A Naturalistic Library
This page brings together a personal selection of books that have shaped my understanding of naturalism or help illuminate some of its dimensions: general philosophy, physics, evolution, human nature, culture, consciousness, reason, and religion.
It is neither an exhaustive bibliography nor a definitive ranking of the “best books” on these subjects. Some of the works directly defend naturalism; others present scientific or philosophical theories that contribute to a naturalistic picture of the world. I have also included several historically important texts that help situate contemporary naturalism within its broader intellectual tradition.
With two explicitly noted exceptions, I have read all the books presented here. This library is intended to evolve and expand over time.
Levels of difficulty
★ Accessible: requires no specialised background in the field.
★★ Intermediate: more technical or philosophical, but still approachable with time and attention.
★★★ Advanced: assumes some familiarity with philosophy, science, or specialised debates.
These ratings are, of course, only approximate. Much depends on each reader’s background, reading habits, and interests.
Understanding Naturalism
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Sean Carroll — The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
Level: ★
Sean Carroll offers a broad introduction to what he calls “poetic naturalism.” The world is entirely natural and governed by physical processes, but this does not mean that higher levels of description—life, consciousness, values, or persons—are unreal or meaningless.
This is probably one of the best entry points in the library. The book shows how a scientific worldview can recognise the reality and usefulness of multiple levels of explanation without introducing any supernatural discontinuity into the world.
Why read it: for an accessible, contemporary, and non-eliminativist account of naturalism.
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David Papineau — Philosophical Naturalism
Level: ★★★
David Papineau develops a systematic account of philosophical naturalism. Among other subjects, he examines physicalism, mental causation, reduction, and the relationship between philosophy and the sciences.
The book is considerably more academic than The Big Picture. Rather than merely presenting a general worldview, it sets out the philosophical arguments that support naturalism and physicalism.
Why read it: for a rigorous philosophical defence of contemporary naturalism.
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Andrew Melnyk — A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism
Level: ★★★
Andrew Melnyk offers a precise and ambitious formulation of physicalism. He seeks to determine exactly what it means to claim that everything that exists is physical or entirely dependent upon the physical.
The book is particularly useful for moving beyond vague formulations of materialism. It also shows that physicalism need not deny the existence of biological, psychological, or social phenomena, but must instead explain their place within a physically constituted world.
Why read it: to understand what a physicalist thesis can genuinely claim when formulated with precision.
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James Ladyman and Don Ross — Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized
Level: ★★★
Ladyman and Ross propose a metaphysics deeply informed by contemporary science. They criticise much of traditional analytic metaphysics, which they regard as excessively detached from physics and the other sciences.
In particular, they defend a form of structural realism according to which the structures and relations disclosed by science are more fundamental than individual objects conceived as small, self-contained substances.
Why read it: to discover a radical attempt to reconstruct metaphysics from the sciences rather than from ordinary intuitions.
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Bertrand Russell — The Analysis of Matter
Level: ★★★
Published in 1927, this book represents an important stage in the history of naturalism and structural realism. Russell examines what physics genuinely allows us to know about matter and explores the relationship between the structure of the physical world and the contents of experience.
Some parts are naturally dated from a scientific perspective, but the philosophical problems remain fundamental: what do we know about physical reality beyond its relations and structure? How should physics and perception be brought together?
Why read it: to understand one of the historical sources of structuralism and of the contemporary naturalist tradition within which this blog is situated.
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Evolution, Human Nature, and Culture
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Richard Dawkins — The Selfish Gene
Level: ★
Dawkins presents evolution from the perspective of the gene as a central unit of natural selection. The famous phrase “selfish gene” does not mean that organisms are necessarily selfish. It refers instead to a way of explaining the spread of genes in terms of their effects on their own replication.
The book sheds light on altruism, cooperation, conflict between organisms, and relationships among relatives.
Why read it: to understand the explanatory power of natural selection and the distinction between the interests of genes, organisms, and groups.
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Richard Dawkins — The Blind Watchmaker
Level: ★
This book responds to the idea that the complexity and apparent purposiveness of living beings require the intervention of a designer. Dawkins shows how natural selection can gradually produce extraordinarily complex structures without any prior plan.
The book is an excellent introduction to the cumulative logic of evolution.
Why read it: to understand how an unintelligent process can produce the appearance of design.
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Daniel Dennett — Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Level: ★★
Dennett examines the philosophical consequences of Darwinian theory. In his view, natural selection is an extraordinarily powerful idea: a mechanical, blind, and purposeless process can explain the emergence of structures that appear to have been designed for a purpose.
