Philosophy audiobooks

Heidegger in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

One of two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and his fundamental question: "What is the meaning of existence?" For Heidegger, this question was beyond the reach of reason and was the primary "given" of every individual life. To... Read more

Marx in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. This great venture has now all but completely failed. Yet the force of the communist belief... Read more

Sartre in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Abridged: No

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism—at the opportune moment when this set of ideas filled the spiritual gap left amidst the ruins of World War II. Existentialism was a philosophy of action and showed the ultimate freedom of the... Read more

Utopia

By: Sir Thomas More

Narrated by: James Adams

Length: 4 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

In this political work written in 1516, Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island. Book I ofUtopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty,... Read more

The Art of War

By: Sun Tzu

Narrated by: Ray Porter

Length: 9 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Master Sun said: “Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.”For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese culture, a lucid text that reveals as much about psychology, politics, and economics as it does about battlefield strategy. For those... Read more

The Histories

By: Caius Cornelius Tacitus

Narrated by: James Adams

Length: 10 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Caius Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman orator and public official, is considered one of the greatest historians as well as one of the greatest prose stylists of the Latin language. In The Histories, he describes and interprets the period in which he lived, beginning with the political situation that followed Nero's death in AD 69 and ending with the... Read more

What Is Art?

By: Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by: Geoffrey Blaisdell

Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

What Is Art? is the result of fifteen years’ reflection on the nature and purpose of art.Tolstoy claims that all good art is related to the authentic life of the broader community and that the aesthetic value of a work of art is not independent of its moral content. The book is noteworthy not only for its famous iconoclasm and compelling attacks... Read more

The Architecture of Happiness

By: Alain de Botton

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 4 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

The Architecture of Happiness is a dazzling journey through the philosophy and psychology of architecture and the indelible connection between our identities and our locations.One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings, and streets that... Read more

Ayn Rand Answers

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 10 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

After the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Ayn Rand turned to nonfiction writing and occasional lecturing. Her aim was to bring her philosophy to a wider audience and to apply it to current cultural and political issues. The taped lectures and the question-and-answer sessions that followed added not only an eloquent new dimension to Ayn... Read more

Three Plays

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Robin Field

Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Published together for the first time are three of Ayn Rand’s compelling stage plays. The courtroom drama Night of January 16th, a 1935 Broadway success famous for leaving the verdict to the audience, is presented here in its definitive, final revised text—a superb dramatization of Rand’s vision of human strengths and weaknesses. Also included... Read more

The Voice of Reason

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 15 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand’s life, they reflect a... Read more

The Romantic Manifesto

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 7 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned collection of essays, Ayn Rand throws new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again, Rand demonstrates her bold originality and her refusal to let popular catchphrases and conventional ideas define her sense of the truth.In her ethics AynRand extolled the virtue of... Read more

Return of the Primitive

By: Ayn Rand & Peter Schwartz

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 13 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

In the 1960s and early ’70s, the most prominent, vocal cultural movement was the New Left: a movement that condemned America and everything it stood for: individualism, material wealth, science, technology, capitalism.While the New Left achieved limited political success, it brought about vast cultural changes that remain with us to this day.... Read more

Seven

By: Jacqueline Leo

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 6 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Why are there 7 wonders of the world, 7 seas, 7 ages of man, 7 levels of hell, 7 primary colors, 7 whole notes of the musical scale, and 7 days of the week? And why, when asked to choose a number between 1 and 10, do most people choose 7?Leo celebrates the special qualities of the number 7 by delving into its mathematical, scientific,... Read more

On the Social Contract

By: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Narrated by: Erik Sandvold

Length: 5 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

“Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential 1762 work, On the Social Contract, a milestone of political science and essential reading for students of history, philosophy, and social science. A progressive work, it inspired worldwide political reforms, most notably the American and French... Read more

Ecce Homo

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

Narrated by: Stephen Van Doren

Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Ecce Homo, which is Latin for “behold the man,” is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in 1888, a few weeks before his... Read more

Beyond Good and Evil

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

Narrated by: Stephen Van Doren

Length: 8 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

This is one of the most important works written by Nietzsche and represents his attempt to sum up his philosophy. The great nineteenth-century philosopher refines his previously expressed ideal of the superman in this work, a fascinating examination of human values and morality. It takes up and expands on the ideas of his previous work, Thus... Read more

A Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy

By: René Descartes

Narrated by: James Adams

Length: 8 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

This three-part work includes A Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy.By calling everything into doubt, Descartes laid the foundations of modern philosophy. With the celebrated words “I think, therefore I am,” his compelling argument swept aside ancient and medieval traditions. He deduced that... Read more

Quantum

By: Manjit Kumar

Narrated by: Ray Porter

Length: 14 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Quantum theory is weird. As Niels Bohr said, if you aren’t shocked by quantum theory, you don’t really understand it. For most people, quantum theory is synonymous with mysterious, impenetrable science. And in fact for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar gives a... Read more

Walking Wisdom

By: Gotham Chopra & Deepak Chopra

Narrated by: Gotham Chopra

Length: 6 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

As far back as he can remember, every day of his life someone has asked Gotham Chopra what it was like to have Deepak Chopra as a father. They wanted to know if Gotham is a master practitioner of the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, whether he is in Perfect Health, if he meditates all day—in short, if he lives the perfect spiritual life. The... Read more

The Story of Philosophy

By: Will Durant

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 19 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The product of eleven years of research, The Story of Philosophy is an endlessly inspiring and instructive chronicle of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Socrates to Santayana. Written with exacting and scrupulous scholarship, it was designed both to command the respect of educators and to capture the interest of the layman.Durant lucidly... Read more

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed

By: Howard Gardner

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 7 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

The True, the Good, and the Beautiful are as timeless a trio of concepts as Western culture has to offer. Since before Socrates, humankind has explored these virtues in an attempt to describe and categorize them. Our definitions of these concepts, moreover, have unceasingly changed over the ages and across continents. Every known civilization... Read more

Leviathan

By: Thomas Hobbes

Narrated by: James Adams

Length: 23 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

The leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace, and security to be attained? Hobbes’ answer is sovereignty, but the resurgence of interest today in Leviathan is due less to its answers than its methods: Hobbes sees politics as a science capable of the same axiomatic approach as geometry.Written during the turmoil of the... Read more

Socrates in the City

By: Eric Metaxas

Narrated by: Eric Metaxas & the contributing authors

Length: 14 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Following the extraordinary success of the New York Times bestseller Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas’ latest book offers inspirational and intellectually rigorous thoughts about the great questions surrounding us all today.The Greek philosopher Socrates famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Taking this as a starting point, Eric... Read more