[Glice]

Anyone dismissing Kant in a sentence is an idiot. There's a categorical imperative for you.

ni'k - Bertrand Russel's 'a history of Western philosophy' is a pretty good primer on philosophy up to the 20th-century. I also think you can get away with not reading the source texts - it's really not worth getting bogged down with the whole of Hegel's phenomenology of spirit for months when a short encyclopaedia article should do the same job. The intimate details of Marx aren't really that necessary either.

There's an argument that says that very few people understand any given philosopher 'fully'. I have to say I'm largely sympathetic to this - except for being a very high-level academic, being able to posit a thinker in a continuum or general structure is sufficient. I think if everyone who said they'd read, say, Critique of Judgement had absorbed every single point in there then you'd get a lot fewer people saying they'd read it. Just getting a broad idea of what they're saying is fine, although I'll put the caveat that one of the worst things anyone can do is to dismiss any given philosopher outright (with the exception of the analytics, who can fuck the fuck off as far as I'm concerned).