/lit/ - Literature

>>16935425
Nothing is essential
It seems like a lot of people who are new to philosophy think it is a lot more thematically monolithic than it is. Philosophy of language, epistemology, ontology, mind, political phil, ethics, phenomenology, etc are all present more or less in all philosophy movements, and most people study along those lines, rather than in terms of a philosophers influence across the discipline as a whole. For example hume is incredibly influential, but someone who studies political philosophy doesn't have much of a reason to read him. Nagle's bat paper is even more influential in philosophy of mind, but moral philosophers don't give a shit.
If you want to understand philosophy in the way that people who are good at it understand it, you need to pick out topics you are interested in and study them.
If you want to study history of philosophy in general, on the other hand, the essential thinkers are probably plato, aristotle, hume, kant, hegel, nietzsche, and wittgenstein.
However if you read all of those guys you won't be in a good position to debate literally any topic in contemporary philosophy because they are only distantly related to the positions and strategy common to current publications.
>t. Bachelors in philosophy in 2 weeks
>>16936027
I have no idea why people consider Nozick influential, please enlighten me.