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Classic papers every analytic philosopher should read? (and have they changed?)

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

What are some classic papers that every analytic philosopher should read, regardless of their specific area? I mean, for example, Frege’s “On Sense and Reference” and Russell’s “On Denoting” seem like papers one should have read even if one does not work in philosophy of language. If a metaphysics/epistemology professor had never read them, it might seem a little surprising. What other papers have a similar status?

I also have a related question. Some papers seem to have been canonical in the past, but are no longer regarded as required reading for everyone. For example, one of my professors told me that in his generation, everyone read Davidson, but for my generation this no longer seems necessary. Do people agree with this? And are there other texts that have this kind of status?

Thoughts from readers?

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18 responses to “Classic papers every analytic philosopher should read? (and have they changed?)”

  1. Anonymous

    Grice, “Logic and Conversation”

    Kripke, Naming and Necessity

    Strawson, “On Referring” (esp. if one is going to read Russell’s “On Denoting”)

    Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”

    Goldman, “What is Justified Belief?”

    Maybe also: Lewis, “Causation” or “New Work for a Theory of Universals” or parts of *On the Plurality of Worlds*

    Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?”

    Reply
  2. Heather W. Hoyt

    I don’t think there are any papers that ever analytic philosopher needs to read. I would worry that any list of classical papers will focus on papers by white males, reinforce a narrow viewpoint, and exclude voices that are excellent but have been undervalued.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I do not think it would be worrisome if the list included mostly white male authors. But on that note: have you got any classics in mind that are only (or mostly) considered canonical because they were authored by white males? Any that ought to be demoted?

      Even so, such a list would doubtless include several (e.g.) female philosophers. There are many women who have been extremely influential in analytic philosophy. To name a few: Anscombe, Murdoch, Korsgaard, Foot, Thomson, Thomasson, Rudder Baker, L.A. Paul, Fricker, Haslanger, etc. Some of these names are even in this thread.

      Reply
    2. NotAWhiteMale

      Idk, I feel like if you read On Denoting, or Sense and Reference, or Freedom and Resentment, or Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives, to absorb their “viewpoints” and “voices”, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what analytic philosophy is or ought to be.

      Reply
  3. Chris

    MIT has a fairly “stereotypical analytic” program – one of the few where the faculty seem to agree on a two term sequence of classics for PhD students . (I say this without agreeing or disagreeing with their list- though my own view is that it is good to have some departments like this and some that are not)
    https://opencw.aprende.org/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-400-proseminar-in-philosophy-i-fall-2013/Syllabus/

    And for term two
    https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/151762/24-401-spring-2020/contents/syllabus-and-calendar/index.htm

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    If there is such a list, I believe it would probably have philosophy of language papers/works such as “On Denoting”, “Naming and Necessity”, etc. Other classics such as “Two Dogmas” and “On What There Is” depend upon your research. Someone who’s not working with language or metaphysics may advance in their research without ever reading them (though it would be useful to read them sometime).

    Reply
  5. dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd

    Even if you’re not in value theory, I think you probably should have read these:

    Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect
    Bernard Williams, Moral Luck
    Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Just to give an example of how little agreement there is on canon…

      If you asked me to list canonical articles on the ethics of abortion, the Foot article would not be in my top five (and I work extensively on this topic). There is just so much good, important work out there on most subjects. So, it is really hard to settle on a small subset that is truly canonical work. And it is even harder to make the case that one MUST read these specific canonical works.

      (I am thinking now that you might have recommended the Foot article for the double effect aspects, rather than the abortion aspects. If so, my comment is less relevant.)

      Reply
  6. Anonymous

    Philosophy is such a huge and diverse field, there is no such thing as “required reading.” Read what interests you, and what helps you understand things. Sometimes that involves looking back at older work in your subfield, sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t confuse scholarship with identity, as if someone can’t be a real philosopher (or analytic philosopher, or whatever) without having read specific things. No gatekeeping! Let a thousand gardens bloom! Read widely!

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    Every analytic philosopher should read everything I’ve ever written, obviously!

