Philosophy audiobooks

On Benefits

By: Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Narrated by: Mike Rogers

Length: 8 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

The original Latin name of this important essay by Seneca, written around 60 CE, was De Beneficiis, which is why it is generally translated as ‘On Benefits’. However, it is more usefully titled ‘On Favours’, because this is what it is essentially about: the giving and receiving of favours, with all the implications of such transactions. Seneca... Read more

What is the Dharma?

By: Urgyen Sangharakshita

Narrated by: Jinananda Jinananda

Length: 11 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

What is the Dharma? To walk in the footsteps of the Buddha, we need a clear and thorough guide to the essential principles of Buddhism. Whether we have just begun our journey or are a practitioner with more experience, What is the Dharma? is an indispensable exploration of the Buddha's teachings as found in the main Buddhist... Read more

The Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha

By: Urgyen Sangharakshita

Narrated by: Urgyen Sangharakshita

Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

The Noble Eightfold Path is one of the most important teachings in Buddhism. In this series of eight lectures, given originally in 1965, Urgyen Sangharakshita introduces each stage, from right understanding to right meditation, explaining the deeper implications involved.

Sangharakshita, the London-born Buddhist teacher, is one of the most... Read more

Who Is the Buddha?

By: Urgyen Sangharakshita

Narrated by: Jinananda Jinananda

Length: 14 minutes

Abridged: No

This is not an ordinary biography of the Buddha. In his characteristically individual manner, Urgyen Sangharakshita - the leading English-born Buddhist teacher and founder of the Triratana Buddhist Community - recounts the known details of the Buddha's life but enriches the story with contemporary relevance.

Unpicking the threads of historical... Read more

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

Narrated by: Christopher Oxford

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of the most extraordinary - and important - texts in Western philosophy. It was written by Friedrich Nietzsche between 1883 and 1885. He cast it in the form of a novel in the hope that his urgent message of the 'death of God' and the rise of the superman (Ubermensch) would have greater emotional as well as... Read more

Buddhism Plain and Simple

By: Steve Hagen

Narrated by: William Hope

Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

The observations and insights of the Buddha are practical and eminently down to earth, dealing exclusively with awareness in the here and now.

Buddhism Plain and Simple offers listeners these fundamental teachings, stripped of cultural trappings that have accumulated around Buddhism over the past 25 centuries. The newcomer will be inspired by the... Read more

The Antichrist, Ecce Homo

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

Narrated by: Christopher Oxford

Length: 4 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

The Antichrist and Ecce Homo were two of the last works written by Friedrich Nietzsche just before his mental collapse in 1889. Though both written in 1888, they are very different in content and style.

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche expands on his view that the submissive nature of Christianity undermined Western society, depressing and sapping... Read more

The Moral Epistles

By: Seneca the Younger

Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart

Length: 23 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Towards the end of his life, Seneca the Younger (c4 BCE-65 CE) began a correspondence with a friend in Sicily, later collected under the title The Moral Epistles.

In these 124 letters, Seneca expresses, in a wise, steady and calm manner, the philosophy by which he lived - derived essentially from the Stoics. The letters deal with a variety of... Read more

Human, All Too Human

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

Narrated by: Michael Lunts

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

It was with Human, All Too Human, first published in 1878, that Nietzsche developed the aphoristic style that so suited his challenging views and uncompromising style. The text is divided into three main sections: 'Of the First and Last Things', 'History of the Moral Feelings' and 'The Religious Life'. But the style remains the same: he declares... Read more

The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom)

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

Narrated by: Michael Lunts

Length: 10 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) is one of Nietzsche's greatest books. His wonderfully fertile mind roams over mankind, his thoughts, his emotions, his behaviour and his weaknesses with remarkable clarity, with insight - but also with humour!

