Thank you a lot for this answer, I mean this is exactly what I am looking for. As a person that wants to live his live trough literature, it only comes naturally that I also want to know a lot about history and philosophy, but unfortunately, as I am not as well versed in these disciplines as I am in the literature itself. I know Aquinas because I talk about him a lot because as I said we have the copy of his book in our monastery, but I am lost when it comes to others, his predecessors and his successors, and that's why I am asking this question and this is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for.



As I mentioned above, I do not want to study Philosophy as my main topic, I am just really interested and want to see it all. As someone interested in writing myself I am sure that Aesthetics would be the right kind of study for me, but I would love to have the general knowledge that goes a little deep than one-liners to describe the whole Philosophical persona. And it is a lot of work, but so is reading Proust, Joyce or Gaddis (as an ESL it is really freaking hard :D ) but I hope that I can enlighten myself and become a more educated person.
So basically it is "everything" that I would like to read, just because it is interesting how can a couple of people completely change a worldview of so many (Like Hegel, Aquinas and of course Plato and Aristoteles) also I would love to be able to eventually connect some of the big ideas with my favourite novels or my favourite novels with some really interesting philosophy.

I was thinking about eventually reading of each volume of "History of Philosophy" and then read books (at least their most known) by the names dropped in these books.