Where should a beginner start?

With What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel, the easiest book on this list at difficulty 29 out of 100: about 1.1 hours at an average pace. Then Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (41) and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (44).

What is the hardest book on the list?

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, at 86 out of 100 and about 35 hours at an average pace. It comes last, after the books that prepare for it.

How long does the whole list take?

About 132 hours at an average pace of 250 words a minute. The three longest books take 82 hours of them: Critique of Pure Reason (35 hours), The Second Sex (27 hours) and Republic (20 hours).

How is difficulty measured?

ReadingRate scores every book from 0 to 100 on how hard it is to read, from its prose and from what it asks of a reader. For a book of argument the score weighs how complex the argument is, what it assumes you already know, how opaque its terms are, how indirectly it makes its case and how much it tries to hold at once.

Philosophy for beginners

Eighteen books, from the easiest to the hardest by ReadingRate’s difficulty score: from Nagel’s short questions to Kant’s Critique.

18 books · 132 hours at an average pace · difficulty 29 to 86

Easy

What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel (1987): difficulty 29 of 100, Easy, about 1.1 hours. The big questions, one short chapter each, before any names or jargon.

Moderate

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c. 180 CE): difficulty 41 of 100, Moderate, about 2.8 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. An emperor’s private notebook on how to live. You can open it anywhere.
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641): difficulty 44 of 100, Moderate, about 1.6 hours. Six meditations that doubt everything. Modern philosophy starts here.
Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre (1946): difficulty 46 of 100, Moderate, about 1.8 hours. A public lecture in which Sartre explains existentialism to non-philosophers.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1848): difficulty 47 of 100, Moderate, about 45 min, free to read on ReadingRate. The shortest book here, and one of the most consequential.
The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912): difficulty 49 of 100, Moderate, about 2.9 hours. Russell’s own introduction to what we can know, written for general readers.
Symposium by Plato (c. 385 BCE): difficulty 50 of 100, Moderate, about 2.2 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A dinner party that argues about love. The easiest way into Plato.
Analects by Confucius (c. 479 BCE): difficulty 51 of 100, Moderate, about 2 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Short sayings on character and government that shaped Chinese thought for two thousand years.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (1748): difficulty 51 of 100, Moderate, about 3.7 hours. Hume argues that experience, not reason, is where our knowledge comes from. Kant said it woke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (c. 340 BCE): difficulty 52 of 100, Moderate, about 6.3 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. What a good life is, built from habits rather than rules.
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859): difficulty 54 of 100, Moderate, about 3.3 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. The classic case for free speech, and for leaving people alone unless they harm others.

Challenging

The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays by Albert Camus (1942): difficulty 56 of 100, Challenging, about 4.1 hours. Is life worth living if it means nothing? Camus says yes.
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949): difficulty 58 of 100, Challenging, about 27 hours. The founding book of feminist philosophy. It is long, so read it a part at a time.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962): difficulty 60 of 100, Challenging, about 5.6 hours. How science changes its mind. This is where “paradigm shift” comes from.
Republic by Plato (c. 375 BCE): difficulty 65 of 100, Challenging, about 20 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Justice, the soul, the ideal city and the cave. Most of Western philosophy answers this book.

Difficult

Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard (1843): difficulty 70 of 100, Difficult, about 4.2 hours. Abraham raising the knife over Isaac, read as a problem for any ethics of rules.
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (1886): difficulty 76 of 100, Difficult, about 8 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Nietzsche’s attack on every philosopher before him. It lands harder once you have read them.

Very difficult

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781): difficulty 86 of 100, Very difficult, about 35 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. The summit: what the mind adds to everything it knows. Read it last.

Questions

Where should a beginner start?: With What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel, the easiest book on this list at difficulty 29 out of 100: about 1.1 hours at an average pace. Then Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (41) and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (44).
What is the hardest book on the list?: Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, at 86 out of 100 and about 35 hours at an average pace. It comes last, after the books that prepare for it.
How long does the whole list take?: About 132 hours at an average pace of 250 words a minute. The three longest books take 82 hours of them: Critique of Pure Reason (35 hours), The Second Sex (27 hours) and Republic (20 hours).
How is difficulty measured?: ReadingRate scores every book from 0 to 100 on how hard it is to read, from its prose and from what it asks of a reader. For a book of argument the score weighs how complex the argument is, what it assumes you already know, how opaque its terms are, how indirectly it makes its case and how much it tries to hold at once.

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