Who Are The Best Philosophers? Why?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by nicholas1M7, Dec 28, 2006.

  1. glaucon tending tangentially Registered Senior Member

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    Nice call James.

    Nice to see a contemporary reference.
    While (obviously) philosophers of the past do carry weight, it's sad that most people aren't aware of contemporary thinkers...
     
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  3. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    I think this partly has to do with how reputation and relevance of a philosopher are established, and also with the position of the person who is making the assessment, where and to whom.

    Namely, it is philosophy itself that contributes to our criteria for the reputation and relevance of a philosopher or their philosophy. So for a particular philosopher, that can only be assessed after they have made their contributions, sometimes long after.

    It's not like we have a neutral, objective value system by which we would assess philosophers and their philosophies.

    For example, if it weren't for Schopnehauer's work itself - could we value Schopenhauer's work? Certainly Schopenhauer himself shaped the way we view his philosophy, and the way we value it. We could even say he taught us to value his philosophy, and that without his effort to do so, we wouldn't value it.

    Just as importantly, it is the opinion of the elite that also shapes how we value a particular philosophy.

    Then, newer elites assess earlier elites - and the opinion of the run-of-the-mill person is shaped by that too.


    Further, I may have an attraction for Gödel - but I will have to be careful where, to whom and how I talk about it.
    Someone might be fixated on Gödel's eventual paranoia or his theism, and if that person is my boss, that could cast doubt on my intellectual abilities.


    Then there is the phenomenon of "thank heavens he's/she's dead". Living or not well-studied philosophers have been known to surprise, and not always comfortably. So it is quite a daring act to announce one's support of them.
    Sartre ended up a Catholic and who knows where David Chalmers will end up ...
     
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  5. Hesperado Don't immanentize the eschaton Registered Senior Member

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    By the way, concerning Descartes and his Cartesian meditation, the historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson has persuasively argued (which, of course, includes documentation, not just speculation sans citations) that Descartes learned his method from the Jesuits -- on whose studies he cut his philosophical teeth as a young man. Indeed, according to Gilson, the kind of procedure Descartes went through -- stripping one thing away after another until nothing was left but the ego cogitans (the "thinking I") -- was a routine philosophical exercise developed in the curriculum of Jesuit schools.
     
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  7. Hesperado Don't immanentize the eschaton Registered Senior Member

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    You want a contemporary philosopher, my favorite was Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). Died 26 years ago -- hope that's contemporary enough. I never met him -- though I did manage to write him a letter (typed on a Selectric electric typewriter) which, though he did not respond to it, he did mention in a telephone call to my professor (a professor who had by that time written a biography of him and knew him well). My professor reported the gist of the phone call to me the next day -- something along the lines of "Voegelin mentioned your letter, but he said it raised too many complex questions for him to go into."

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  8. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    My vote for history's best philosopher in general would have to be Aristotle. He's pretty much in a class of his own. It isn't so much that I agree with everything that Aristotle said (I emphatically don't). It's that Aristotle was so good across the board.

    He wrote on everything, from the reproductive biology of invertebrates to cosmic metaphysics. (The word 'metaphysics' comes from how Aristotle's books were later compiled by posthumous editors.) He created deductive logic more or less single-handedly. He wrote on the philosophy of science, on ethics, on aesthetics, on physics, on meteorology, on psychology and the philosophy of mind, on politics, on the philosophy of language... at a time when most of those subjects didn't even exist yet.

    It was in large part the influence of Aristotle's hugely influential books on all of these subjects that set them going as distinct scholarly specialities.

    There have doubtless been better subsequent philosophers than Aristotle in just about every speciality. His thinking in every area has been extended, improved and in many cases extensively reworked. That's as it should be and I'm sure it's what Aristotle himself hoped would happen. But nobody has ever matched the scope, the breadth, some might say the grandeur of Aristotle's synoptic vision.
     
  9. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The problem that I have with contemporary thinkers is that it's hard to get enough perspective on them to really form a judgement.

    Most of them write on and defend positions regarding issues of active philosophical discussion. And personally, I'm not really sure what my own final position is going to be on most of those issues, nor am I always sure that I know what the best or most productive line of inquiry is going to be.

    It's all very much in flux, work in progress. So it's difficult for me to predict today how many of these people are going to be remembered (assuming they are) several hundred years from now.
     
  10. Hesperado Don't immanentize the eschaton Registered Senior Member

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    Yep.

