The philosophy books of 2026 in three words: consciousness, prophecy, artificial state

There are two ways of taking stock of a year in philosophy publishing. Read the books one by one — or look at which words keep coming back.

In 2026 three words keep coming back: consciousness, prophecy, artificial state.

The selection below is not a list of bestsellers. It has been made on three criteria: academic weight, currency, and the capacity to start an argument.

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1. Michael Pollan — A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness#

Penguin Press · 24 February 2026

Pollan's tenth book, and the most unexpected entry in the field.

Known for his books on food and plants, Pollan turns this time to consciousness — and his method owes less to a work of philosophy than to a traveller's account of exploration.

The book is built as a sequence of questions taking in ever more complicated layers of experience. Pollan puts the question of consciousness from scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic perspectives at once.

The list of people he meets shows the reach of the thing: "plant neurobiologists" hunting for the first spark of consciousness in plants; scientists trying to engineer emotion into artificial intelligence; psychologists and novelists trying to catch the stream of consciousness as it is lived.

The book entered the New York Times bestseller list and was among the finalists for the Kirkus Prize.

Why it matters: Schwitzgebel's scepticism and Chalmers's hard problem, both covered here this week, represent the academic argument. Pollan's book is the same problem translated into public language. Read together, the two show how a philosophical problem becomes a public matter.

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2. Carissa Véliz — Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI#

Doubleday · 21 April 2026 (United Kingdom: Swift Press, 7 May)

Carissa Véliz, a philosopher at Oxford, was known for Privacy Is Power, her book on privacy. The new one aims at a larger target.

The central thesis is in the book's strongest sentence: the real promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future but power over other people.

Véliz follows the business of prediction from the oracles of ancient Greece to modern algorithms. Drawing on examples from medicine, climate, technology and society, she arrives at four conclusions:

• Predictions about people tend to fulfil themselves.
• More data is no guarantee of a better outcome.
• Artificial intelligence is likelier to increase risk than to reduce it.
• A free and resilient society needs not more prediction but better preparation.

The first of these is philosophically the most interesting. A prediction made about a person — from a credit score to a risk of offending, from job performance to a health forecast — changes how that person is treated; the treatment changes the behaviour; and the changed behaviour "confirms" the prediction.

Prediction, in short, does not foresee the future. It makes it.

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3. Jill Lepore — The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State#

25 August 2026

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, treats artificial intelligence not as a technology but as a political force transforming the very idea of the state and of democracy.

The picture she draws is a heavy one: political campaigns reduced to algorithms mining attention; multinational firms policing public debate; the age of the liberal nation-state coming to an end, its place taken by government by artificial intelligence.

And the most striking notion of all: power is sustained by mystification — machines are said to know what human beings cannot.

The formulation matters. On Lepore's account the political power of artificial intelligence comes not from its actually knowing better but from its being believed to know better. The continuity between the oracle and the algorithm lies exactly there — and it speaks directly to Véliz's book.

Lepore insists that she has not written a pessimistic book: what has been done destructively can be undone, and by illuminating the origins of the Artificial State we can imagine a different future.

Connections: read alongside Rob Gallagher's work on autonomy and automation and Judith Butler's critique of democracy, both covered here this week, the political-philosophy agenda of 2026 comes into focus.

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Also on our list#

Eric Schwitzgebel — AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview (Cambridge Elements, August 2026). A hundred-page intervention arguing that consciousness in artificial intelligence is, in the near term, neither plainly impossible nor plainly inevitable. Our full piece.

Geoff Keeling & Winnie Street — Emerging Questions in AI Welfare (Cambridge Elements, June 2026). Can an artificial intelligence system have a welfare, and if it can, what should we do about it? Our full piece.

Amy Olberding — Kill All The Chickens (Polity, 2026). A lyrical mosaic on grief, memory and class from a Confucian ethicist. Our full piece.

Iulia Nistor — horror cinema and philosophy (transcript Verlag, May 2026). From catharsis to the abject: a philosophical framework for the horror genre. Our full piece.

David Bather Woods — Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist (University of Chicago Press). A philosophical biography that reassesses Schopenhauer's pessimism in the light of his experience; the APA blog introduced it in June this year. Today's piece on Schopenhauer draws on this reading too.

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The picture that emerges#

These books were all written in the same year, and in ignorance of one another. Yet all three are looking into the same gap.

Pollan asks: what is experience?

Véliz asks: who is empowered by claims about the future?

Lepore asks: where has the authority to decide gone?

Put the three questions together and one question comes out — the question underlying every piece we have run this week:

What is the difference between being a thinking creature and being an object about which decisions are made?

A note on Turkish publishing: no Turkish translation of any of these books has yet been announced. Pollan's earlier books found a wide readership in Turkish, and A World Appears can be expected to attract similar interest.