CAST YOUR VOTE!
Nozick
Socrates
Plato
Jesus
Karl Popper Popper
Leibniz
Jeremy Bentham
Descartes
Spinoza
Locke
Berkeley
Hume
Kant
Nietzsche
Schopenhauer
Epicurus
Ayn Rand
Heidegger
Husserl
Russell
Wittgenstein
Ayer
Sartre
Rousseau
J. S. Mill
CAST YOUR VOTE!
Not a big fan of Eastern philosophy I take it.
Thats not philosophy thats "barbarian mysticism" thankyouverymuch.
The end is nigh
I voted for Russell. It was either him or Hume for me.
I voted Wittgenstein because he was of the general opinion that reading philosophy makes one dull.
First eliminate every possible source of error. Thence success is inevitable.
Me.
But, for a certainty, back then,
We loved so many, yet hated so much,
We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...
Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
Whilst our laughter echoed,
Under cerulean skies...
Foucault
ILE
7w8 so/sp
Very busy with work. Only kind of around.
I was in the bathroom yesterday yelling at the mirror "I TAKE IT YOU HAVEN'T READ YOUR BASIC KANT!"
No kidding.
I had to give Spinoza some love, but I would have gone Chuang Tzu over anybody else. Second tier picks for me would be Locke/Witty/Nietzsche over Hume simply because of the readibility and style. Of the ones I've read I had the most difficulty with Kant and the most derision for Ayn Rand (she's tied for the lead too lol), although I don't pretend to be that familiar with the work of some of the more contemporary voices like Nozick or Ayer or most any of the Frenchies.
I vote for Fonzie or Mr. C.
That makes me think of Virginia Woolf and something of hers I read (A Room of One's Own, I think?). She would be up there on my list for that alone.
But, damn, I really don't have a clue who Foucault is. Maybe I should look him up sometime.
Did you list Kierkegaard..? And Heidegger, with his overly thick sentences.
I'd pick Simone de Beauvoir... The ethics of ambiguity is probably my favorite book of this ilk.
(I wouldn't mind living like Jean-Jacques though... Except, you know, perhaps I'd be slightly better to my family... Perhaps and slightly.)
Try Julia Kristeva for a female post-structuralist philosopher.
Also, you're missing a lot of people there! What about Althusser, Lacan, Todorov, Barthes etc etc etc. Sure, with structuralism and post-structuralism, you're moving ever more away from strict 'philosophy' toward a blending with other 'schools' or 'disciplines', which is why I prefer using the broader category of theorists.
But my favourite is and most likely always will be Foucault. I think I even mentioned him my type thread, as though adoring him would somehow help me discover my type.
()
3w4-1w2-5w4 sx/sp
What about Mr Miyagi (Karate Kid movie)?
ILE "Searcher"
Socionics: ENTp
DCNH: Dominant --> perhaps Normalizing
Enneagram: 7w6 "Enthusiast"
MBTI: ENTJ "Field Marshall" or ENTP "Inventor"
Astrological sign: Aquarius
To learn, read. To know, write. To master, teach.
ILE
7w8 so/sp
Very busy with work. Only kind of around.
I've never even heard of any of those. They're not mainstream philosophers, are they? They're even less well-known than philosophers such as Carnap, Putnam, Kuhn, Quine and Frege. They probably rank along side philosophers like Block, Fodor, Jackson and Kripke.
Heidegger's there. I considered Kierkegaard.
But this is about the greatest philosopher - not the greatest theorist. Otherwise the list would be epic.
I did consider him as well, but didn't think he was as prominent as some of the others.But my favourite is and most likely always will be Foucault. I think I even mentioned him my type thread, as though adoring him would somehow help me discover my type.
Fuck him. He's overrated.
Not in the list.
...the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'.
INTp
I voted for ayn rand, not because I think she's the greatest, but because I wanted to break the tie between her and fuckin Jesus.
The end is nigh
I wanted to vote for myself, but I voted for Neitzsche because I feel that he would have agreed with me.
Wond'ring aloud, How we feel today. Last night sipped the sunset, My hand in her hair. We are our own saviours, As we start both our hearts, Beating life Into each other. ~Ian Anderson
I hear that she can shoot centipedes out of her vagina too.
Thats from E.D. so I know it must be truth.
The end is nigh
Ew, Descartes? Seriously? Are you a Christian solipsist?
But, for a certainty, back then,
We loved so many, yet hated so much,
We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...
Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
Whilst our laughter echoed,
Under cerulean skies...
Wittgenstein was the most genial, especially in his paradoxical conclusion in regard to the study of philosophy.
Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit
define greatest...
longest influential: aristotle
I choose Locke, thanks to him we got the scientific revolution. Otherwise we would still use the bible as our book of knowledge.
.
You'll have to tell me about it sometime.
Funnily enough, I've heard of and read something from every one of those fuckers.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree on the Spinoza/Tao similarities. I just happened to be taking my modern phil class while I was taking chinese thought and I was all at how connected they seemed to be. A friend of mine has gotten pretty heavy into the Tao Te Jing the last year or two and he's waaaay towards the Zen perspective of it.
This made me lol.
Also, it just occurred to me that no one mentioned Dr. Seuss!
In my mind, Wittgenstein is, by far, the greatest philosopher. He is the one philosopher to date who seems to have the best understanding of philosophy . How else can you explain so much confusion, so much disagreement, and so little philosophical certainty? I think that his answer that philosophy is an attempt to take language from its everyday use and to (hopelessly) try and find general patterns in it - through this same language - is the best explanation for these problems that I've seen so far. I don't really care for the Tractatus, but Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty blew my mind away.
Jason
even richard nixon has got soul ... dadadadaderrrrr ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
wittgenstein won my vote
The question is in regards to the greatest philosopher and not necessarily about one's favorite philosopher (sorry Spinoza :frown, so I voted for Kant. Why Kant? The birth of modern philosophy was divided into two main camps: rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). Kant argued against and reconciled both while also creating his own original ideas. While I am not a fan of the German idealism that followed Kant, he cannot be held responsible for the bad philosophers that followed. Modern philosophy (secular and religious) lives in his philosophical wake. There is no return to Pre-Kantian philosophy; he changed the nature of the philosophical framework.
Johari Box"Alpha Quadra subforum. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." ~Obi-Wan Kenobi
Kant's moral argument is rather weak as his defense of God (the way he words it even casts some amount of doubt as to his own sense of belief), but I think that was a case where he wrote himself into a corner and couldn't quite take his philosophy to its conclusions. But Kant was also highly Christianity and many of his critiques of pure reason have just about flat out killed defenses of God from those approaches. It almost sounded like an appeasement to the religious and perhaps even his own Pietist background.
Spinoza is probably one of the most thoroughly consistent philosophers, with his thoughts on a plethora of subjects tying back to the basic premises of his philosophy.Since I'm not a trained philosopher, I tend to read up on many idea only after I've made the same/similiar conclusions(Spinoza) thru my own wanderings, perhaps I'm just not to Kant yet.
Johari Box"Alpha Quadra subforum. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." ~Obi-Wan Kenobi