in high school most people thought I was a philosopher.  Even people who were much smarter than me thought I had a certain insight in that direction. And yet I never went into philosophy in college because I could already tell that 20th century philosophy was on its way toward a train wreck, But even so I consider the subject to be important. Of course Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Kant are important but I would like to suggest Leonard Nelson and Kelley Ross at his web site to be the best [i think the approach of Nelson is great, but had a serious flaw in the categories of space and time that only Kelley Ross was able to correct.]

My reasoning is that the British American "Analytic Philosophy" is a train wreck and so well pointed out in  books by Robert Hanna. The other 20th century ones are beyond contempt since they are incoherent. Heidegger just substituted Being in place of God and being authentic to oneself instead of moral obligations  to others. Freud I have always thought was a fraud since I could not stand his steam engine model of the human mind. Marx was wrong since the Labor theory of value is false--things have value outside of what amount of work went into making them--for example: AIR.