The book extends far beyond biology. It discusses the mind, culture, the human sciences, and the philosophical resistance provoked by Darwinism.
Why read it: to appreciate the philosophical reach of evolutionary theory and its importance in the formation of a naturalistic worldview.
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Steve Stewart-Williams — The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
Level: ★
Steve Stewart-Williams offers a wide-ranging synthesis of the evolution of the human mind and culture. He examines how natural selection shaped our psychological dispositions, but also how ideas, norms, and cultural practices evolve and interact with our biological inheritance.
The book presents a thoroughly naturalistic approach to human beings while avoiding the reduction of every behaviour to a simple adaptation. It discusses cooperation, altruism, morality, relations between the sexes, and cultural evolution.
Why read it: for a clear and wide-ranging account of how evolution can illuminate both the human mind and culture.
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Steven Pinker — How the Mind Works
Level: ★★
Steven Pinker provides an ambitious account of the human mind drawing on cognitive science and evolutionary theory. He defends the idea that the mind can be understood as a collection of information-processing mechanisms shaped, at least in part, by natural selection.
The book covers a broad range of subjects: perception, reasoning, emotions, social relations, art, humour, and religion. Its ambition and the sometimes speculative character of some of its proposals have generated considerable debate, but it remains a major presentation of the evolutionary psychology research programme.
Why read it: to discover an ambitious attempt to explain the architecture of the human mind through cognitive science and evolution.
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Steven Pinker — The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Level: ★★
Pinker criticises three conceptions that have strongly influenced modern thought: the mind as a blank slate, the naturally innocent human being corrupted by society, and the idea of a mind independent of the body.
He defends the existence of a biologically constituted human nature without concluding that our behaviour is rigid, inevitable, or morally justified. One of the book’s main virtues is precisely its distinction between the scientific explanation of behaviour and its moral or political justification.
Why read it: to understand why recognising human nature entails neither simplistic determinism nor moral conservatism.
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Joseph Henrich — The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
Level: ★★
Joseph Henrich argues that the evolutionary success of our species does not primarily rest on exceptional individual intelligence. It depends above all on our ability to learn from others, select social models, and accumulate knowledge across generations.
Culture is therefore not simply added to an already constituted biological nature. Cultural practices alter the selection pressures acting on human populations, while our biological dispositions in turn influence the forms that cultural transmission can take. Human evolution must consequently be understood as a process of gene–culture coevolution.
Why read it: to understand how cumulative cultural evolution and gene–culture coevolution transformed the human species.
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Dan Sperber — Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach
Level: ★★★
Dan Sperber develops a naturalistic approach to culture based on what he calls an “epidemiology of representations.” Ideas are not simply copied unchanged from one mind to another: they are interpreted, reconstructed, and transformed whenever they are transmitted.
The aim is to explain why some representations spread and persist within a population while others disappear. Their diffusion depends both on the psychological properties of the human mind and on the social and material conditions through which representations circulate.
The book also offers an alternative to overly literal conceptions of culture as a collection of “memes” replicating in the manner of genes. It connects anthropology with cognitive science by investigating the individual mechanisms that make collective cultural phenomena possible.
Why read it: to discover one of the most important programmes for a cognitive and naturalistic explanation of culture.
Personal note: I have not yet read this book. Its importance and its close connection with the orientation of this library nevertheless fully justify its inclusion.
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Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber — The Enigma of Reason
Level: ★★
Mercier and Sperber propose an interactionist theory of reason. According to them, human reasoning did not evolve primarily to enable isolated individuals to arrive spontaneously at the truth, but to produce, assess, and exchange arguments in social contexts.
This approach helps explain both our remarkable argumentative abilities and the many biases affecting individual reasoning. Under certain conditions, a faculty that performs poorly in isolation becomes far more effective when embedded in critical discussion.
Why read it: to understand reason as a natural, social, and evolved capacity rather than as an abstract faculty detached from our biological and cultural history.
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Physics and the Scientific Picture of the World
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Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands — The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Level: ★★ to ★★★
The Feynman Lectures provide a wide-ranging introduction to physics, from mechanics and electromagnetism to quantum mechanics. Their value lies not only in their technical content, but also in the way Feynman seeks to make physical principles intelligible.
These are not necessarily books to be read from beginning to end. They can also be approached thematically and revisited regularly.
Why read them: to develop a deep conceptual understanding of physics and encounter an exceptionally clear way of reasoning scientifically.
