<![CDATA[Which books influenced you?]]>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?

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