Are there any academic papers that you would recommend to a student of philosophy, regardless of subject area being studied, as valuable foundational reading?

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Yes, there are seminal works of philosophy that are of historical and systematic interest for the understanding they convey of what philosophy is. Here I would mention at least a dozen historical works before any more recent academic papers - works by the usual suspects: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Frege, and Wittgenstein. With regard to academic papers - by which I take you to mean shorter works published in the last 60 years or so - there is no settled canon. Still, it is pretty clear who have been the leading philosophers of this period; and pretty clear also, in most cases, what their most important essays were. It would be difficult to understand the current state of Anglophone philosophy without having read at least a good smattering of the following: W.V.O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and "Epistemology Naturalized", Donald Davidson's "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", Philippa Foot's "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect", Robert Nozick's "Coercion", Derek Parfit's "Personal Identity" and "Equality or Priority", Tom Nagel's "What is it Like to be a Bat?", Bernard Williams' "Moral Luck", Ronald Dworkin's "Taking Rights Seriously", Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and a few other seminal works by Elizabeth Anscombe, Ruth Marcus, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, David Lewis, Thomas Kuhns, John Rawls, John McDowell, Jerry Fodor, Patricia Churchland, Dan Dennett, and part-timers Noam Chomsky and Amartya Sen.

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