r/philosophy · 2020
Most-mentioned books in r/philosophy during 2020
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/philosophy within the published source unit for 2020. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.
#1 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.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#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 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 Enchiridion
Epictetus
A freed slave's 2,000-year-old field manual for deciding what you control — and letting go of everything else.
#8 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.
#9 Apology
Plato
A philosopher on trial chooses death over silence, defending a life of relentless questioning before the jury that will kill him.
#10 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.
#11 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.
#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 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.
#14 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.
#15 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.
#16 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.
#17 Ego Is the Enemy
Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday's case for subordinating ego to craft draws 41 Reddit mentions, most from r/Stoicism, where the book is treated as a gateway to the primary sources.
#18 How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
Donald Robertson
Donald Robertson follows Marcus Aurelius from student to emperor, using the Meditations as a manual for cognitive therapy anyone can apply today.
#19 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.
#20 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.
#21 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.
#22 Phaedo
Plato
Socrates spends his final hours arguing that the soul survives death — and inviting his friends to find the holes in his logic.
#23 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.
#24 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.
#25 Think
Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn's Cambridge introduction to philosophy — the book that once prompted one reader to change their major from Business Administration to Philosophy.