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Sean Carroll — The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Volume 1: Space, Time, and Motion
Level: ★★
Carroll aims to present the major ideas of modern physics without removing mathematics altogether. He gradually introduces the concepts needed to understand classical mechanics, spacetime, and relativity.
The book occupies an interesting middle ground between purely verbal popular science and a university textbook. It requires genuine effort, but the equations are explained rather than merely displayed.
Why read it: to bridge the gap between general popular science and a more formal understanding of physics.
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Sean Carroll — The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Volume 2: Quanta and Fields
Level: ★★ to ★★★
Sean Carroll continues his project of presenting modern physics without eliminating its mathematical content. This second volume discusses quantum mechanics, fields, symmetries, and the principal concepts leading to quantum field theory.
Like the first volume, it lies between traditional popular science and a university textbook. It is nevertheless more demanding because of the nature of the subjects it addresses.
Why read it: to acquire a conceptual and mathematical understanding of quantum fields and move one step closer to contemporary theoretical physics.
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Sean Carroll — Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
Level: ★★
Carroll defends the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, often called the many-worlds interpretation. On this view, the evolution of the wave function always remains unitary: there is no need to introduce a special collapse during measurement.
The book presents the foundations of quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, decoherence, and the metaphysical implications of the Everettian interpretation.
Why read it: to discover an accessible and ambitious defence of a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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David Wallace — The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation
Level: ★★★
David Wallace offers one of the most developed philosophical defences of the Everett interpretation. He explains how a structure of relatively autonomous branches can emerge from quantum dynamics through decoherence. He also examines the difficult question of probability in a theory in which the various possible outcomes are all realised.
The book is considerably more technical than Sean Carroll’s. It is intended mainly for readers already familiar with quantum mechanics and the philosophy of physics.
Why read it: to engage with one of the most rigorous philosophical formulations of the Everett interpretation.
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Consciousness and Mind
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Daniel Dennett — Consciousness Explained
Level: ★★
Dennett criticises the idea that there is a single centre in the brain where all information is gathered and presented to an inner observer. In its place, he proposes his “multiple drafts” model, in which conscious contents result from numerous parallel processes.
The title is deliberately provocative. The book does not claim to solve every neuroscientific problem, but seeks to transform the way we formulate the problem of consciousness by removing several misleading intuitions.
Why read it: to discover a functionalist, deflationary, and thoroughly naturalistic approach to consciousness.
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David Papineau — Thinking about Consciousness
Level: ★★★
Papineau defends a form of physicalism while taking seriously the impression that there is a gulf between physical descriptions of the brain and conscious experience.
He explains this impression in part through the distinctive way in which we think about our experiences. We can refer to the same mental state through a physical concept or a phenomenal concept without immediately recognising that both concepts pick out the same state.
Why read it: to understand how a physicalist can acknowledge the force of the problem of consciousness without concluding that consciousness lies beyond the physical world.
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François Kammerer — Consciousness and Matter: A Materialist Solution to the Problem of Conscious Experience
Level: ★★★
François Kammerer examines the difficulties that conscious experience appears to pose for materialism. He presents the main physicalist strategies before defending a form of illusionism: what needs to be explained is not the existence of irreducible phenomenal properties, but our remarkably persistent conviction that such properties exist.
The book offers a French-language introduction to contemporary debates about qualia, the explanatory gap, and the different materialist responses to the problem of consciousness.
Why read it: for an in-depth philosophical defence of illusionism and an explanation of how this position seeks to solve the problem of conscious experience.
Personal note: I have not yet read this book, but it provides a natural introduction to François Kammerer’s work and usefully complements the English-language book presented below.
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François Kammerer — House of Mirrors: The Illusion of Phenomenal Consciousness
Available free of charge in English as a PDF.
Level: ★★★
In this more recent book, Kammerer offers a detailed and systematic defence of illusionism. He does not deny the existence of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, or pains. Rather, he denies that these states possess the intrinsic and irreducible phenomenal properties we spontaneously attribute to them.
His main aim is to explain why our conviction that phenomenal consciousness exists is so powerful and so difficult to abandon. One of the book’s central challenges is therefore to explain not only the phenomenal illusion itself, but also the intuitive resistance provoked by its denial.
Why read it: to discover one of the most developed defences of contemporary illusionism and understand how this position seeks to explain our belief in irreducible phenomenal properties.
Access: the complete book can be read and downloaded free of charge as an English-language PDF from the author’s website.
