Philosophy Books of the 20th and 21st Century

selected by piero scaruffi
"Thinking about Thought" | Intelligence is not Artificial
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(Note: the + simply indicates the most famous works, not necessarily my favorites)
+Sigmund Freud: "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900)
Wilhelm Dilthey: "Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik" (1900)
+Edmund Husserl: "Logical Investigations" (1900)
Alexsius Meinong: "On Assumptions" (1902)
Yu-wei Kang: "Tu-tung Shu/ Book of Great Equality" (1902)
George Simmel: "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
+George-Edward Moore: "Principia Ethica" (1903)
+Max Weber: "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1905)
George Santayana: "Life of Reason" (1906)
+Pierre Duhem: "The Aim And Structure of Physical Theory" (1906)

Edward Thorndike: "Animal Intelligence" (1911)
+Gyorgy Lukacs: "The Soul and the Forms" (1911)
+Carl Jung: "Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912)
+Ferdinand Saussure: "Cours de Linguistique Generale" (1913)
+John Watson: "Psychology as Behavior" (1913)
+ D'Arcy Thompson: "On Growth and Form" (1917)
Benedetto Croce: "Filosofia dello Spirito" (1917)
Moritz Schlick: "General Theory of Knowledge" (1918)
+Oswald Spengler: "The Decline of the West" (1918)

Samuel Alexander: Space Time and Deity (1920)
+Edward Sapir: "Language" (1921)
Franz Rosenzweig: "The Star of Redemption" (1921)
Kitaro Nishida: "Zen no Kenkyu/ On Goodness" (1921)
++Bertrand Russell: "The Analysis of Mind" (1921)
William Ogburn: "Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature" (1922)
+Jean Piaget: "The Language and Thought of the Child" (1923)
+Martin Buber: "I and Thou" (1923)
+Charlie-Dunbar Broad: "The Mind and its Place in Nature" (1925)
Marcel Mauss: "The Gift" (1925)
Wolfgang Koehler: "The Mentality of Apes" (1925)
+Vladimir Vernadsky: "The Biosphere" (1926)
Jan Smuts: "Holism and Evolution" (1926)
Liu Yeng-hong: "Great Equality of the East" (1926)
+Ivan Pavlov: "Conditioned Reflexes" (1926)
++Martin Heidegger: "Being and Time" (1927)
++Rudolf Carnap: "The Logical Structure of the World (1928)
++Ernst Cassirer: "The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" (1929)
++Alfred Whitehead: "Process and Reality" (1929)
Clarence-Irving Lewis: "Mind and World Order" (1929)

William-David Ross: "The Right and the Good" (1930)
Krishna-Chandra Bhattacharyya:"The Subject as Freedom" (1930)
Muhammad Iqbal: "Book of Eternity" (1932)
Walter Cannon: "The Wisdom of the Body" (1932)
Alfred Schutz: "Phenomenology of the Social World" (1932)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan: "An Idealist View of Life" (1932)
+Karl Jaspers: "Philosophy" (1932)
Edward Westermarck: "Ethical Relativity" (1932)
Alford Korzybski: "Science and Sanity" (1933)
+George Herbert Mead: "Mind Self and Society" (1934)
++Karl Popper: "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (1934)
+Arnold Toynbee: "Study of History" (1934)
Gaston Bachelard: "The New Scientific Spirit" (1934)
Emil Cioran: "On the Heights of Despair" (1934)
+Lev Vygotsky: "Thought and Language" (1934)
Jacob Moreno: "Who Shall Survive?" (1934)
Alfred-Jules Ayer: "Language Truth and Logic" (1936)
Leon Trotsky: "Their Morals and Ours" (1938)
+Burrhus Skinner: "The Behavior of Organisms" (1938)
+Charles Morris: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs" (1938)
+John Dewey: "Logic - The Theory of Inquiry" (1938)
Johan Huizinga: "Homo Ludens" (1938)
+ Pierre Teilhard: "The Phenomenon of Man" (1938)
Fung Yu-Lan: "New Learning of Principle" (1939)
Kurt Goldstein: "The Organism" (1939)
Norbert Elias: "The Civilizing Process" (1939)

+Walter Benjamin: "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940)
++Susanne Langer: "Philosophy in a New Key" (1942)
++Albert Camus: "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942)
+Kenneth Craik: "The Nature of Explanation" (1943)
Nicolai Hartmann: New Ways of Ontology (1943)
+JeanPaul Sartre: "Being and Nothingness" (1943)
Charles Stevenson: "Ethics and Language" (1944)
Kaarl Polanyi: "The Great Transformation" (1944)
+Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945)
+Simone Beauvoir: "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1947)
Max Horkheimer: "The Eclipse of Reason" (1947)
+Norbert Wiener: "Cybernetics" (1948)
++Gilbert Ryle: "The Concept of Mind" (1949)
+Donald Hebb: "The Organization of Behavior" (1949)
Simone Weil: "The Need for Roots" (1949)
Ghose Aurobindo: "The Human Cycle" (1949)
+Joseph Campbell: "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (1949)

Carl Schmitt: "The Earth's Nomos" (1950)
Marcel Gabriel: The Mystery of Being" (1950)
+Hannah Arendt: "Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
Qutb Sayyid: "In the Shadow of the Koran" (1952)
Richard-Mervyn Hare: "The Language of Morals" (1952)
Leo Strauss: "Natural Right and History" (1952)
Peter-Frederick Strawson: "Introduction to Logical Theory" (1952)
++Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Philosophical Investigations" (1953)
Erich Fromm: "The Sane Society" (1955)
+Claude Levi-Strauss: "Structural Study of Myth" (1955)
Wilfred Sellars: "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956)
Karl Mannheim: "Essays on the Sociology of Culture" (1956)
Erving Goffman: "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (1956)
+Benjamin-Lee Whorf: "Language Thought and Reality" (1956)
+Roman Jakobson: "Fundamentals of Language" (1956)
Aleksandr Koyre: "From The Closed World to the Infinite Universe" (1957)
Iris Murdoch: "Metaphysics and Ethics" (1957)
+ Noam Chomsky (USA, 1928): "Syntactic Structures" (1957)
+Donald Broadbent: "Perception and Communication" (1958)
Eric Hoffer: "The True Believer" (1958)
Andre Siegfried: "Itineraires de Contagions" (1959)
Ernst Bloch: "The Principle Of Hope" (1959)

Hans-Georg Gadamer: "Truth and Method" (1960)
+ Hilary Putnam (USA, 1926): "Minds and Machines" (1960)
Daniel Bell: "The End of Ideology" (1960)
+Paul Ricoeur: "Philosophy of the Will" (1960)
Hand Blumenberg: "Metaphorology" (1960)
+Willard Quine: "Word and Object" (1960)
Emmanuel Levinas: "Totality and Infinity" (1961)
++Thomas Kuhn: Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962)
+Max Black: "Models and Metaphors" (1962)
+John-Langshaw Austin: "How to do Things with Words" (1962)
+Paul Feyerabend: "Mental Events and the Brain" (1963)
Betty Friedman: "The Feminine Mystique" (1963)
Edmund Gettier (USA, 1927): "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963)
Ronald Laing: "The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise" (1964)
+Thomas Sebeok: "Approaches to Semiotics" (1964)
Gilbert Simondon: "Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information" (1964)
+Herbert Marcuse: "One-dimensional Man" (1964)
+Roland Barthes: "Elements of Semiology" (1964)
Jacques Ellul: "La Technique" (1964)
++Marshall McLuhan: "Understanding Media" (1964)
Walter Ong (USA, 1912): "The Presence of the Word" (1964)
+Richard Rorty: "Mind-body Identity" (1965)
Donald Campbell: "Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-cultural Evolution" (1965)
Justus Buchler: "Metaphysics of Natural Complexes" (1966)
+Michel Foucault: "The Order of Things" (1966)
+James-Jerome Gibson: "The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems" (1966)
+ Paul Grice: "Studies in the Way of Words" (1967)
+Arthur Koestler: "The Ghost in the Machine" (1967)
+Jacques Derrida: "Grammatology" (1967)
+Guy Debord: "The Society of the Spectacle" (1967)
Ludwig VonBertalanffy: "General Systems Theory" (1968)
+Buckminster Fuller: "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (1968)
Amitai Etzioni: "The Active Society" (1968)
+Herbert Simon: "The Sciences of the Artificial" (1969)
+Gilles Deleuze: "The Logic of Sense" (1969)
+John Searle: "Speech Acts" (1969)

