Philosophy audiobooks

Fierce Self-Compassion

By: Kristin Neff
Narrated by: Jean Ann Douglass
Length: 12 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No

The author of Self-Compassion follows up her groundbreaking book with new ideas that expand our notion of self-kindness and its capacity to transform our lives, showing women how to balance tender self-acceptance with fierce action to claim their power and change the world.

Kristin Neff changed how we talk about self-care with her enormously...

When Breath Becomes Air

By: Paul Kalanithi
Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra & Cassandra Campbell
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR... Read more »

101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

By: Brianna Wiest
Narrated by: Abby Craden
Length: 10 hours 45 minutes
Abridged: No

Over the past few years, Brianna Wiest has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see... Read more »

12 Rules for Life

By: Jordan B. Peterson
Narrated by: Jordan B. Peterson
Length: 15 hours 40 minutes
Abridged: No

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

What does everyone in the modern world need to know?

Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.

Humorous, surprising and... Read more »

The Tyranny of Merit

By: Michael J. Sandel
Narrated by: Michael J. Sandel
Length: 11 hours 17 minutes
Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good?

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social...

The Quest for Cosmic Justice

By: Thomas Sowell
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 5 hours 51 minutes
Abridged: No

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up... Read more »

The Tao of Pooh

By: Benjamin Hoff
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Length: 2 hours 46 minutes
Abridged: No

Winnie-the-Pooh has a certain Way about him, a way of doing things that has made him the world's most beloved bear. In The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff shows that Pooh's Way is amazingly consistent with the principles of living envisioned by the Chinese founders of Taoism. The author's explanation of Taoism through Pooh, and Pooh through Taoism,... Read more »

How Not to Be Wrong

By: Jordan Ellenberg
Narrated by: Jordan Ellenberg
Length: 13 hours 28 minutes
Abridged: No

The Freakonomics of math—a math-world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts its power in our hands

The math we learn in school can seem like a dull set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned. In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us how terribly limiting this view is: Math isn’t... Read more »

The Book

By: Alan Watts
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
Length: 4 hours 51 minutes
Abridged: No

Modern Western culture and technology is inextricably tied to the belief in the existence of a self as a separate ego, separated from and in conflict with the rest of the world. In this classic book, Watts provides a lucid and simple presentation of an alternative view based on Hindu and Vedantic philosophy. Read more »

What We Owe Each Other

By: Minouche Shafik
Narrated by: Minouche Shafik
Length: 6 hours 55 minutes
Abridged: No

This audiobook narrated by Minouche Shafik provides an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive

Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting...

The Monk and the Philosopher

By: Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard
Narrated by: David Shaw-Parker
Length: 14 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No

Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism-not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this project was born, and Richard met with his father, Jean-Francois Revel-a French philosopher who became...

The Book of Eels

By: Patrik Svensson
Narrated by: Alex Wyndham
Length: 6 hours 24 minutes
Abridged: No

Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition.

Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has...

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

By: Marie Kondo
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 4 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?
Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you'll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate... Read more »

Entitled

By: Kate Manne
Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
Length: 6 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No

An urgent exploration of men’s entitlement and how it serves to police and punish women, from the acclaimed author of Down Girl

“Kate Manne is a thrilling and provocative feminist thinker. Her work is indispensable.”—Rebecca Traister 

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC

In this bold and stylish critique, Cornell philosopher... Read more »

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Narrated by: Joe Ochman
Length: 16 hours 13 minutes
Abridged: No

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and The Bed of Procrustes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the... Read more »

This Life

By: Martin Hägglund
Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
Length: 16 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No

Winner of the René Wellek Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald

A profound, original, and accessible book that offers a new secular vision of how we can lead our lives. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our... Read more »

You Belong

By: Sebene Selassie
Narrated by: Sebene Selassie
Length: 8 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No

"A POWERFUL WORK OF SPIRITUALITY AND ANTI-RACISM"—Publishers Weekly

"IF YOU READ ONE BOOK IN 2020, MAKE IT THIS ONE."—Tricycle 

From much-admired meditation expert Sebene Selassie, You Belong is a call to action, exploring our tangled relationship with belonging, connection, and each other

You are not separate. You never were. You never will be.

We...

The Second Sex

By: Simone De Beauvoir
Narrated by: Ellen Archer & Judith Thurman
Length: 39 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No

UNABRIDGED AND AVAILABLE ON AUDIO FOR THE FIRST TIME

Simone de Beauvoir’s essential masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a revolutionary exploration of inequality and otherness. This unabridged edition of the text reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English...

Everybody

By: Olivia Laing
Narrated by: Elizabeth Sastre
Length: 9 hours 10 minutes
Abridged: No

“Astute and consistently surprising critic” (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century. The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying... Read more »

Fathoms

By: Rebecca Giggs
Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio
Length: 12 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No

Winner of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction * Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

A “delving, haunted, and poetic debut” (The New York Times Book Review) about the awe-inspiring lives of whales, revealing what they can teach us about... Read more »

Cosmos and Psyche

By: Richard Tarnas
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
Length: 25 hours 55 minutes
Abridged: No

From a philosopher whose magisterial history of Western thought was praised by Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith comes a brilliant new book that traces the connection between cosmic cycles and archetypal patterns of human experience. Drawing on years of research and on thinkers from Plato to Jung, Richard Tarnas explores the planetary... Read more »

The Three Pillars of Zen

By: Roshi Philip Kapleau
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
Length: 14 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No

In this classic work of spiritual guidance, the founder of the Rochester Zen Center presents a comprehensive overview of Zen Buddhism. Exploring the three pillars of Zen—teaching, practice, and enlightenment—Roshi Philip Kapleau, the man who founded one of the oldest and most influential Zen centers in the United States, presents a personal... Read more »

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By: Robert M. Pirsig
Narrated by: Michael Kramer
Length: 15 hours 10 minutes
Abridged: No

This lyrical, evocative, thought-provoking journal of a man's quest for truth -- and for himself -- has touched and changed an entire generation.

At its heart, the story is all too simple: a man and his son take a lengthy motorcycle trip through America. But this is not a simple trip at all, for around every corner, through mountain and desert,...

The Rebel

By: Albert Camus
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 11 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No

By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established... Read more »