    Aristotle had a work titled Ta Physika (Greek for "natural things"), and many centuries later, an Arab scribe added a title for all the stuff that came after that work as "Meta Ta Physika" (Greek "meta" can mean simply "after" or "following") which dealt with things less tangible (such as the nous, or what might be translated as "mind"); and which over time became elided as a single word "Metaphysika" -- hence morphing into a category "Metaphysics".

    Eric Voegelin discusses this in his history of the deformation of classic philosophy in the post-Platonic period and Middle Ages (a deformation that was not uniform nor wholesale, according to Voegelin, but still a trend -- beginning in earnest with the needless bifurcation of "Realism"and "Nominalism" -- that would unfold with greater and more deleterious sociocultural consequences following the Middle Ages).
     
  11. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Absolutely.
    There may be a topic that I'm very much interested in, I read up on it, and may end up with a fascination for a particular philosopher who researches it.
    But after a while, my interests shift, and so does my focus on philosophers.
    In retrospect, it doesn't seem fair to hail a philosopher simply because of a few of his ideas on a topic that I'm interested in.
     
  12. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    I like Voegelin, particularly his texts on Gnosticism (he's a bit more "grounded" than Hans Jonas), but he's far from my "favorite"--or the "best," whatever the hell that means.

    Considering Yazata's remarks, there aren't terribly many contemporaries to consider in that light. It seems like Heidegger was one of the last to start from "ground up," so to speak, but then he got a little wacky (or according to my sole published "academic" piece, he was kinda channeling some Aboriginal folks from the Alice Springs region).

    Amongst contemporary Americans, Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond stand out for me. Of the Europeans, there are far too many to name--mostly French, Italian, and eastern European (and I suspect glaucon hates most of them

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    ). The English? Are there any noteworthy contemporary English thinkers?
     
  13. Pierre-Normand Registered Member

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    Sure... Peter F. Strawson, Gareth Evans, Michael Dummett, David Wiggins, Sabina Lovibond, Michael Luntley and Jennifer Hornsby, just to mention a few, aren't (weren't) only noteworthy but also outstanding thinkers. There ought to be some more noteworthy philosophers who belong to a more 'continental' tradition than those, but I am not acquainted with them well enough to judge.
     
  14. Mutawintji Registered Member

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    Mine is Democritus.

    'Nothing exists except Atoms and the Void ... all else is opinion.'

    'Everything is the fruit of either chance or necessity'

    He was the first to realise that everything was made from indivisible, point like, Atomos. His was the first ever 'Atomic Theory' (Quantum Mechanics)


    Mutawintji
     
  15. Hesperado Don't immanentize the eschaton Registered Senior Member

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    Sounds like Democritus believed in the existence of 3 things, not merely 2:

    1) atoms

    2) the void

    3) opinion.

    :bugeye:
     
  16. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    Forgot to mention my current favorite: Cary Wolfe, who works in the burgeoning post-humanist tradition which draws from Continental, Anglo-Analytical, and American Pragmatist traditions equally--though the Continental might seem "more" equal than others.

    A couple of those names are familiar--Dummett and Evans--but not terribly so. I gather most are working primarily in the Analytic tradition? Probably largely for reasons of personal temperament and disposition, I've just never really been able to get into that. I feel that Americans perhaps more so than other native English speaking nationals have more effectively merged traditions--esp. Cavell and Diamond; although this could very well be attributable to my lack of familiarity with current English, Australian, etc. thinkers. My thoughts are that the Pragmatics, and even earlier American philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau, in many ways anticipate current strains of Continental thought.

    James mentioned Peter Singer, whom I consider pivotal in anticipating post-humanist thinking (with Animal Liberation particularly, but I feel that apart from this, much of his work is largely reformulation and extension of the English Utilitarians. Singer didn't coin the term "speciesism" (I think that was Ryder?), but he was the first to really articulate upon such. Yet I find that much of Singer's work echos the humanistic trappings of those whom he argues against.
     
  17. Pierre-Normand Registered Member

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    I agree that the best thinkers are able to either merge traditions or, at least, not be dismissive of the other tradition on ground of mere stereotypical or superficial characterization of the other school. Many Analytics believe most Continentals to be ponderous obscurantists and many Continentals believe Analytics to have lost touch with the real issues and to have become tiresome and bickering hair-spitters. This fails to characterize the best work done on either side, or the work done by philosophers who eschew the Analytic/Continental divide altogether. Cavell and Diamond are indeed good examples. Think also of Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Christine Korsgaard, John McDowell...
     

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