28 Important Philosophers List the Books That Influenced Them Most During Their College Days

The web site Demasi­a­do Aire recent­ly asked “some of the world’s most impor­tant philoso­phers which three books influ­enced them the most while under­grad­u­ate stu­dents.” And, from what we can tell, they got a good response. 28 influ­en­tial philoso­phers duti­ful­ly jot­ted their lists, and, for at least the past day, Demasi­a­do Aire has been offline, seem­ing­ly over­whelmed by traf­fic. Thanks to the Inter­net Archive’s Way­back Machine, we can recov­er these lists and pro­vide you with a few high­lights. We have added links to the texts cit­ed by the philoso­phers. The free texts have an aster­isk (*) next to them.

Charles Tay­lor (McGill Uni­ver­si­ty):

–Phénoménolo­gie de la Per­cep­tion, Mau­rice Mer­leau-Pon­ty

–The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov*, Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky

–Jalons pour une théolo­gie du Laï­cat, Yves Con­gar

Daniel Den­nett (Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty):

“That’s easy:

–Word and Object, Quine.

–The con­cept of mind*, Gilbert Ryle

–Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein

“I got to study with Quine and Ryle, but Wittgen­stein had died before I encoun­tered his work”.

Alexan­der Nehamas (Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty):

–Apol­o­gy of Socrates*, Pla­to

–Nico­machean Ethics*, Aris­to­tle

–Ethics*, Spin­oza

“Also, I should point out that Nietzsche’s On the Geneal­o­gy of Moral­i­ty* had a huge effect on me when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent and had a for­ma­tive influ­ence on my philo­soph­i­cal devel­op­ment”.

David Chalmers (Aus­tralian Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty):

“I was an under­grad­u­ate stu­dent in math­e­mat­ics rather than phi­los­o­phy, but the answer is”:

–Gödel, Esch­er Bach, Dou­glas Hof­s­tadter

–The Mind’s I, Dou­glas Hof­s­tadter & Daniel Den­nett

–Rea­sons and Per­sons, Derek Parfit

You can view lists by oth­er philoso­phers, includ­ing Alain de Bot­ton, Wendy Brown, Peter Mil­li­can, and more here. The image above comes via by MjYj.

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