    Reply
  8. Daniel

    It’s more important to read stuff in the fields adjacent to yours than to read famous philosophy just for the sake of reading famous philosophy, especially if you are going to be so parochial as to narrow philosophy down to analytic philosophy specifically.

    (I realize the question does not specify analytic philosophy only, but that is how most people are answering it. If the question is “what philosophy should every philosopher read, if we are not limiting ourselves just to analytic philosophy” then the list will be too long for anyone to read, even if they avoid reading other stuff they have to read for their own research. And of course nobody can avoid reading what they must read for their own research!)

    So, for instance, if you do social and political philosophy, it’s more important to read some political science, sociology, etc. If you do philosophy of mind, it’s more important to read some neuroscience etc. My knowing about the essential indexical or having read Carnap’s Aufbau has done little for me. The political science etc. that I’ve read has been very helpful.

    That’s not to say it’s pointless to have a broad base in philosophy. My answer to the question is that it’s more important to read stuff in adjacent fields, not that it’s completely unimportant to read stuff in philosophy. It’s good to read broadly in graduate school and it’s good to keep up that reading sporadically. But there’s no list of papers or works that everyone should read, and people who are too insistent about something being a must-read are being too close-minded. People should read what they are interested in reading. If it’s a famous and influential work you might find it more rewarding, but maybe not! Sometimes reading an unknown, entirely forgotten paper will be much more rewarding than reading something everyone else says you should read.

    I do however agree with Anonymous above that everyone should read all of my stuff.

    Reply
  9. dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd

    I think many on this thread are missing the question. Nobody is suggesting people should be required to read these classics, or excluded in some way if they don’t, or that failing to do so will cause them harm or is worthy of disapproval. Not even close. It’s simply starting with the observation that analytic philosophy is — largely, roughly, in the family of — an academic field. Like many others. And fields have classics — whether or not they should — they really do. They have papers that are, as the OP says, “canonical,” something we’d find “surprising” to learn a colleague didn’t read. They have important, memorable papers that shifted the paradigm in some way or another, and that many seem to know and refer to often, even when they’re in a different area from that of the classic. To really know and understand the field, then, it would be helpful to have read these papers. The OP is asking the straightforward and uncontroversial question: what are they for the field of analytic philosophy?

    Whether they should be, or whether there should be any at all, are entirely different questions.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I like the way you think, but don’t agree with your position. “And fields have classics — whether or not they should — they really do.” Do they really? Literature (critics) used to have the classics on the pedestal. But even that, these days no one would find any particular book not read by a serious student of literature “surprising” as you put it. I, for one, don’t find reading any of the classic papers listed in this thread helpful for me, having been in the field for 15 years.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        What about Plato’s Republic or Descartes’ Meditations, Zhuangzi, etc? Surely philosophy does have classics. They don’t have to be put “on a pedestal” whatever that means.

        To answer the question about papers no longer canonical in a subfield, here is an example:
        Gettier’s paper used to be canonical for those who work on contemporary epistemology; now I’d say Williamson is more standard. For social epistemology, I think Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice and Charles Mills (“White Ignorance”) are now cannonical. Sure, you can do philosophy without reading these (including Plato!) but that doesn’t mean they are not cannonical within the relevant subfield, if you work on the relevant topics. No one is saying people should be required to read Fricker or Mills (or Plato) – only that these are cannonical within a certain subfield.

  10. Genre Analysis

    The question should be reframed because it is not so much about having read certain papers but having read a wide array of papers to sample the ways analytic philosophy can be done: how many papers do you need to read carefully to be able to understand and apply the genre? Or what are the main archetypes (e.g., counter-example paper, explicit P1, … Pn C argument, novel position paper, etc.) of philosophy papers that need to be read?

