is a Humanism by Sartre
- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (absurdism)
- The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
- The Prophet by Gibran Kahlil (short prose)
- Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rilke (very philosophical poems)
- De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (reflections in the prison)
- Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Emerson
- The God of the Left Hemisphere by Roderick Tweedy (an illuminating book!)
- The Symposium by Plato (on love)
- Siddhartha and Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (philosophical novels)
- Ethics by Spinoza (stunning metaphysics)
- Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire
- The Spirit of Spinoza: Healing the Mind (therapeutic experience)
- Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus (Stoic)
31 Life-Changing Philosophy Books (According to a Cambridge MPhil)
- Republic by Plato
- Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
- Discourses by Epictetus
- Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
- On the Sufferings of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
- Practical Ethics by Peter Singer
- Modern Moral Philosophy by Elizabeth Anscombe
- Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J.L. Mackie
- Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide by Edward Feser
- Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason by J.L. Schellenberg
- The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
- Athens and Jerusalem by Lev Shestov
- Resisting Scientific Realism by K. Brad Wray
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
- Philosophy of Pseudoscience by Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry
- Begriffsschrift by Gottlob Frege
- A Friendly Introduction to Mathematical Logic by Christopher Leary
- The Rise of Analytic Philosophy by Michael Potter
- Logic and Conversation by Paul Grice
- Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
- Two Dogmas of Empiricism by W.V.O. Quine
- On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Cambridge Pragmatism by Cheryl Misak
- On Love by Stendhal
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky