Philosophy textbooks—anthologies or introductory-level commentaries—can tackle roles past the pedagogical functions for which they’re put collectively. By way of editorial and authorial decisions of inclusion and exclusion such works can outline or make clear fields of examine, canonize particular works, determine a subdiscipline’s central issues, and, relying on uptake, set the agenda for future work within the space.
In a submit at his weblog, Digressions & Impressions, Eric Schliesser discusses Readings in Philosophical Analysis, a 1949 anthology edited by Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars that, he says, “units the agenda for the opposite textbooks [of the era], and concurrently helps consolidate, roughly, what counts as analytic philosophy (or in fashionable philosophical evaluation) and never.” The e-book was over 600 pages lengthy, with 42 items in it (journal articles and e-book excerpts). (See this brief review of it in The Philosophical Overview.) Schliesser additionally mentions (on the suggestion of Alan Richardson), Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, A Collection of Readings, a 1953 quantity edited by Leonard Linsky that whereas itself is “not the definitive canon” nonetheless “clearly anticipates a lot of the early canon of the philosophy (of language centered) proseminar.”
What are different examples of area-defining or agenda-setting or in any other case influential textbooks in philosophy?
I’d nominate Will Kymlicka‘s Modern Political Philosophy, the original edition of which was printed in 1991 (an updated version appeared a decade later), which drew out a set of philosophical disputes and considerations that had emerged in political philosophy over the earlier 20 years, and which—partially as a result of (it appears) so many future political philosophers learn it as college students—would proceed to be central to political philosophy, even because the self-discipline modified, for an additional 20. I’d be curious to listen to if others in political philosophy agree.