    Reply
  11. Charles Pigden

    Here’s an adapted post from an earlier thread

    I am going to recommend books rather than articles., though the books refer to some of the articles that have already been listed. I shall assume that there are two distinct audiences with an interest in this question: graduate students students (or junior professors) interested in self-education and more senior professors interested in educating their graduate students. Let’s assume that you (or your students) had (or have had) a good undergraduate education but that from the philosophical point of view it was a little patchy. You want to be (or you want each of your students to be) a wide-ranging philosopher who can turn up to a great many papers, can understand roughly what is going on, and can usually ask an intelligent question. You also want to be (or want your students to be) the sort of person who can slot in to small-to-medium department where breadth is at a premium. What should you read and/or recommend?

    Well if you are within the broadly analytic tradition, I strongly recommend Scott Soames two books: Philosophical Analysis the Twentieth Century vol 1 The Dawn of Analysis and vol.2, The Age of Meaning.  (his two later books collectively titled The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, are also very good but a bit too advanced for either a proseminar course or the early stages of graduate self-education). These are really excellent books despite a certain tendency to what specialists in the area (such as myself ) might condemn as over-simplification and a rather cavalier disregard for historical detail. On a great many issues he strikes me as simply correct, and when he isn’t the clarity of his style enables you to see where he goes wrong. Supplement these two volumes with Potter’s The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930. In some ways this is even better.  Potter is equally rigorous , a more careful historian and a more attractive writer, but he does not have 
`Soames’s range or depth. Use these books as your guides/set texts, dipping into the authors they discuss as your specific interests or the interests of you class dictate. There are important philosophers they neglect, Potter because of his temporal focus, and Soames for reasons that are not clear to me. Of these the most important, in my view, is Hilary Putnam. But this problem can be solved by helping yourself/directing your class to the first two volumes of Putnam’s Collected Papers, Mathematics, Matter and Method, and  Mind. Language and Reality. These collections contain what in view are some absolute classic must-read (and eminently readable) articles, and I am so grateful to my Cambridge supervisors for introducing me to them all those years ago.

    Now I do have further nits to pick with Soames. He does not take the story much beyond 1980 and even within that time-frame, there are other philosophers besides Putnam that he conspicuously neglects. To begin with (and this is perhaps a regional gripe from a philosopher who has spent his entire post-graduation career in Australia and New Zealand) Australasian philosophers hardly get a look-in. No Jack Smart, hardly any David Armstrong, hardly any Arthur Prior, no Peter Singer, a short footnote on Frank Jackson and no John Mackie. Less surprisingly, there is nothing about such non-main-stream philosophers as Richard Routley/Sylvan and Val Routley/Plumwood. Even in the seventies Australasian style physicalism (including the mind-brain identity thesis and its successors) was big intellectual business, and big intellectual business even at Cambridge where I was an undergraduate. Mackie’s error theory was big news in meta-ethics, and Peter Singer’s brand of utilitarianism was making a splash in normative ethics. So all these philosophers are well-within Soames’s time-frame and it is a bit unfortunate that they don’t get talked about. Another philosopher that Soames neglects is Dummett. Now in my view Dummett is a ridiculously overrated philosopher whose system was obviously broken-backed from the start (which is not to say that he does not sometimes have useful insights). But even so he was hugely influential, from 1959 onwards, and there ought to be to be a bit more about him. Two other trends that in my view Soames neglects are the Popperian tradition in the philosophy of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend) and the neo-Aristotelian tradition in ethics and meta-ethics (Anscombe, Geach and Foot). It is true that Geach gets discussed, but chiefly in his persona as a citric of Hare and non-cognitivism in general. There isn’t much about the positive program (though there is the problem that Foot, Geach and Anscombe were a diverse and idiosyncratic bunch despite the fact that Geach and Anscombe were married and that Foot and Anscombe were close personal friends.)

    Despite these gripes and caveats, I do think that young philosophers in the analytic tradition could do themselves a lot of good by reading Soames’ and Potter’s books. Furthermore this would not be a particularly onerous reading project for somebody doing a PhD, since PhDs, whether thesis-only or not, have a three-year minimum which is almost always exceeded. Plenty of time to read, learn and inwardly digest these books as well as keeping up with your own stuff and reading around in adjacent areas of enquiry – which as ‘Daniel’ rightly notes is a Good Thing to Do. .

