The best books about critical thinking

Mary Midgley was in her nineties when she wrote this book, yet it’s alive with ideas and energy – and the insistence that philosophy should be “for” something in the most urgent, practical sense; that it should help us explore such questions as to how to live and to do good. Midgley was both highly scientifically literate and fiercely opposed to the claim that science will ever answer every question. We humans, she believed, are brilliant animals who need to understand our biological heritage as richly as possible if we’re to grapple fruitfully with our planetary future. I can think of few more urgent themes for the present century.

One of the most important aspects of critical thinking is identifying and questioning faulty assumptions, and Invisible Women is one of the most brilliant recent examples I’ve seen of this in action. Criado Perez offers a rich and meticulously researched account of the ways in which women’s experiences, bodies, needs, and histories have been systematically effaced in countless settings; how, for example, the “normal” human measurements used to design everything from car safety features to phone handsets are based on male rather than female bodies. This is a devastatingly eye-opening book and a call to action against complacency of all kinds.

Taleb has written a handful of wonderful books exploring the ways in which human beings tend to systematically misunderstand the world. This was his first, and it’s a fantastic place to begin. As the title suggests, he’s fascinated by the ways in which chance events can seem significant when, in fact, this significance is merely an illusion; how, for example, we can’t resist seeing events in terms of cause and effect even when this is wishful nonsense. Taleb is a risk expert and mathematician – but he’s also a dazzling explainer and fearless provocateur, drawing on history and personal experience to bring statistically rigorous ways of thinking to life. 

This is a slim, passionate, personal book by one of the most significant American educators and activists of the last century. It’s part of her “teaching” trilogy (the other two books cover Community and Freedom) and is founded on the belief that “one could choose to educate for the practice of freedom.” Critical thinking is often treated as an emotionless, logical discipline, but this book shows how it’s rooted in a deep human longing for understanding—and is also vital to informed, equitable democratic participation. Teaching Critical Thinking is a profound testament to the significance of emotionally, politically, and intellectually engaged pedagogy – and why these three things are ultimately inseparable. 

This might be the most famous book written in recent years about thinking – and the ways in which we’re all astonishingly vulnerable to various kinds of bias, distortion, and selectivity in our views of the world. But it’s also a book that offers hope in the sheer care with which it synthesizes a lifetime of thought and research. To be human is to be hasty, flawed, and partial; but it’s also to be part of an ongoing collective negotiation with these limitations. This is a foundational text for embarking upon that negotiation, and one that Nobel laureate Kahneman has put together with a careful mix of clarity and wisdom.