The following is adapted from a Word document titled What Every Educated Person Should Know about Philosophy. My dad RandallRDipert created the document in 1998 while he was a philosophy professor at West Point. The document was later available on his web site, where he described it as:
A list of books and articles, concepts, and quotations which I suggest every college graduate should know; also, extended to a graduate who is a philosophy major. A bit grandiose, overreaching, and pompous—but maybe suggestive of something useful.
A well-read undergraduate should ideally have read, or at least be somewhat familiar with, many or most of the works in boldface. The color guide below highlights introductory difficulty: entry paths, next steps, and challenging introductions. Other works round out a suggested reading list for the aspiring philosophy major.
Every philosophy major should grapple with the central debates in philosophy of language, mind, science, aesthetics, mathematics, history, logic, and action theory. Series from Prentice-Hall, Oxford, and others provide approachable overviews of each subdiscipline.
A vocabulary list drawn from E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy with additions I found useful to emphasize.
"It is not possible to step into the same river twice." — Heraclitus
"Nature loves to hide." — Heraclitus
"If cattle, horses, or lions had hands, they would draw the forms of gods like cattle, horses, or lions." — Xenophanes
"Man is the measure of all things." — Protagoras
"Know yourself!" — Delphic maxim (via Socrates)
"The unexamined life is not worth living." — Socrates
"No one does wrong intentionally." — Socrates
"Philosophy begins in wonder." — Plato
"The true lover of knowledge … soars with undimmed passion until he grasps the essential nature of things." — Plato
"I am human; I think of nothing human as foreign to me." — Terence
"So the good has been explained as that at which all things aim." — Aristotle
"Man is by definition a rational animal." — Aristotle (echoed by Thomas Aquinas)
"Man is by nature a political animal." — Aristotle
"The human good turns out to be the activity of the soul in conformity with excellence." — Aristotle
"Plato is dear to me, but the truth is dearer still." — attributed to Aristotle
"There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it." — Cicero
"I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; I believe so that I may understand." — Anselm
"God is that than which no greater can be thought." — Anselm
"It is necessary to assume something … and this all men call God." — Thomas Aquinas
"Since we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not…" — Thomas Aquinas
"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." — William of Ockham (attributed)
"Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen." — Montaigne
"I think, therefore I am." — René Descartes
"Common sense is the best-distributed commodity in the world." — René Descartes
"… the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." — Thomas Hobbes
"No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience." — John Locke
"To be is to be perceived." — George Berkeley
"I refute it thus." — Samuel Johnson (as recorded by James Boswell)
"'Tis not, therefore, reason, which is the guide of life, but custom." — David Hume
"Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them." — David Hume
"Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"I have no need of that hypothesis." — Pierre-Simon Laplace (about God)
"Two things fill the mind with ever new awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within." — Immanuel Kant
"Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind." — Immanuel Kant
"Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." — Immanuel Kant
"The greatest happiness for the greatest number." — Jeremy Bentham / John Stuart Mill
"It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." — John Stuart Mill
"What experience and history teach is that people never learn anything from history." — Georg Hegel
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One is what one eats." — Ludwig Feuerbach
"Religion is the opiate of the people." — Karl Marx
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it." — Karl Marx
"That government is best which governs least." — Henry David Thoreau
"What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors." — Friedrich Nietzsche
"There are no facts, only interpretations." — Friedrich Nietzsche
"Every word is a prejudice." — Friedrich Nietzsche
"Consider what effects we conceive the object of our conception to have—that is the whole of our conception of the object." — Charles Sanders Peirce
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." — Lord Acton
"Contrariwise … that's logic." — Lewis Carroll
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean." — Lewis Carroll
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." — George Santayana (attributed)
"All of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato." — Alfred North Whitehead (attributed)
"The Nothing nothings." — Martin Heidegger
"Language is the house of Being." — Martin Heidegger
"All metaphysics … speaks the language of Plato." — Martin Heidegger
"Insofar as the statements of geometry speak about reality, they are not certain…" — Albert Einstein (paraphrasing Immanuel Kant)
"… man is condemned to be free." — Jean-Paul Sartre
"Hell is other people." — Jean-Paul Sartre
"First comes the grub, then comes morality." — Bertolt Brecht
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." — Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Every sign by itself seems dead; in use it is alive." — Ludwig Wittgenstein
"… philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." — Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." — Noam Chomsky
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." — Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
"What is there? Everything." — W.V.O. Quine
"To be is to be the value of a bound variable." — W.V.O. Quine
This little canon tips its hat to Harold Bloom's The Western Canon and to E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s arguments for cultural literacy, but applies the logic to philosophy. That raises perennial debates: Do canons over-celebrate dead Western men? How do we fold in non-Western traditions? Does "classicizing" our reading harden culture or help us think?
With philosophy the stakes shift. The aim is not merely knowing arguments but cultivating wisdom—an ability to judge what is true or valuable. Reading mountains of philosophy, on its own, is neither necessary nor sufficient. It helps only when paired with conceptual discipline, logical skill, interpretive charity, emotional maturity, worldly experience, methodological self-awareness, tolerance for unpopular ideas, and, most of all, a spark of wonder.
Reciting or memorizing canonical works without that spark is like memorizing music while remaining tone-deaf. Philosophy demands internal motivation and good taste for truth. The selections above are guideposts rather than guarantees: prompts to explore the conversations that built the discipline and invitations to wrestle with them firsthand.