American, philosophy undergraduate in 1991, law graduate in 2007, wife and three kids in the interim.

I don’t believe in favorite philosophers, as most have something interesting to say, and none have said enough about anything. But I will say that the must-read stuff includes every Greek up to and including Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, Plotinus, Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, Hegel, all the existentialists, Russell and logical positivism, Wittgenstein, and because we live today, you need to understand post-modernism - and really there are twice as many more who are worth hours each. And further, Eastern wisdom is full of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics well worth understanding. And physics and science since Bacon and Newton and Darwin must be taken into account.

But philosophy today is a dying art, bleeding out by its own hand.