I think it was Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling when I was 15. Or maybe I was 16. It was almost 50 years ago, who remembers? At least that I considered "philosophy." I'd read Emerson before that, and came at Thoreau as a philosopher, mostly on the reputation of "Civil Disobedience," though I read that and Walden before Kierkegaard. Again, if memory serves.For those of you who read philosophy, what was the first piece of philosophy you read and how old were you?— Judith Stout (@judystout1) January 22, 2020
I'd stand by Kierkegaard as my first. (Sorry, I'm reading the responses to this tweet. I don't consider any literary work as philosophy. So I'm excluding those. Kinda scary, though, to remember how much I've read in fiction.)
Geesh,I wonder what it was. I think I'd read some of the Platonic dialogues by high school, Aristotle was, of course, not fashonable. I remember my Freshman year in college, a tweed-bedecked faculty wife and PhD in her own right admonishing someone that their thinking was too Aristotelian and not virtuously Platonic. I read a lot of Russell in HS but I wouldn't count that as philosophy, now. I know I read lots of other things in high school, I read some Spinoza and thought it was kind of dumb and pointlessly formalistic. I have never seen why he's considered so great. I read some of the existentialists, Sartre, certainly, Camus, lots of secondary literature from philosophy textbooks, books ABOUT philosophy. It's possible that the first thing I read was a textbook in Thomist cosmology - one of my older sisters went to a Catholic school where it was one of the textbooks for their theology requirement. I remember being amused by the sentence "Monism is repugnant" though now I understand why. I wish I'd read Kierkegaard, instead. Though I'm sticking with what I said about the quality of contemporary theology as opposed to contemporary philosophy, which is in the same decadence as theoretical physics, these days.
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