Donald Davidson (USA, 1917): "Mental Events" (1970)
Louis Althusser: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970)
Karl Pribram: "Languages of the Brain" (1971)
+Jacques Monod: "Chance and Necessity" (1971)
+John Rawls: "Theory of Justice" (1971)
Raymond Cattell: "A New Morality from Science" (1972)
Bernard Williams: "Morality - An Introduction to Ethics" (1972)
+Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: "Anti-Oedipus" (1972)
+ Saul Kripke (USA, 1940): "Naming and Necessity" (1972)
+Gregory Bateson: "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1972)
Karl-Otto Appel: "Transformation der Philosophie" (1973)
++ Thomas Nagel (USA, 1937): "What is it Like to be a Bat?" (1974)
Russell Ackoff: "Systems, Messes, and Interactive Planning" (1974)
Archie Bahm: "Ethics as a Behavioral Science" (1974)
+Rene Thom: "Structural Stability and Morphogenesis" (1975)
+Richard Dawkins: "The Selfish Gene" (1976)
+ Jerry Fodor: "The Language of Thought" (1975)
+Ulric Neisser: "Cognition and Reality" (1975)
Peter Unger (USA, 1942): "Ignorance" (1975)
+Edward-Osborne Wilson: "Sociobiology" (1975)
Umberto Eco (Italy, 1932): "A Theory of Semiotics" (1975)
+Frank Jackson (Australia, 1943): "Perception" (1977)
+Julian Jaynes (USA, 1920): "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (1977)
Hermann Haken (Germany, 1927): "Synergetics" (1977)
George Pugh: "The Biological Origin of Human Values" (1977)
John Leslie Mackie: "Ethics - Inventing Right and Wrong" (1977)
Michael Walzer: "Just and Unjust Wars" (1977)
Sissela Bok: "Lying, Moral Choice in Public and Private Life" (1978)
Nelson Goodman: "Ways of World Making" (1978)
+Eleanor Rosch: "Cognition and Categorization" (1978)
+Guy Murchie (USA, 1907): "Seven Mysteries of Life" (1978)
Mary Midgley (Britain, 1919): "Beast and Man" (1978)
Thomas Schelling: "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" (1978)
Pierre Bourdieu: "Distinction" (1979)
Christopher Lasch: "The Culture of Narcissism" (1979)
+Jean-Francois Lyotard: "The Postmodern Condition" (1979)
Reinhart Koselleck: "Futures Past" (1979)
+James Lovelock: "Gaia" (1979)
+Francisco Varela: "Principles of Biological Autonomy" (1979)

+Humberto Maturana: "Autopoiesis and Cognition" (1980)
+Ilya Prigogine: "From Being to Becoming" (1980)
Alvin Toffler: "The Third Wave" (1980)
+George Lakoff: "Metaphors we Live by" (1980)
++Douglas Hofstadter (USA, 1945): "Goedel Escher Bach" (1980)
Lawrence Kohlberg: "The Philosophy of Moral Development" (1981)
+Jean Baudrillard: "Simulacra and Simulation" (1981)
Stanley Cavell: "Pursuits of Happiness" (1981)
+Jurgen Habermas (Germany, 1929): " Theory of Communicative Action" (1981)
Alasdair Macintyre (Britain, 1929): "After Virtue" (1981)
+Peter Singer (Australia, 1946): "The Expanding Circle" (1981)
+Benoit Mandelbrot: "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" (1982)
+ Rudy Rucker: "Infinity and the Mind" (1982)
+Carol Gilligan (USA, 1936): "In a Different Voice" (1982)
Ray Jackendoff (USA, 1945): "Semantics and Cognition" (1983)
Mark Granovetter: "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1983)
Nancy Cartwright (USA, 1944): "How the Laws of Physics Lie" (1983)
Peter Van Inwagen (USA, 1942): "An Essay on Free Will" (1983)
Philip Johnson-Laird: "Mental Models" (1983)
John Barwise & John Perry: "Situations and Attitudes" (1983)
+Mario Bunge: "Treatise on Basic Philosophy" (1983)
Clifford Geertz: "Local Knowledge" (1983)
Fredric Jameson: "Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984)
David Davidson: "Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation" (1984)
+ Jaegwon Kim (USA, 1934): "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation" (1984)
+Derek Parfit: "Reasons and Persons" (1984)
+ Michael Gazzaniga: "Social Brain" (1985)
+Marvin Minsky: "The Society of Mind" (1985)
+Robert Ornstein: "Multimind" (1986)
Jean-Luc Nancy (France, 1940): "The Inoperative Community" (1986)
+ Gerald Edelman: "Neural Darwinism" (1987)
Mark Johnson: "The Body in the Mind" (1987)
+ Bernard Baars (USA, 1946): "A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness" (1988)
Tyler Burge (USA, 1946): "Individualism and Self-Knowledge" (1988)
Alain Badiou (France, 1937): "Being and Event" (1988)
Ingvar Johansson (Sweden, 1943): "Ontological Investigations" (1989)
Zygmunt Bauman (Poland, 1925): "Modernity and the Holocaust" (1989)
+Roger Penrose: "The Emperor's New Mind" (1989)
Slavoj Zizek (Slovenia, 1949): " The Sublime Object of Ideology" (1989)
Shelly Kegan: "The Limits of Morality" (1989)

