Philosophy audiobooks

Life Skills Junkie

By: Howie Junkie

Narrated by: How-To Junkie

Length: 35 minutes

Abridged: No

From the Desk of the How-To Junkie for the "Life Skills Junkie":
Howdy friend, who wants "to improve yourself with better life skills,"
Do you want to improve your life? Yes, that is a rhetorical question...then improve your skills for life!
Life skills are really crucial to have - ranging from interacting with people, to working with all sorts of... Read more

Reputation

By: Gloria Origgi, Stephen Holmes & Noga Arikha

Narrated by: Andrea Gallo

Length: 9 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

A compelling exploration of how reputation affects every aspect of contemporary life Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we... Read more

Theory and Reality

By: Peter Godfrey-Smith

Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Length: 10 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the listener on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction... Read more

After Virtue, Third Edition

By: Alasdair MacIntyre

Narrated by: Derek Perkins

Length: 14 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recognized as a significant and potentially controversial critique of contemporary moral philosophy. Since that time, the book has been translated into more than fifteen foreign languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies. Now, twenty-five years later, the University of Notre Dame... Read more

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

By: Daniel C. Dennett

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Length: 15 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

What is human consciousness and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of... Read more

Midlife

By: Kieran Setiya

Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne

Length: 4 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle age.



How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of... Read more

Awakening Your Ikigai

By: Ken Mogi

Narrated by: Matt Addis

Length: 3 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Ikigai is a Japanese phenomenon commonly understood as "your reason to get up in the morning." Ikigai can be small moments: the morning air, a cup of coffee, a compliment. It can also be deep convictions: a fulfilling job, lasting friendships, balanced health. Whether big or small, your ikigai is the path to success and happiness in your own... Read more

What We Think About When We Think About Soccer

By: Simon Critchley

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard

Length: 3 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Soccer is the world's most popular sport, inspiring the absolute devotion of countless fans around the globe. But what is it about soccer that makes it so compelling to watch, discuss, and think about? Is it what it says about class, race, or gender? Is it our national, regional, or tribal identities? Simon Critchley thinks it's all of these and... Read more

The Social Construction of Reality

By: Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 9 hours

Abridged: No

Called the "fifth-most important sociological book of the 20th century" by the International Sociological Association, this groundbreaking study of knowledge introduces the concept of "social construction" into the social sciences for the first time. In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdiscipline that, since... Read more

The Enigma of Reason

By: Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard

Length: 14 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out... Read more

The Three Pillars of Zen

By: Roshi Philip Kapleau

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 14 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In this classic work of spiritual guidance, the founder of the Rochester Zen Center presents a comprehensive overview of Zen Buddhism. Exploring the three pillars of Zen—teaching, practice, and enlightenment—Roshi Philip Kapleau, the man who founded one of the oldest and most influential Zen centers in the United States, presents a personal... Read more

To Fight Against This Age

By: Rob Riemen

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard

Length: 3 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

In "The Eternal Return of Fascism," Rob Riemen explores the theoretical weakness of fascism, which depends on a politics of resentment, the incitement of anger and fear, xenophobia, the need for scapegoats, and its hatred of the life of the mind. He draws on history and philosophy as well as the essays and novels of Thomas Mann and Albert Camus... Read more

How to Win an Argument

By: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 3 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

All of us are faced countless times with the challenge of persuading others, whether we're trying to win a trivial argument with a friend or convince our coworkers about an important decision. Instead of relying on untrained instinct—and often failing as a result—we'd win more arguments if we learned the timeless art of verbal persuasion,... Read more

American Character

By: Colin Woodard

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 9 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, and the Tea Party. In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these key strands... Read more

Radical Wholeness

By: Philip Shepherd

Narrated by: Philip Shepherd

Length: 11 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives—peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are... Read more

Assume the Worst

By: Carl Hiaasen

Narrated by: Carl Hiaasen

Length: 15 minutes

Abridged: No

This is Oh, the Places You'll Never Go--the ultimate hilarious, cynical, but absolutely realistic view of a college graduate's future. And what he or she can or can't do about it.

"This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration. That's not what you need. You need a... Read more

Adam Smith

By: Jesse Norman

Narrated by: Jesse Norman

Length: 13 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

A dazzlingly original, "remarkable" account of the life and thought of legendary economist Adam Smith (Financial Times).

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is now widely regarded as the greatest economist of all time. But what he really thought, and the implications of his ideas, remain fiercely contested. Was he an eloquent advocate of capitalism and... Read more

The Craftsman

By: Richard Sennett

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 11 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

The Craftsman explores the relation between the hand and the head. Richard Sennett argues that working with physical things stimulates people to think.



Craftsmanship, says Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The... Read more

This Is It

By: Alan Watts

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 3 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

This inspiring audiobook contains six revolutionary essays exploring the relationship between spiritual experience and ordinary life—and the need for them to coexist within each of us.

With essays on “cosmic consciousness” (including Alan Watts’ account of his own ventures into this inward realm); the paradoxes of self-consciousness; LSD and... Read more

The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

By: Eugenia Cheng

Narrated by: Moira Quirk

Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

How both logical and emotional reasoning can help us live better in our post-truth world

In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she... Read more

How to Die

By: Seneca

Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan

Length: 2 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die," wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always," and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time,... Read more

Why Marx Was Right

By: Terry Eagleton

Narrated by: Roger Clark

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a... Read more

I Am Dynamite!

By: Sue Prideaux

Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith

Length: 17 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES Editors’ Choice • THE TIMES BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE HAWTHORNDEN PRIZE

A groundbreaking new biography of philosophy’s greatest iconoclast

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most enigmatic figures in philosophy, and his concepts—the Übermensch, the will to power, slave morality—have fundamentally reshaped our... Read more

I Am a Strange Loop

By: Douglas R Hofstadter

Narrated by: Greg Baglia

Length: 16 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks, where does the self come from -- and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to... Read more