These are the following events that have transpired during 1938 concerning the realm or topic of philosophy:

September 2 – B. F. Skinner's ground-breaking book The Behavior of Organisms was first published. Of the 800 copies in the first printing, only 548 had been sold by 1946.^[1]

• John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and Experience and Education
• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
• Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis
• Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics
• Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence
• Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities
• Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
• Charles W. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (novel)
• Alan Turing, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals
• Jean Wahl, Kierkegaardian Studies

• April 11 - Muhammad Shahrur, Syrian thinker and author (died 2019)
• July 8 - Justin Leiber (died 2016)
• July 10 - David Hugh Mellor, English philosopher (died 2020)
• August 3 - Remo Bodei (died 2019)
• November 16 - Robert Nozick (died 2002)

• March 27 - William Stern (born 1871)
• April 26 - Edmund Husserl (born 1859)