Allan Gibbard (USA, 1942): "Wise Choices, Apt Feelings" (1990)
Judith Butler (USA, 1956): "Gender Trouble" (1990)
Giorgio Agamben: "The Coming Community" (1990)
++Colin McGinn: "The Problem of Consciousness" (1991)
+Daniel Dennett (USA, 1942): "Consciousness Explained" (1991)
Ernest Sosa (USA, 1940): " Knowledge in Perspective" (1991)
Rosalind Hursthouse (New Zealand, 1943): "Virtue Theory and Abortion" (1991)
+ Merlin Donald: "Origins of the Modern Mind" (1991)
Naomi Wolf: "The Beauty Myth" (1991)
Ulrich Beck: "The Risk Society" (1992)
Helena Cronin: "The Ant and the Peacock" (1992)
Christine Korsgaard (USA, 1952): "The Sources of Normativity" (1992)
+ Stuart Kauffman: "The Origins of Order" (1993)
Susan Wolf: "Freedom Within Reason" (1993)
Philip Pettit: "The Common Mind" (1993)
Susan Haack (Britain, 1945): "Evidence and Inquiry" (1993)
+Stapp Henry: "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics" (1993)
Simon Blackburn (Britain, 1944): "Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993)
Robert Brandom (USA, 1950): "Making it Explicit" (1994)
John McDowell (USA, 1942): "Mind and World" (1994)
Gilles Fauconnier: "Mental Spaces" (1994)
Henry Plotkin: "Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge" (1994)
Susan Neiman (USA, 1955): "The Unity of Reason" (1994)
+Steven Pinker: "The Language Instinct" (1994)
+ Antonio Damasio: "Descartes' Error" (1995)
+Frank Tipler: "The Physics of Immortality" (1995)
+Robert Wright: "The Moral Animal" (1995)
John Brockman: "Third Culture" (1995)
+ Wiliam Calvin: "How Brains Think" (1996)
+Sanuel Huntington: "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (1996)
+Jesper Hoffmeyer: "Signs of Meaning in the Universe" (1996)
+Steven Mithen: "The Prehistory of the Mind" (1996)
++David Chalmers (Australia, 1966): "The Conscious Mind" (1996)
Judith Jarvis Thomson: "Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity" (1996)
Martha Nussbaum (USA, 1947): "Cultivating Humanity" (1997)
Niklas Luhmann: "Theory of Society" (1997)
+Jared Diamond: "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1997)
Peter Galison: "Image and Logic" (1997)
Blackmore, Susan: "The Meme Machine" (1998)
Terrence Deacon: "The Symbolic Species" (1998)
+Tor Norretranders: "The User Illusion" (1998)
John Harris: "Clones, Genes and Immortality - Ethics and the Genetics Revolution" (1998)
+Andy Clark (Britain, 1957): "The Extended Mind" (1998)
+Katherine Hayles: "How We Became Post-Human" (1999)
Marcia Baron: "Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology" (1999)
Gayatri Spivak (India, 1942): " A Critique of Postcolonial Reason" (1999)

Rosalind Hursthouse: "Ethics, Humans and Other Animals" (2000)
David Oderberg (Australia, 1963): "Applied Ethics" (2000)
Michael Slote: "Morals From Motives" (2001)
Jonathan Haidt: "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail" (2001)
Graham Harman (USA, 1968): "Tool-Being" (2002)
Peter Gardenfors: "How Homo Became Sapiens" (2003)
James Surowiecki: "The Wisdom of Crowds" (2004)
Kwame Anthony Appiah (Britain, 1954): "The Ethics of Identity (2005)
Jonathan Haidt: "The Happiness Hypothesis" (2006)
John Hawthorne (Britain, 1964): "Metaphysical Essays" (2006)
Timothy Morton (Britain, 1968): "Ecology Without Nature" (2007)
Michael Sandel: "Justice" (2007)
David Benatar: "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence" (2008)
Alison Gopnik: "The Philosophical Baby" (2009)
Julian Savulescu (Australia, 1963): "Unfit for Life" (2009)
Joanna Zylinska: "Bioethics in the Age of New Media" (2009)
Amartya Sen: "The Idea of Justice" (2009)

+ Kevin Kelly: "What Technology Wants" (2010)
Jesse Prinz: "The Emotional Construction of Morals" (2011)
Ronald Dworkin: "Justice for Hedgehogs" (2011)
Vilayanur Ramachandran: "The Tell-Tale Brain" (2011)
++David Deutsch (Britain, 1953): "The Beginning of Infinity" (2011)
Giulio Tononi: "Phi, A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul" (2012)
John Heil (USA, 1950): "The Universe as we Find It" (2012)
Helen Steward (Britain, 1965): "A Metaphysics for Freedom" (2012)
Robert Kurzban: "Why Everyone" (Else) Is a Hypocrite" (2012)
+Sam Harris: "Free Will" (2012)
+Susan Greenfield (Britain, 1950): "Mind Change" (2014)
+ Yuval Harari (Israel, 1976): "Sapiens" (2014)
Amie Thomasson (USA, 1968): "Ontology Made Easy" (2015)
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