Philosophy audiobooks

Fathoms

By: Rebecca Giggs

Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio

Length: 12 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction * Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

A “delving, haunted, and poetic debut” (The New York Times Book Review) about the awe-inspiring lives of whales, revealing what they can teach us about... Read more

When Einstein Walked with Gödel

By: Jim Holt

Narrated by: David Stifel

Length: 15 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

From Jim Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?, comes When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, an entertaining and accessible audiobook guide to the most profound scientific and mathematical ideas of recent centuries

Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right... Read more

Me and the Orgone

By: Orson Bean

Narrated by: Orson Bean

Length: 2 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

After spending ten years and thousands of dollars for psychoanalysis, actor Orson Bean was divorced, depressed, and dissatisfied with life. Then he discovered medical orgone therapy, a unique method of treatment developed by Wilhelm Reich, MD. This therapy is centered on the concept that sexual feelings must be integrated with tender feelings of... Read more

Plato in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a life in philosophy. In 387 BC he founded the Academy, the world's first university, and taught his students that all we see is not reality but... Read more

Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it, he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished.Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else—metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself—was... Read more

Nietzsche in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ultimately went mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and... Read more

Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense, yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live, and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective... Read more

Kant in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Königsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. Kant's aim was to restore metaphysics. He insisted that all experience must conform to... Read more

Aristotle in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic. When he first divided... Read more

Objectivism

By: Leonard Peikoff

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 19 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

This brilliantly conceived and well-organized book is based on a lecture course given by Dr. Leonard Peikoff in 1976, prepared with the help of Ayn Rand and entitled “The Philosophy of Objectivism.” Ayn Rand said of these lectures: “Until or unless I write a comprehensive treatise on my philosophy, Dr. Peikoff’s course is the only authorized... Read more

Philosophy: Who Needs It

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 10 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Who needs philosophy? Ayn Rand’s answer: Everyone.This collection of essays was the last work planned by Ayn Rand before her death in 1982. In it, she summarizes her view of philosophy and deals with a broad spectrum of topics. According to Ayn Rand, the choice we make is not whether to have a philosophy but which one to have: a rational,... Read more

Rousseau in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 28 minutes

Abridged: No

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, a naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his contemporaries Kant and Hume may have been superior academic philosophers, the sheer power of Rousseau’s ideas was unequaled in his time. It was he who... Read more

Spinoza in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God—one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity today, Spinoza’s conclusions are deeply in accord with... Read more

Hume in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which... Read more

Schopenhauer in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Schopenhauer, the "philosopher of pessimism," makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. But if the world is indifferent to our fate, it doesn't thwart us on purpose. The world's fa├ºade is supported by what Schopenhauer calls the universal Will—blind and without purpose. This Will brings on all our misery... Read more

Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

Abridged: No

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought... Read more

Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 2 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion.After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years... Read more

The Art of Being

By: Erich Fromm

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 4 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

This classic work by psychologist and social philosopher Eric Fromm builds upon his previous popular book, To Have or to Be? In The Art of Being, Fromm teaches us to avoid the tantalizing illusions of our consumer-driven world by learning to function as a whole person from a state of inner completeness or being. The transition from an identity... Read more

The Prince

By: Niccolò Machiavelli

Narrated by: John Lescault

Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor, The Prince is a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince, a king, a president.When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that... Read more

The Consolations of Philosophy

By: Alain de Botton

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: he has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.From the frustration of misplacing your keys to... Read more

Status Anxiety

By: Alain de Botton

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 6 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Anyone who's ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor's Lexus had better read Alain de Botton's irresistibly clear-headed book—immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest for status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort... Read more

St. Augustine in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Augustine’s spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity, detailed in his Confessions, ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy: the fusion of the two doctrines of Christianity and Neoplatonism. This not only provided Christianity with a strong intellectual backing but tied it to the Greek tradition of philosophy, which... Read more

Socrates in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates, who spent so much of his time talking about philosophy on the streets of Athens that he never got around to writing anything down. His method of aggressive questioning, called dialectic, was used to cut through the palaver of his adversaries... Read more

Hegel in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Hegel’s dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Its most vital element was the dialectic of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This sprung from Hegel’s aim to overcome the deficiencies of logic and ascend toward Mind as the ultimate reality. His view of history as a process of humanity’s... Read more