I choose these books

because feminists need to know our traditions and teach them to new generations.
Women’s voices must never again be erased from history. Wollstonecraft mobilizes the
energy of the French Revolution to voice the rights of women. In luminous prose, Woolf
shows why we should honor women’s writing throughout history, and why we must
include women in all our writing and thinking. And Beauvoir is the feminist philosopher
who first understood that under patriarchy “woman” is cast as the Other. All later
feminist thought builds on her insights."

 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) 

 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
 

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor
of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. 
 

"African philosophy is far too various, far too self-critical to be reduced to a single
canon. An argument can be made, nonetheless, that some of its most generative texts
constitute a counter-canon of sorts, a fugitive archive for the dispossessed, a future
conservatory for utopian dreams. The books assembled below are all very different, but
they all speak to how African thought realizes radical encounters between epistemology
and politics, metaphysics and aesthetics, ethics and logic. In so doing, they summon the
world to a global dialogue on ecological, political, ethical, and aesthetic transformation."

 The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, translated by R. B. Parkinson. (1850 BCE) 

 Aboubakar Fofana, The Manden Charter, translated into French by Jean-
Louis Sagot. (1236)
 Zera Yacob, The Treatise of Zera Yacob (1667)
 Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, Mi'raj al Su'ud: Ahmad
Baba's Replies on
Slavery (1615)
 Henry Odera Oruka, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern
Debate on African Philosophy (1990)
 
Omedi Ochieng is assistant professor of communication at Denison University. His
books include Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the
Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy.
 

"The phenomenological movement was founded in Germany in the early years of the
20th century around the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Subsequent generations of
phenomenologists included figures such as Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida, whose
works, for good or ill, have gained wide prominence. These important founding texts of
the movement, however, have been influential primarily amongst philosophers.
Husserl’s Logical Investigations, published in two volumes in 1901/2, established a new
way of thinking about language, meaning, and evidence, and was the first to pose a
clear distinction between formal logic and formal ontology. Reinach then applied
Husserl’s ideas to the phenomena of law, thereby inventing the ontology of social acts,
later reborn as speech act theory, while Ingarden applied them to the ontology of art,
initiating a Polish school of realist phenomenology that would influence the thinking of
the Polish Pope."

 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900-1901)

 Adolf Reinach, The A priori Foundations of the Civil Law (1913)
 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (1931)
 

Barry Smith is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Julian Park Chair at
University of Buffalo.