Suggested readings for PhD students?

Earlier this month, at the usually highly admirable The Philosopher’s Stone, Robert Paul Wolff posted a list of “twenty-five books by great philosophers that every grad student should read by the time he or she gets the PhD”. The list was remarkably well received — there were quibbles, of course, about what should be on it, but the principle of the thing seemed well supported.

Well, after a forty year career of sorts in philosophy, as far as I can recall I’ve read two of the listed books.

Should I feel abashed? Inadequate? Letting the side down? Not at all. The suggestion that every philosopher (let alone every PhD student) should work through that list is of course complete tosh.

Or at least, it is if “read” means any more than dip into a few interesting/famous passages, and getting some second-hand outlines from quick introductions.

I’m all for students having, say, a fifty lecture course giving the headline news about Wolff’s listed books — or the do-it-yourself equivalent of reading the relevant Stanford Encyclopedia article (or an equivalent) every fortnight for a year, interspersed with chasing up a few particular passages for pleasure. That could be quite fun and mildly educational. But anything more, for non-historians, is likely to be not only beyond the call of duty but mostly of no particular use — except for at most two or three books depending on your interests. Sure, a modern ethicist would probably do well to read more of the Nicomachean Ethics (say). And a modern metaphysician might get something out of  struggling with some of Aristotle’s Metaphysics — or might not (I know a world-class metaphysician or two who seem to have managed very well without). But two or three books isn’t twenty five.

I’ve always been struck by these words of the great Cambridge classicist, Francis Cornford, in the preface from his book on Thucydides:

In every age the common interpretation of the world of things is controlled by some scheme of unchallenged and  unsuspected presupposition; and the mind of any individual, however little he may think himself to be in sympathy  with his contemporaries, is not an insulated compartment,  but more like a pool in one continuous medium — the circumambient atmosphere of his place and time. This element of thought is always, of course, most difficult to detect and  analyse, just because it is a constant factor which underlies all the differential characters of many minds.

That is one central reason why it can be so revealing to seriously engage with one of the Great Dead Philosophers. By working our way into some measure of real understanding of what is going on in their texts, by finding what they take for granted, and the unspoken presumptions which  shape the seeming-oddities of their position, our own unspoken presumptions can be thrown into relief and indeed challenged. It widens our sense of the range of possible approaches and positions. But to get to the point where you can work into a distant intellectual framework in this way takes very considerable amounts of time and effort (and skills and aptitudes that many philosophers don’t have). It’s certainly not something you can do for twenty-five books by long-dead authors while getting on with your the day-job of writing a PhD on some contemporary topic.

So yes: for non-historians, if you find your interests meshing enough with those of some long-dead author, there can be pleasure and instruction to be had from tackling them at first-hand in a moderately serious way. But as for the rest of the Great Dead Philosophers, the sensible course for the PhD student (the course you might actually profit from in some small ways) is to stand on the shoulders of the serious scholars, take in the SEP articles or whatever which will tell you about voyages to those alternative intellectual landscapes, and dip just here and there into (translations of) the original texts: but don’t even begin to try to really read those twenty five books.