• Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers (originally published in German as Die großen Philosophen, 1957)
• Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (1957)
• Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957)
• B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (1957)
• Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (1957)
• André Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoric Man (1957)
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
• Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957)

Philosophical fiction edit

• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
• Max Frisch, Homo Faber (1957)

• March 20 - Charles Kay Ogden, English linguistic psychologist and polymath (born 1889)
• October 13 - Erich Auerbach, German-born scholar of comparative literature and philologist (born 1892)