WellReadUndergrad

• Created Tuesday 17 November 2020
• Updated Tuesday 7 October 2025

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.

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I. What Every Educated Person Should Know in Philosophy

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.

Novels and Other Literature with Philosophical Substance

• Aristophanes — The Clouds (satire of philosophy and Socrates)
• Alexander Pope — Essay on Man (long poem wrestling with religious metaphysics)
• Voltaire — Candide (parody of Leibniz) and shorter satires
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust
• Fyodor Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment (or Notes from Underground); The Brothers Karamazov (especially "The Grand Inquisitor")
• Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha (novella)
• Albert Camus — The Stranger; The Plague; The Myth of Sisyphus (essays on meaning and suicide)
• Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead; Atlas Shrugged
• Jean-Paul Sartre — No Exit (play)
• Lewis Carroll — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (best revisited after studying logic); Through the Looking-Glass
• T.S. Eliot — The Waste Land; Four Quartets
• Robert M. Pirsig — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Lila: An Inquiry into Morals
• Iris Murdoch — novels rich with philosophical dilemmas

Semi-Popular or Not Strictly Philosophical Essays

• Michel de Montaigne — Essays ("That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die," "Of Friendship," "Of Cannibals," "Of Custom…," "Our Feelings Reach Beyond Us")
• Immanuel Kant — "Perpetual Peace"; "What Is Enlightenment?"
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — Essays: First Series ("Friendship," "Nature," "Self-Reliance")
• Henry David Thoreau — Walden; Civil Disobedience
• Charles Sanders Peirce — "The Fixation of Belief"; "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"
• William Kingdon Clifford — "The Ethics of Belief"
• William James — "The Will to Believe"; Pragmatism; "The Moral Equivalent of War"; "The Pragmatic Theory of Truth"
• Sigmund Freud — The Interpretation of Dreams; The Future of an Illusion; Civilization and Its Discontents; Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Bertrand Russell — "A Free Man's Worship"; selections from Why I Am Not a Christian
• Isaiah Berlin — essays such as "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (in Russian Thinkers)
• Ayn Rand — The Virtue of Selfishness; Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged

History of Philosophy

Ancient & Medieval

• Plato — Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Republic; Symposium; Phaedrus; Meno; for majors: Euthyphro; Theaetetus
• Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics; Poetics; key portions of the treatises for majors
• Epictetus — Enchiridion
• Augustine of Hippo — selections on free will and time; portions of Confessions
• Anselm of Canterbury — Proslogion
• Thomas Aquinas — portions of Summa Theologiae (especially the Five Ways)

Modern

• René Descartes — Meditations on First Philosophy; Discourse on the Method; Principles of Philosophy
• Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan
• Blaise Pascal — selections (including Pascal's wager)
• John Locke — An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (portions); Second Treatise of Government
• Baruch Spinoza — Ethics
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Discourse on Metaphysics
• George Berkeley — Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• David Hume — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (parts); Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Social Contract
• Immanuel Kant — Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; "Perpetual Peace"; "What Is Enlightenment?"; Critique of Pure Reason (or Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics)
• John Stuart Mill — On Liberty; Utilitarianism
• Karl Marx — key selections summarizing major views (e.g., the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
• Søren Kierkegaard — signature works (e.g., Fear and Trembling)
• William James — The Varieties of Religious Experience (especially "Mysticism")
• Friedrich Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil and other mature works
• Bertrand Russell — The Problems of Philosophy; Logic and Knowledge

General Histories

• Bertrand Russell — History of Western Philosophy (opinionated but readable)
• Frederick Copleston — multi-volume History of Philosophy
• W.T. Jones — multi-volume History of Western Philosophy
• William Matson — A New History of Philosophy (lively, two volumes)
• Roger Scruton — A Short History of Modern Philosophy
• D.W. Hamlyn — The Penguin History of Philosophy
• Robert C. Solomon & Kathleen Higgins — A Passion for Wisdom
• Robert C. Solomon et al. — A Short History of Philosophy
• Anthony Kenny — The Oxford History of Western Philosophy and The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy
• Samuel Enoch Stumpf — Socrates to Sartre and Beyond
• Matthew Stewart — The Truth About Everything
• Ben-Ami Sharfstein — A Comparative History of World Philosophy
• Mary Warnock — Women Philosophers (anthology)
• A.J. Ayer & Jane O'Grady — A Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations

