The best existential philosophy books

Most books about philosophy focus on famous figures and movements, such as Plato, Hume, existentialism, rationalism, etc. Their central purpose is to convey the basic ideas developed by those philosophers and those streams of thought. The public philosopher Julian Baggini and I, however, thought it might be a good idea to write a book organized instead around what philosophers actually do when they philosophize. We asked ourselves, “How do philosophers of all kinds generate and justify ideas? How is philosophy like and unlike the sciences? How does it compare to literary criticism, fiction, and poetry? What’s its relationship to religious practice? How can more advanced philosophers refine their thinking?” It was a kind of a hit and now appears in over seven languages.

Many consider Heidegger the most important philosopher of the 20th Century; many more consider him incomprehensible. His writing is notoriously off-putting, requiring readers to almost learn a new language in order to get at his ideas. But those ideas are so spectacular that I wanted everyone to be able to understand them, so I drew on my decades of experience teaching him to students to convey his thoughts in the most readable, enjoyable style possible, with lots of examples and a few jokes. If you want to understand the existence you’ve been thrown into, if you want the closest thing to an Owner’s Manual to a human life that I’ve ever encountered, read Heidegger. If you want to understand him, read my book alongside him.

A deeply personal, accessible look at how we preserve our humility and wonder or in short “awe” for living in the face of blinding biotechnical change. The book raises key questions about our motivation to explore, depth of engagement with life, and even our dignity when “devices” dominate our lives. The issue is not so much our enchantment with and attempts to emulate the machine; it is our risk of actually becoming machines. Unless we figure out how to preserve the awe, wonder, and core of what it means to be human, we risk losing the very best of who are.

What is so special about touching a piano John Lennon once owned? Why do we yell at our laptops? And why do people like to say “everything happens for a reason”? Drawing on cognitive science, anthropology, and neuroscience, my book shows that magical thinking is hardwired into our brains through evolution. It helps us believe that we have free will and an underlying purpose, as it protects us from the paralyzing awareness of our own mortality. Interweaving stories, reflections, and research, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking reveals just how this seemingly irrational process informs and improves the lives of even the most hardened skeptics, the author included.

This is the story of the decade I was fortunate enough to spend living and traveling with a wolfdog named Brenin, spanning life in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France. It is a book about love and about growing up. It is also a sustained attack on human exceptionalism. There are certain stories we like to tell ourselves about why are different from, and better than, other animals. Our intelligence makes us better than them? Or perhaps it is our morality? Or perhaps our sense of our own mortality? These are just stories we like to repeat, articles of faith, and nothing more. Moreover, each story has a dark side in that it reveals something deeply unflattering about us and our nature. 

This text looks at humanity’s effect(s) on nature and the wildlife within it in a phenomenological and existential approach – this is being written in the hopes of bringing about a newfound sense of realization of the issues regarding our environment(s) (living and non-living) which surround us on a daily basis. In our own search for meaning and ease in life, we have removed the meaning of an existing being, the being in this case meaning nature, and our own selves as beings need the existence of nature in order to form our meaning. We are negating ourselves as a result of negating the essence of the existing natures which we were originally given. We can fix this, granted we put in the effort. 

Many consider Heidegger the most important philosopher of the 20th Century; many more consider him incomprehensible. His writing is notoriously off-putting, requiring readers to almost learn a new language in order to get at his ideas. But those ideas are so spectacular that I wanted everyone to be able to understand them, so I drew on my decades of experience teaching him to students to convey his thoughts in the most readable, enjoyable style possible, with lots of examples and a few jokes. If you want to understand the existence you’ve been thrown into, if you want the closest thing to an Owner’s Manual to a human life that I’ve ever encountered, read Heidegger. If you want to understand him, read my book alongside him.

With rhyming dialogue and a rhythm to match Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Matita tells the tale of a writer's relationship with substance abuse and his craft from the unique perspective of his pencil

The pencil is an instrument of creativity, blinded by loyalty. The bottle is a vessel of lethargy and debauchery but inspiration all the same. Together they comprise the duality of the writer. This is their tale. It’s a truly tragic one at that—a terrible conversation between two futile minds. Join them, dear reader, and glimpse the inner workings of artistic musings.

The publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in 2014 elicited shockwaves throughout the otherwise staid guild of Heidegger scholarship. We learned, for example, that Heidegger’s enthusiasm for Nazism dated from the early 1930s and that his commitment to (as he put it) “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” persisted until the end of World War II. These revelations were bound to have a transformative impact on the way that Heidegger’s philosophy was interpreted and transmitted. Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology seeks to expose and decipher the conditions that led to the controversial and disturbing alliance between Heideggerian “fundamental ontology” and German fascism.