    However, I differ slightly from ‘Daniel’ in thinking that it is a good idea to give yourself a broad education in the history of the philosophy, especially its recent history. (The difference is slight since he is fan of wide reading in general.) If you know a bit about diverse areas of philosophy, including areas not obviously relevant to your niche (and/or niches) you can sometimes see connections that a niche-confined philosopher is likely to miss, even if that philosopher takes care to keep up with adjacent areas of enquiry. For example, I have a research specialty in the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Following Daniel’s precepts I try to maintain a modest level of literacy in adjacent subjects such a social psychology, political sociology, history and economics, especially behavioural economics. But I have a recent paper in which I use ideas derived from the philosophy of logic, specifically inferentialism and Prior’s famous critique thereof, to argue that a great deal of social scientific research into conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists is not intellectually respectable. I have got a paper that uses Luther ’s writings on free will to criticise the meta-ethics of R.M Hare. And I have paper that uses Godwin on Political Justice (from the 1790s) to critique Searle on No-Ought-From-Is (from the 1950s and 1960s). I could go on. And of course, people have been using considerations derived from the philosophy of logic and the philosophy science to illuminate social and political issues since at least the days of Popper, if not the days of John Stuart Mill. (We are always banging on about Lakatos in the conspiracy theory literature.) So although knowing about Carnap’s Aufbau or the essential indexical may not have done Daniel much good in *his* persona as a socio-political philosopher, knowing about similarly abstract topics has been highly useful to me in *my* capacity as a socio-political philosopher. (So too has knowing a fair bit about the history of philosophy generally been useful to me in my other capacities, including my capacity as a meta-ethicist.)

    The point is that having a broad knowledge of the history of philosophy can make you more effective as a researcher in your chosen research niches by enabling you to to make useful niche-crossing connections. It can also make you more useful – and therefore more saleable – as a colleague, especially in small-to-medium departments in which it is important for us to be able talk to each other. There are no guarantees, of course, but reading some such books as Soames and Potter can (help) give you the necessary knowledge.

    Two further points and a meta-point.

    1) a) A philosopher who can now be safely neglected is R.M Hare though he would once have been considered a must-read is R.M.Hare. When I began my PhD in 1980, Hare was the bee’s knees and the cats pyjamas. Since I thought he was importantly wrong I devoted hundreds of pages of my thesis to refuting him. But his star fell very quickly. By the time I was approaching completion in 1985 I had begun to feel that he wasn’t worth the effort. Sure, he was wrong, but there weren’t enough people who thought he was right to make him worth the effort of a detailed refutation. Most of those pages were junked.

    b) Now I am not so certain about this, I am inclined to think that Davidson is no longer a must-read or even a must-know-about. Some of his basic ideas seem to me simply silly and by now the Davidsonic Boom has gone bust.

    2) dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd’s list of canonical tests – Philippa Foot, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’ Bernard Williams, ‘Moral Luck’ and Peter Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’ seems to me not just bizarre but borderline bonkers. And I say this as a fellow-labourer in the value-theoretic vineyard.

    3) Meta-point. The fact that dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd and I differ so widely about this, is evidence of how wildly subjective such judgements tend to be.

    Reply
  12. Michel

    Late to the party, but I’ll chip in to say that, for aesthetics, I think it would be nice if everyone in analytic philosophy had read Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” and Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art”.

    Nochlin was an art historian, but she was a philosophy undergrad, and that paper is not just enormously art historically important, it targets and dismantles the myth of genius (which is so prevalent in philosophy), and pairs nicely with modern social ontology. It’s great. As for the Walton, well, I think its tentacles are everywhere, and everyone can get something out of it.

    More generally, I would like everyone in philosophy, whether analytic or continental, to have a broad base in the history of philosophy.

    As for the standard “classics”… Honestly, I never got much out of many of them. Shrug.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      These are both such good suggestions. I think the Nochlin paper gives a great example of fusing historical analysis and philosophy. It also, like the best philosophy, helps you see how something complicated hangs together and raises questions you might never have thought about. It’s also useful for thinking about the history of philosophy, not just the history of art.

      Reply

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