Where Do Philosophers Get Their Ideas?

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

- Martin Cohen

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.

Take Plato. His writings have been aptly described as the source for which all subsequent philosophy is merely 'footnotes' - and yet Plato himself was clearly influenced by his reading mystical figures such as Pythagoras. In fact, the characters in Plato's books are sometimes chosen to indicate that the theories they voice are not Plato's own but rather summaries of other wellknown figures' ideas, against which Plato uses Socrates as a foil.