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Religion: Philosophical Criticism and Naturalistic Explanation
David Hume — Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Level: ★★
In dialogue form, Hume examines the principal arguments for the existence of God, especially the argument from the apparent order of the world. He highlights the difficulties that arise when we attempt to infer the attributes of a creator from the observable universe.
The dialogical format allows Hume to confront several positions without directly presenting a simplified doctrine of his own.
Why read it: to discover one of the most subtle classical critiques of natural theology.
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David Hume — The Natural History of Religion
Level: ★★
Here, Hume is no longer primarily concerned with whether religious beliefs are true, but with explaining how they arise and change. He places particular emphasis on fear, uncertainty, anthropomorphism, and the human tendency to attribute intentions to events.
The book thus anticipates some contemporary approaches in the cognitive science of religion.
Why read it: to discover one of the earliest major attempts to explain religious belief naturalistically.
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David Hume — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Level: ★★
This work is a major introduction to Hume’s philosophy. It discusses causation, induction, the limits of human knowledge, and the status of testimony concerning miracles.
The critique of miracles does not rest merely on their extraordinary character. It requires us to compare the probability that a miracle occurred with the probability that the testimony is mistaken, exaggerated, or deceptive.
Why read it: to understand the epistemological foundations of empiricism and of the naturalistic critique of the supernatural.
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Stewart Elliott Guthrie — Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
Level: ★★
Guthrie argues that religion partly rests on a general tendency to interpret ambiguous phenomena as manifestations of intentional agents. From an adaptive perspective, falsely detecting an agent is often less costly than failing to detect one when it is genuinely present.
Religion then appears as an extension of ordinary mechanisms of perception and interpretation.
Why read it: to understand the role of anthropomorphism and agent detection in the formation of religious representations.
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Pascal Boyer — Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Level: ★★
Pascal Boyer draws on anthropology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theory to explain why some religious representations are transmitted more successfully than others.
Religious beliefs are not the product of a single need or specialised faculty. Rather, they exploit several ordinary cognitive mechanisms: the understanding of intentions, memory, social reasoning, and the representation of living beings.
Why read it: to discover one of the principal syntheses in the cognitive science of religion.
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Daniel Dennett — Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Level: ★
Dennett proposes that religions should be studied as natural phenomena open to scientific analysis. He examines how they arise, spread, change, and maintain themselves within human societies.
The purpose is not merely to criticise the truth of religious doctrines, but to understand how religions function and why they exert such influence.
Why read it: for an accessible introduction to the naturalistic programme of studying religion scientifically.
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John L. Mackie — The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God
Level: ★★★
Mackie systematically examines the principal philosophical arguments for the existence of God: the ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, as well as arguments based on religious experience.
He also discusses the problem of evil and the various attempts to reconcile the existence of suffering with that of a perfectly good and omnipotent God.
Why read it: for a rigorous and critical philosophical analysis of classical theism.
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Graham Oppy — Naturalism and Religion: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation
Level: ★★★
Graham Oppy compares naturalism with the major religious worldviews by treating them as competing comprehensive theories. Rather than merely refuting isolated arguments, he asks which overall conception of reality offers the best combination of simplicity, coherence, and explanatory power.
His approach is particularly useful for avoiding the presentation of the debate between naturalism and religion as a simple opposition between science and faith.
Why read it: to discover one of the most sophisticated contemporary philosophical defences of naturalism against religious worldviews.
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Some Possible Reading Paths
There is, of course, no need to read these books in the order in which they appear here.
For a first introduction to naturalism, I would recommend beginning with The Big Picture, followed by either The Blind Watchmaker or Breaking the Spell, depending on the reader’s interests.
To explore evolution, human nature, and culture, an initial path might include The Selfish Gene, The Ape That Understood the Universe, and The Secret of Our Success. This could then be followed by Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, The Blank Slate, Explaining Culture, and The Enigma of Reason.
To develop a deeper understanding of the physical picture of the world, one might begin with selected chapters from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, then continue with the two volumes of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe and Something Deeply Hidden. The Emergent Multiverse represents a much more demanding further step.
To explore consciousness and the mind, one possible route would be to begin with Consciousness Explained, then read Thinking about Consciousness, before moving on to François Kammerer’s two books. These authors defend positions that are close in some respects, but sufficiently different to reveal several important tensions within contemporary naturalistic approaches to consciousness.
Finally, for the philosophy of religion, Hume’s works provide an excellent starting point. They can be followed by Guthrie, Boyer, and Dennett for naturalistic explanations of religion, and then by Mackie and Oppy for the philosophical analysis of theism.
This selection is provisional. New books, along with more detailed discussions of some of the works already listed, will be added gradually.