In this work are 383 separate paragraphs, some short, some long, but all singular observations - the... Read more

On Anger, on Leisure, on Clemency

By: Seneca the Younger

Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart

Length: 6 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

'On Anger' is one of Seneca's most important essays. At some length he investigates the nature of anger: how and why it emerges, the effect it has on the individual and those to whom it is directed, and how to manage it and prevent it even from arising. For, Seneca considers, anger simply serves no purpose - it does not bring courage in war,... Read more

The Consolation of Philosophy

By: Manlius Boethius

Narrated by: David Rintoul

Length: 4 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

The Consolation of Philosophy is one of the key works in the rich tradition of Western philosophy, partly because of the circumstances in which it was written.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c480-c524) was of aristocratic Roman birth and became consul and then master of offices at Ravenna, one of the highest posts under the Ostrogothic Roman... Read more

The Praise of Folly/Against War

By: Desiderius Erasmus

Narrated by: Georgina Sutton & Leighton Pugh

Length: 6 hours

Abridged: No

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was known as Prince of the Humanists - though a theologian, a Catholic priest and the leading European scholar of his time. A close friend of Sir Thomas More, Erasmus' writings had a strong influence on the growing movement for change in Christian Europe, both Lutheran and the Counter-Reformation.... Read more

Rhetoric and Poetics

By: Aristotle

Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart

Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Poetics and Rhetoric are the two major works by Aristotle which, after more than 2,000 years, remain key behavioural handbooks for anyone interested in story, performance, presentation and indeed psychology.

The continuing influence of Poetics, for example, is readily discernible even among the scriptwriters of Hollywood! Poetics is the shorter... Read more

The World as Will and Idea

By: Arthur Schopenhauer

Narrated by: Leighton Pugh

Length: 17 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

In this final part to Schopenhauer's momentous and hugely influential work, his original and wide-ranging observations are as lively as ever. Though cast as a 'pessimist' by history, he is anything but that to read - and listen to. Here are the last supplementary comments his original work (published 1818), the fruit of decades of further... Read more

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

By: Adam Smith

Narrated by: Michael Lunts

Length: 16 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’

So begins The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the first major text by Adam Smith, who, seven... Read more

Discourse on Metaphysics, On the Ultimate Origin of Things and Other Principal Essays

By: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Narrated by: Charles Armstrong

Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

This Leibniz collection contains some of the philosopher’s most important works and ideas, spans three decades and illuminates the fascinating intellectual journey undertaken by him in his quest for truth.

A prodigious polymath, Leibniz was a mathematician, philosopher, physicist and statesman and engaged with a sweeping range of ideas and... Read more

The Essays

By: Francis Bacon

Narrated by: Hayward B Morse

Length: 7 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount St Albans, Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor of England, was an immensely learned, clever and ambitious man, with considerable political influence during the later years of Queen Elizabeth I and through almost two decades of the reign of her successor James I. However, he was also a philosopher... Read more

Time and Free Will

By: Henri Bergson

Narrated by: Michael Lunts

Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi-occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’

He was indeed all these things and many more, being as famous in his lifetime for his... Read more

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

By: Martin Heidegger

Narrated by: Martyn Swain

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1929, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) published his remarkable book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The Kantbuch, as Heidegger often called it, is regarded by many as a vital supplement to the unfinished second part of Heidegger’s most influential work, Being and Time, which was published two years earlier in 1927.

Kant and the Problem of... Read more

Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy

By: Bryan W. Van Norden

Narrated by: Brian Nishii

Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Van Norden’s Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy is evidently of increasing importance in balancing our 21st century view of philosophy in general. It is to Van Norden’s regret, that when ‘philosophy’ is discussed or taught, it is almost always in the context of ‘Western Philosophy’ rather than a global perspective. Yet the contribution... Read more

On the Ends of Good and Evil

By: Marcus Tulius Cicero

Narrated by: Derek Le Page

Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Towards the end of his life and his career as one of the leading politicians and orators in Rome, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE-43 BCE) was exiled to his country house. It was a time of political turmoil in the capital of the empire, caused by the power-grab of Julius Caesar.

In the quiet of the countryside, Cicero began to write on philosophy.... Read more

The Socratic Dialogues: Middle Period

By: Benjamin Jowett & Plato

Narrated by: David Rintoul

Length: 12 hours

Abridged: No

The Republic is perhaps the single most important, the most studied and the most quoted text of all of Plato's Socratic Dialogues. Through the medium of Socrates, Plato outlines his view and ideas concerning the ideal working of the city-state.

Socrates narrates a conversation that took place the previous day with Cephalus, Glaucon, Thrasymachus... Read more

On the Soul & Parva Naturalia

By: Aristotle

Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart

Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Two contrasting reflections by Aristotle which cover very particular ground. In 'On the Soul', Aristotle presents his view of the 'life essence' which, he argues, is possessed by living things whether plants, animals or humans.

Not a 'soul' in the generally accepted Western use of the term, this 'soul', he says, is a life force that is... Read more