Favorite Philosophy Books

What are your favorite philosophy books? I'm currently taking an ethics course at my university. I am interested in finding new philosophy books to read to get a better understanding of the subject. Can be any branch!

technically fiction but camus' the outsider is pretty good wrt the theme of absurdism and such. i haven't read nietzche personally but i've heard his stuff is pretty good (and it's forever on my tbr)

Ethics is a really vast topic, so it's hard to give advice. To move away from the classics like Nietzsche, Plato, etc... If you want something interesting that's probably very different from what you've seen at university, I'd suggest David Benatar, who deals with antinatalist ethics.

There's also Hannah Arendt, who works on political ethics, but there's a good chance you've already covered her in class. If not, she tackles more modern topics and has her own particular set of issues she deals with. There are other philosophers like Deleuze who also have their own distinct take on the subject, though without addressing it directly (but it's VERYY interesting), or fiction authors who explore the topic, sometimes in great depth. 

If a specific style or topic interests you, feel free to ask :D

I’m partial to philosophy that gets into ethics, power, identity, knowledge, and what we owe one another. A few I’d recommend:

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity — probably one of my favorite ethics books. Existentialist ethics about freedom, responsibility, and our obligations to other people.
• Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good — really interesting if you want ethics beyond just rules and consequences. She focuses a lot on attention, perception, and how we learn to see other people clearly.
• Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice — about the ethics and politics of knowledge: who gets believed, who is treated as credible, and whose experiences we even have concepts for.
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract — a critique of the traditional social contract tradition and the way Western political philosophy has treated race and white supremacy. Very readable.
• Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body — philosophy of disability that takes up questions about disability, well-being, identity, and what it means to have a good life.
• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue — good if your ethics class gets into virtue ethics. He asks what happened to our shared language for talking about morality and why modern moral arguments so often seem impossible to resolve.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality — especially fun once you’ve encountered traditional moral theories because he starts asking where our ideas of “good,” “evil,” guilt, punishment, etc. actually came from.
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — philosophy, psychology, colonialism, race, recognition, and what domination does to a person’s sense of self. One of those books that gives you a whole new vocabulary for seeing things.

If you’re relatively new to philosophy, I’d probably start with de Beauvoir, Mills, or Fricker. They’re substantial enough that you can really dig into them without feeling like you need three semesters of philosophy just to understand what the author is saying.

And if you want something older, Plato’s Euthyphro is short and surprisingly fun for ethics because the basic question it raises about whether something is good because an authority commands it, or commanded because it is already good, is still incredibly relevant.

Thank you all for the recommendations :)

On the topic of ethics:

Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle

Ethics by Baruch Spinoza

Principles of Ethics by Herbert Spencer

Self-Help and Character by Samuel Smiles

On top of this, I believe it is important to look into societal-level ethics, or civility, which is best understood through works such as:

Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello

What is Mutualism? by Clarence Lee Swartz

Voluntary Socialism by Francis Dashwood Tandy

Someone who reads all of these will be quite the rational ethicist.