My Philosophy Textbook Is on Sale

The Kindle e-book is only $9.99 through December

One of my passions is helping people understand and appreciate philosophy’s role in building a better society. I teach philosophy at a US university, and several years ago, I gave up on the mass-produced introduction to philosophy textbooks.

The offerings from the Big Four educational publishing corporations (Cengage, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and Oxford) are overpriced. I can’t in good conscience ask my students to pay over $100 for a book that costs under $10 to print and ship. Then there’s the reality of the bookstores that contract with schools to steer students toward thinking they have to purchase textbooks from that bookstore. The bookstore adds another 20% or more to the price of the textbooks. It’s criminal, I think.

Worse, the corporate textbooks are continuing to be degraded in their quality of content, full of errors and omissions, and failing adequately to describe the philosophers’ ideas. The corporate textbooks dumb down philosophy and don’t provide a full picture of what philosophers do or how philosophers interact with society. They also fail in placing philosophical questions and exploration in the present day.

I decided to write my own introduction to philosophy textbook that is affordable and grounded in real life…