As far as my frequent citing of original dates is concerned, this is a policy which I have consciously adopted for some years in the hope that the habit will spread. The way in which so many philosophers habitually refer to the classics of their subject is perplexing. What would we make of a literary scholar who used expressions such as ‘see Shakespeare (1958)’, when citing a passage in Hamlet, or who provided no dates other than that of the edition they happened to have on their shelves? And yet countless philosophy books appearing today will casually use references like ‘Kant (1962)’, very often with nothing, either in the footnotes or the bibliography, to give even the faintest indication that Kant was not an English or American philosopher writing in the latter twentieth-century. Such a reference system, apt enough for modern science journals, was never really suited for the humanities. Quite apart from issues of pedagogy (we surely owe it to our students to be a little more informative), there is something unappealingly parochial about a citation method that reduces the entire sweep of Western thought to a set of modern English editions

(Cottingham, Cartesian Reflections)