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Open libraryA reading record for people who read philosophy.
Shelve texts, log pages, keep quotes and reflections tied to the page they came from, and rate how demanding a work really is. Each week you are placed in a pool of readers at your own rank — pages read, weighted by difficulty, decide who rises.
The ladder
Six tiers, each with three divisions up to Champion. Movement narrows as you climb.
- Bronze
- Silver
- Gold
- Platinum
- Diamond
- Champion
Where to beginA recommended progression: six stages, from short welcoming books to the works most readers need years to finish.
Getting your bearings
Short, welcoming books that show what philosophical questions look like.
The ancient foundations
The works every later philosopher is quietly answering.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Stoic practice written privately, without an audience.
Tao Te Ching
Laozi
A counterweight from the East: restraint instead of mastery.
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
Virtue, habit and the good life, argued systematically for the first time.
The Republic
Plato
Justice, the soul and the city — the origin of most Western political thought.
The modern turn
Knowledge, doubt and the self are reopened from the ground up.
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius
The bridge from antiquity into the medieval world.
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes
Doubt everything, then rebuild. Modern philosophy starts here.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
The empiricist reply, and the problem of induction.
Second Treatise of Government
John Locke
Consent, property and the limits of authority.
Ethics and the moral argument
Three rival answers to the question of how one ought to act.
Meaning, existence, suspicion
Once the foundations are shaky, these writers ask what is left.
Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard
Faith as a leap that reason cannot underwrite.
Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality itself put on trial.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
The absurd, and why it is not an argument for despair.
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre
The clearest doorway into existentialism proper.
The demanding summits
Slow, technical and worth the years. Read with commentary beside you.
Ethics
Baruch Spinoza
Metaphysics set out like geometry, proposition by proposition.
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
The hinge of modern philosophy, and one of its hardest books.
Phenomenology of Spirit
G. W. F. Hegel
Consciousness working its way toward absolute knowing.
Philosophical Investigations
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Meaning as use — philosophy dismantling its own questions.
Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
The question of being, in a vocabulary built from scratch.
Schools & thinkers
Filter by Stoicism, Existentialism, Rationalism, Eastern philosophy and more.
BrowseCurricula
Ordered paths through a tradition — follow one and track it book by book.
See curricula