Immanuel Kant was, in my judgment, the greatest philosopher who has ever lived, but he is very far from being my favorite philosopher.   For sheer beauty, wit, depth, and ironic distance from the philosophical bog, as Emily Dickinson would have called it, I prefer Kierkegaard.   My text for today [it is, after all, Sunday] is this brief passage from the coruscatingly brilliant Preface to Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments :
"It is not given to everyone to have his private tasks of meditation and reflection so happily coincident with the public interest that it becomes difficult to judge how far he serves merely himself and how far the public good.   Consider the example of Archimedes, who sat unperturbed in the contemplation of his circles while Syracuse was being taken, and the beautiful words he spoke to the Roman soldier who slew him: nolite perturbare circulos meos .   [do not disturb my circles -- ed.]"
All but overwhelmed by persistent pain, I have decided to contemplate my circles and leave it to others to decide whether such meditation serves the public good.   My topic today, as it has been on many other days, is how one ought to study philosophy, how one ought to read philosophers, and -- by extension -- how one ought to write philosophy.
My answer to these questions places me in conflict with contemporary professional philosophers, at least in the American academic philosophical world.     To state my conclusion as simply as I am able, I believe that in studying philosophy, you would be well advised to devote your time to reading the writings of the great philosophers, and that it is imperative to read the entire books they have left for us, not merely those passages in which they appear to be addressing some problem that interests you.   When it comes time to put your own thoughts into written form, you should undertake a systematic book-length consideration of the problems or topics that seize you, rather than confining what you have to say to brief essays suitable for publication in the professional journals currently admired by the inhabitants of the bog.
This answer, as I say, puts me at odds with most professional philosophers in the American academy.   When I was young, an aspirant for admission to the guild was required to write a doctoral dissertation, which was understood conventionally to be the length of a short book -- perhaps 75,000 to 100,000 words.   It goes without saying that very few dissertations actually were short books, and fewer still found publishers.   Not every garage band becomes The Beatles, after all.   But the dissertation was understood to require a breadth of learning, a care in scholarship, and a quality of sustained argument that distinguished it from the seminar papers that by then one had cranked out in such proliferation.
At some point, when I was no longer paying close attention to the profession, the practice arose of substituting for the dissertation three "publishable" papers on related subjects.   These papers were to be modeled on the articles that were regularly published in professional journals, and as the competition for entry-level jobs intensified, students were encouraged actually to try to publish one or more of their "dissertation" essays, in hopes of improving their chances on the job market .
Seemingly as part of this fundamental change in the requirements for the degree [although there may be no connection here -- I simply do not know], professors stopped assigning entire books in their courses, and took to assigning selections -- a chapter here, a handful of pages there -- as though trying to communicate that Descartes or Kant or Hobbes really would have written journal articles, if only there had been journals in which to publish them.   Now that I have become somewhat more deeply embedded in the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department [to use the term of art for reporters assigned to front-line fighting units], I have taken to asking the students I encounter what they are reading in their other courses and seminars.   For the most part, it seems, they read recent journal articles or selections from the classic canon of full-scale philosophical books.   There may not be a graduate student in the department who has been asked to read the entire Critique of Pure Reason , and I would bet that not one of them has plowed through all three books of A Treatise of Human Nature .
So what?   Let   me attempt a reply that rises above the level of a shocked "Well I never!"
Great philosophers, as I have often observed, see more deeply on occasion than they can say.   They grasp complex conceptual relationships that may actually exceed the capacity of their received philosophical language to articulate.   A fruitful engagement with the mind of a great philosopher is therefore not merely an effort to understand what the philosopher intended to say, but also a struggle to make connections among parts of his or her text that allow one to bring to the surface and clarify one of those deep insights.   The philosopher may actually believe that the several parts of his or her text co