Twentieth-Century Themes

Ethics and Political Philosophy

• John Rawls — Justice as Fairness
• Martha Nussbaum — The Fragility of Goodness
• Robert Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia
• Alasdair MacIntyre — After Virtue
• Richard B. Brandt — Ethical Theory (or comparable survey of metaethics and normative theory)

Existentialism and Continental Thought

• William Barrett — Irrational Man
• Robert C. Solomon — The Passions; The Existentialists; Continental Philosophy Since 1750
• L. Nathan Oaklander — Existentialist Philosophy
• Edmund Husserl — representative phenomenology (e.g., Ideas I)
• Jean-Paul Sartre — selections from Existentialism Is a Humanism and Being and Nothingness
• Martin Heidegger — essays such as "What Is a Thing?"
• Michel Foucault — The Foucault Reader (ed. Paul Rabinow)
• David H. Richter (ed.) — The Critical Tradition

Analytic Philosophy

• Gottlob Frege — "On Sense and Reference", introduction to Begriffsschrift, "On Concept and Object," "On Function and Concept," "On Russell's Paradox"
• Bertrand Russell — "On Denoting"; essays on logical atomism in Logic and Knowledge
• G.E. Moore — Principia Ethica (chapter 1); "The Refutation of Idealism"
• A.J. Ayer — "The Principle of Verification"; "The Elimination of Metaphysics"
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Blue and Brown Books; Zettel; Philosophical Investigations; On Certainty
• Gilbert Ryle — "Descartes' Myth"
• J.L. Austin — "A Plea for Excuses"; "Other Minds"
• Alan Turing — "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• Edmund Gettier — "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"
• W.V.O. Quine — "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"; "On What There Is"
• John Searle — "What Is a Speech Act?"
• Richard Rorty — Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
• Thomas Nagel — "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

Science Writing with Philosophical Reach

• Thomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Paul Feyerabend — Against Method
• Loren Eiseley — The Immense Journey and related essays
• Sherwin B. Nuland — How We Die
• Lewis Thomas — essays such as "Germs" in The Lives of a Cell
• E.O. Wilson — Sociobiology; Consilience

Mathematics, Logic, and AI

• Edwin Abbott Abbott — Flatland
• A.K. Dewdney — The (New) Turing Omnibus; The Tinkertoy Computer
• Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh — The Mathematical Experience
• Martin Gardner — classic mathematical recreations (e.g., Mathematical Games)
• Douglas Hofstadter — Gödel, Escher, Bach; Metamagical Themas
• Ivars Peterson — The Mathematical Tourist; Islands of Truth
• George Pólya — How to Solve It
• John Allen Paulos — Innumeracy; Beyond Innumeracy

Biographies and Intellectual Portraits

• Gay Wilson Allen — William James: A Biography
• Ray Monk — Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius; Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude
• Paul Levy — Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles
• Ved Mehta — The Fly and the Fly Bottle
• Paul Feyerabend — Killing Time (autobiography)

Logic and Philosophical Reasoning

• Nicholas Falletta — Paradoxicon
• Irving Copi & Carl Cohen — Introduction to Logic
• Irving Copi — Symbolic Logic
• Richard Jeffrey — Formal Logic
• Harry Gensler — Symbolic Logic
• George Boolos & Richard Jeffrey — Computability and Logic

Philosophy of Religion

• Anselm of Canterbury — ontological argument in Proslogion
• Thomas Aquinas — Five Ways in Summa Theologiae
• Blaise Pascal — Pascal's wager
• William James & W.K. Clifford — essays cited above
• Søren Kierkegaard & Friedrich Nietzsche — the leap of faith; "God is dead"
• Martin Buber — selections from I and Thou
• Sigmund Freud — The Future of an Illusion; Moses and Monotheism
• Bertrand Russell — skeptical essays noted earlier

Other Branches of Philosophy

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.

