The blog Demasiado Aire, in their post ‘Philosophical Youth ‘ conducted a survey of twenty famous philosophers asking them to list the three books that influenced them most as undergraduates. A commenter on the blog noted that only two of the 28 philosophers listed were women – and the writer of the post responded immediately (before the Trolls!) with a promise to add more women in the coming days.
Note also that the blog has recently put up a thoughtful post on why there are so few women in philosophy departments.
What I found equally, if not more disturbing than the scarcity of women polled is that none of the philosophers interviewed cited a book by a woman writer as one of the three books that most influenced them as an undergraduate. (Christine Korsgaard cites Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as a fourth book) This despite the fact that many of them cite novels as well as philosophical texts.
It could simply be that those we regard as ‘important’ in the profession now were undergraduates at a time when texts by women less likely to be seen as influential (not quite sure that things have changed that much, but, hey, a bit of blind optimism now an then doesn’t hurt).
But another explanation is that we ‘forget’ our commitment to fighting bias in a context that is not strictly professional, such as having to answer a quiz, and that as a result we rely more on stereotype ( for who remembers much about their undergraduate days?)
I was not an imaginative reader of philosophy as an undergraduate: I read what I was told (if that). But if I ask myself which books truly influenced me during that period, I’d have to cite all of Jane Austen’s novels, those of the Bronte sisters and Margaret Atwood. I’d also want to mention my re-reading of Beauvoir’s Memoirs. All these – Austen’s books in particular – are texts that have influenced the sort of things I write as a philosopher.
So what books influenced you as a fledgling philosopher?
The books that influenced me were The Tin Flute, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Handmaid’s Tale. They all really freaked me out.
Foot, Anscombe and Murdoch. I had enormous trouble putting people’s thoughts together, but Foot and Anscombe were constant presences for years. Murdoch helped me enormously in understanding the natives of my new country. Not all were wildly eccentric, but …
Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I was a C- student and wasn’t planning to go to college: I was 16, graduated from high school when I read it–in 3 days without stopping. It was the first academic thing that interested me. I went to college solely for the purpose of getting a philosophy professor job down the road–as obsessively vocationally oriented as any business major.
Second book: C. I. Lewis: Mind and the World Order, which stuck me with deep conventionalism–the world as an amorphous lump we chop up for our purposes according to our conceptual schemes, etc.
Third book: Tie between Strawson’s Individuals, and Wiggins Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity which latter set the course of my philosophical career, my interest in identity puzzles and my push-back against Wiggins–I being a committed partisan of RELATIVE IDENTITY.
This a terrific question and I hope more people answer it because I’m ‘satiably curious!
Great question and great answers so far.
Parfit — Reasons and Persons
Lewis — On the Plurality of Worlds
Gibbard — Wise Choices Apt Feelings
The two writers who influenced me the most when thinking about ethics are Jane Austen and Iris Murdoch (specifically, her novels). I’ve taught undergrads with both of them, and many students clearly prefer them to the more usual philosophical fare.
Judith Jarvis Thomson’s thought experiments (which opened the door to a life-long interest in ALL thought experiments); Ayn Rand (for showing me that a novel could be so very philosophical – philosophical fiction as a genre…); and Sartre and Camus and Beauvoir (all three in a very personal way, the self, the responsibility for self…and in the last case, the feminism of course).