A philosopher at a top department relays the following request from one of her graduate students:
I had a question about the summer. As we're narrowing down our field of study, some of us were hoping to spend some time in the summer reading core articles in our field - i.e. ones that we really should read if we want to converse intelligibly with contemporary philosophers. However, some of us are a bit at a loss as to what these articles are. Would it be possible for you to put us in contact with philosophers in our department working in our fields, who could come up with 10-20 contemporary articles that they think we should read?
My correspondent thought that readers of the blog could contribute many useful suggestions on this score. I take it what's called for would be something like this (I'll use one of my fields as an example):
A student thinking of working in 'core' legal philosophy ("general jurisprudence," the nature of law and morality) should obviously have read the major books (Raz, Hart, Dworkin, Finnis), but also these articles: Soper, "Legal Theory and the Obligation of a Judge: The Hart/Dworkin Dispute"; Coleman, "Negative and Positive Positivism"; Postema, "Coordination and Convention at the Foundations of Law"; Raz, "Authority, Law and Morality"; Green, "Positivism and Conventionalism"; Shapiro, "On Hart's Way Out"; and then possibly some or all of the following, depending on the student's particular interests: Perry, "Interpretation and Methodology in Legal Theory"; Leiter, "Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence"; Dickson, Evaluation and Legal Theory (a short book!); Greenberg, "How Facts Make Law"; Toh, "Hart's Non-Cognitivism and His Benthamite Project"; Murphy, "Natural Law Theory."
Readers are, of course, invited to add journal and other precise publication information.
