r/philosophy · 2019
Most-mentioned books in r/philosophy during 2019
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/philosophy 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 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.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#4 The Daily Stoic
Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday turns Stoic passages into a 366-day reading habit, and r/Stoicism's 250 mentions can't decide if that's a gateway or a ceiling.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.
#11 The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl Popper
Karl Popper dismantles Plato, Hegel, and Marx to argue that any philosophy treating history as destiny is a blueprint for tyranny.
#12 Enchiridion
Epictetus
A freed slave's 2,000-year-old field manual for deciding what you control — and letting go of everything else.
#13 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.
#14 How to Be a Stoic
Massimo Pigliucci
A philosopher uses Epictetus as a conversation partner to translate Stoic practice into a secular, atheism-compatible framework for daily life.
#15 Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
Seneca writes 124 letters to a friend about grief, fear, and wasted time — and 163 Reddit mentions later, r/Stoicism still treats them as the first thing to read.
#16 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.
#17 On Liberty
John Stuart Mill
Mill's 1859 case for why society has no right to silence you — even when you're wrong — distilled to 130 pages that r/askphilosophy assigns before almost anything else.
#18 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.
#19 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.
#20 A Guide to the Good Life
William B. Irvine
A philosophy professor stress-tests Stoic practice on his own life and hands you the manual: negative visualization, voluntary discomfort, and the trichotomy of control.
#21 Apology
Plato
A philosopher on trial chooses death over silence, defending a life of relentless questioning before the jury that will kill him.
#22 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.
#23 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.
#24 On the Shortness of Life
Seneca
Seneca wrote this letter to a friend who kept saying he'd live properly once he had more time — and explained why that day never comes.
#25 Phaedo
Plato
Socrates spends his final hours arguing that the soul survives death — and inviting his friends to find the holes in his logic.