Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Life Philosophical

Where Do Philosophers Get Their Ideas?

Martin Cohen says they get them the same sort of places as everyone else.

If you ask people to suggest a book that changed the way they think, it should be no surprise if philosophical works pop up as influential texts more often than others. After all, philosophers are supposed to be the ‘big ideas’ people. But we usually imagine such thinkers starting from scratch, maybe by meditating in a closed, warm room in the fashion made famous by René Descartes. Yet that’s not quite right. In fact, philosophers, just like the rest of us, are often following up something they were told or read.

…