<p>Hegel once said, “Philosophy is the history of philosophy”. Understanding the development process of philosophy is crucial for understanding philosophy itself. However, historically, research on the development of philosophy has primarily focused on understanding and interpreting texts, with few quantitative studies. Among the few quantitative analyses, the focus has predominantly been on contemporary philosophical papers. This study collects the citation data of philosophical classic books published from 1600 to 1953 for scientometrics analysis. Through examining the distribution of time intervals of citation among all philosophical classic works, we identified a bimodal distribution. We introduced the concept of “half-life” to decompose it into the superposition of two unimodal distributions. The emergence of the second peak indicates the existence of a large amount of delayed recognition among philosophical classic books, similar to the “Sleeping Beauty Effect” observed in individual papers. We refer to this as the “Collective Sleeping Beauty Effect”. By analyzing the dynamic evolution of the citation network, we propose a possible mechanistic explanation for the observed “Collective Sleeping Beauty Effect”. Furthermore, employing the Leiden community detection algorithm, we dynamically analyze the evolution of community structure, partitioning the philosophical classics into seven communities and examining the patterns of influence among distinct philosophical traditions. These quantitative analyses offer new insights into the history of philosophy.</p>