r/askphilosophy · 2019
Most-mentioned books in r/askphilosophy during 2019
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/askphilosophy within the published source unit for 2019. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.
#1 Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
Kant's 1781 attempt to settle the limits of human knowledge — the book that split philosophy in two and still hasn't been fully digested.
#2 Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger's argument that human existence only gets its meaning from death — 162 Reddit mentions, mostly from people explaining why it's so hard to read.
#3 The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
A 1942 essay that opens with the question of whether life is worth living and ends by insisting Sisyphus is happy.
#4 Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche dismantles the moral framework Western civilization built on, then refuses to tell you what to replace it with.
#5 On the Genealogy of Morals
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche traces where 'good' and 'evil' come from — and argues the answer involves priests, resentment, and a deliberate inversion of aristocratic values.
#6 Phaedo
Plato
Socrates spends his final hours arguing that the soul survives death — and inviting his friends to find the holes in his logic.
#7 Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
Aristotle's 2,400-year-old argument that living well depends on virtue, leisure, and the company you keep — still the canonical text for the field.
#8 Philosophical Investigations
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein's public recantation of his own first masterpiece, dismantling the picture theory of meaning one language-game at a time.
#9 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein built a numbered ladder from logical atomism to the inexpressible, then said the ladder had to be discarded once you climbed it.
#10 Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard uses Abraham's knife at Isaac's throat to ask whether any act of faith can be explained to the person standing next to you.
#11 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche's prophet descends a mountain with three ideas — the Ubermensch, eternal recurrence, the death of God — and r/askphilosophy explains why to read something else first.
#12 Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's 700-page argument that you are nothing until you choose what to be — and that terror is the correct response to that fact.
#13 Symposium
Plato
Seven Athenians take turns defining love at a dinner party, and Socrates closes by reporting what a priestess taught him about desire and immortality.
#14 A Theory of Justice
John Rawls
The 1971 book that reset political philosophy by asking what principles rational people would choose if they didn't know where they'd land in society.
#15 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
David Hume's 1748 argument that knowledge comes from experience, not reason alone — and that you should probably stop pretending to know things you cannot verify.
#16 Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
The Roman emperor's private notebook — written to himself in Greek, never meant to be published — became the Stoic canon's most-cited text 1,800 years later.
#17 Sophie's World
Jostein Gaarder
A teenage girl in Norway starts receiving anonymous philosophy lessons by mail and slowly realizes she might be a character in someone else's story.
#18 The Republic
Plato
A 2,400-year-old Athenian asks why anyone would choose justice over injustice, then spends 400 pages building a city to answer the question.
#19 A History of Philosophy
Frederick Copleston
Nine volumes, one Jesuit priest, and the only multi-volume history of Western philosophy that r/askphilosophy will actually defend in a thread.
#20 A History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell recaps 2,500 years of philosophy from ancient Greece to logical positivism, with opinions — many of them wrong, all of them readable.
#21 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Immanuel Kant
Kant's 1785 argument that morality comes from reason alone — the Categorical Imperative in its original 90-page form, before the Critiques complicate everything.
#22 The Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell wrote a 90-page intro to analytic philosophy in 1912 and r/askphilosophy still hands it to newcomers first, every time.
#23 A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume
Hume uses a billiard ball and a bundle of perceptions to dismantle causation and personal identity — r/askphilosophy is still linking the passages in 2026.
#24 Apology
Plato
A philosopher on trial chooses death over silence, defending a life of relentless questioning before the jury that will kill him.
#25 Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes
A philosopher strips away every belief he holds to find the one thing that can't be doubted, then rebuilds the world from there — in six meditations, 80 pages.