II. Philosophical Words and Phrases

A vocabulary list drawn from E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy with additions I found useful to emphasize.

Term	Term	Term	Term
abduction	reductio ad absurdum	ad hoc	ad infinitum
aesthetics	affirming the consequent	agnosticism	analogy
analytic/synthetic distinction	animism	anthropomorphism	aphorism
a priori / a posteriori	aretē	Thomas Aquinas	aristocracy
atheism	Augustine	autocracy	axiom
Barbara (syllogism)	Allegory of the Cave	Chinese room (thought experiment)	Cicero
civil disobedience	class struggle	communism	Communist Manifesto
Confessions	Copernican Revolution	cosmological argument	Confucius
cultural relativism	deconstruction	deduction	De gustibus non est disputandum
deism	Delphic oracle	democracy	Cartesian demon
denotation	deontology	Descartes, René	determinism
dialectic	dialectical materialism	Divided Line	Cartesian dualism
Jonathan Edwards	egoism	Emerson, Ralph Waldo	emotivism
empiricism	the Enlightenment	Epicureanism	epistemology
Erasmus	ergo	ethical relativism	ethics
ethos	eudaimonia	extension vs. intension	existentialism
fallacy	fideism	Five Ways	Platonic forms
gerontocracy	Gestalt psychology	ghost in the machine	golden mean
hedonism	Hobbes, Thomas	holism	hypothesis
idealism (metaphysics)	individualism	innate ideas	induction
inference	intentionality	In vino veritas	James, William
je ne sais quoi	Johnson, Samuel	justification by faith / grace / works	justice as fairness
Kant, Immanuel	Das Kapital	Lao-tse	Leibniz
liar paradox	Lenin, Vladimir	Leviathan	liberalism (classical, American)
libertarianism	Locke, John	locus classicus	Machiavelli
materialism	"Meaning is use."	meaning / reference (Frege)	medieval
metaphysics	Middle Ages	Mill, John Stuart	monism
monotheism	Montaigne	Montesquieu	More, Thomas
mysticism	naturalism	natural law	natural rights
nature–nurture controversy	Nietzsche, Friedrich	nihilism	"No man is an island."
non sequitur	Occidental philosophy	oligarchy	oligopoly
"One is what one eats."	"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."	ontological argument	ontology
pacifism	paradox	paradigm	Pascal, Blaise
Pascal's Wager	Peirce, Charles Sanders	performatives	philistinism
philosopher-king	philosopher's stone	Plato	Platonism
pluralism	plutocracy	polytheism	Pope, Alexander
positivism	postulate	pragmatism	predestination
predicate	The Prince	Procrustean bed	proletariat
quod erat demonstrandum (Q.E.D.)	raison d'être	red herring	reductio
the Reformation	relativism	the Renaissance	rhetoric
Ring of Gyges	Russell, Bertrand	Russell's paradox	Sartre, Jean-Paul
scholasticism	Self-Reliance	semantics	semiotics
sine qua non	Socrates	sophist	speech-act theory
Spinoza, Baruch	stoicism	subjectivism	syntax
tabula rasa	teleological argument	theocracy	Thomism
Thoreau, Henry David	totalitarianism	transubstantiation	Turing Test
universals	use / mention	utilitarianism	utopia
Verstehen	vicious circle	Voltaire	Weltanschauung
Wittgenstein, Ludwig	Zeno's paradox	Zeitgeist	Mill's methods
Arrow's theorem	Prisoner's dilemma

III. Famous, Short Quotations from the History of Philosophy

"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

IV. A Note on the Very Idea of a Philosophical Canon

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.