Choose the Greatest Philosopher of all Time

“Peter Ustinov”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/partridge/?

As for Harry’s choice, my bet is that he’s leaning toward the greatest dead Scotsman.

No Kieran, it must be Aristotle, because that was Anne Widdecombe choice!

The GLI must be TW, and the GLE SF, right Harry?

I was thinking Blunkett was his least fave person, but of course Widdecombe would fit the bill, too.

I have a hard time thinking about ranking the Scotsman, the Konigsberger, and the two Greeks. But I have a harder time understanding how there are 16 others in the running.

Why is this limited to one species, and a mere few thousand years?

I also find it mildly curious that Hegel didn’t make the shortlist. It’s even more curious that in surveying the length and breadth of philosophy, Wittgenstein and Spinoza make the cut but figures like Averroes and Mencius don’t. Not that I would have voted for any of these, but still.

I was going to say, “Well, why would Hegel be in the running?” … And then I saw the list. Sartre (who isn’t as good as, say, Gadamer)? Epicurus (but not Heraclitus)? Popper (but not Davidson or Kripke)?

I then went to bookshelves to try to find a more suitable number to flesh out the 20–and it’s hard. Strange that, in all of human history, it’s a stretch to find 20 truly great philosophers. Is there any other field with such a paucity of “greatness”? I mean, couldn’t you dash of lists of 20 great composers, poets, novelists, painters, etcetera?

Of course, there’re really only three to choose from: Plato, Aristotle, Kant… with Plato taking the prize.

“Epicurus (but not Heraclitus)? Popper (but not Davidson or Kripke)?”

Yep, also curious choices.

“Strange that, in all of human history, it’s a stretch to find 20 truly great philosophers.”

It depends on how you’re measuring “greatness,” I guess. The best way to explain some of the choices seems to be as measures of influence and name recognition more than anything else; that would certainly explain Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre for me (I haven’t listened to any of the little “why I voted for them” clips, though). The problem is that thinkers who could begin to compete with the undisputed greats for breadth and quality of thought really don’t have much in the way of wider name recognition; that’s the best way I could explain the total omission of Eastern philosophy of any kind.

That’s where I feel cultural gap. How could anybody vote for Hume is truly beyond my understanding (not that he wasn’t one of the greatest, but the greatest I can’t grasp). Nah, Plato is the one.

I don’t want to cause no multicultural fuss, but really – no Confucius? No Buddha? They may have been treated as religious figures by their followers but they were both philosophers, and very influential ones.

I guarantee you that Mill had the highest of what is called IQ or g of anyone on that list, though by no means do I think that is the same thing as “intellect.”

Must be one of the Bruces.

Hey kids, remember when the lad Quiggin stirred up a fuss by pointing out that “music” didn’t just Western art music? We have, I assert, an exact parallel on our hands: not only are Confucius and Lao-Tse conspicuous, as has been noted, by their absence, but also there is the obvious fact that questions the neo-scholastic philosophes of the Anglo-American still mistake for their property have, for some time now, been addressed far more interestingly outside the confines of their discipline.

So I’m voting for Buddha, Confucius, Marx (who certainly belongs on a more interesting list than theirs), Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Foucault and — greatest of all by far — Wiley E Coyote. As Camus said, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“Non-philosophers tend to be more partial to the “ridiculous philosophy stuff””

Only a certain stripe of non-philosopher, though, usually with some training in another humanities discipline. But I think the more general non-philosopher would only be tempted to pick Hume if they’re British (and fair enough, it is a BBC poll after all) — elsewhere I think they’d be likelier to go for Aristotle or Aquinas, or maybe Mill. All of whom are perfectly defensible choices, as it turns out.

Far as French postrucutralists go, I’ve always found them more interesting than their detractors are willing to admit and less impressive than their disciples seem to think; I don’t know that I’d put them on a list of “greatest” thinkers. I’d say Weber, Freud and Lacan belong on a list of most-overrated thinkers… but that’s just me.

1) How can Plato possibly be the greatest philosopher when he was just a scribe for Socrates?

2) You nominate your favorite, but vote for the greatest.

3) I voted a second time based on how pleasant the celebrity endorser’s face was.

) How can Plato possibly be the greatest philosopher when he was just a scribe for Socrates?

You’re kidding, right, Mitch?

(I think the poll is actually an IQ test, and everyone who fails to vote for Plato, fails.)

Btw, the most significant and outrageous omission from the top 20 imho, and a plausible CONTENDER (though not my top choice, I’m going with Kant) is Leibniz.

Oh, fer chrissake, Hume is NOT seriously in the running. He’s an excellent philosopher, obviously, but no Aristotle, no Kant.

You know who’s really, really, really great but utterly misunderstood and radically underappreciated? C. S. Peirce. No, seriously!

Seems like a bone-headed, meat-axe naturalist at first blush, but actually has a truly revolutionary logic of science based on a Kantian ethics of belief. We don’t even really know how important he is yet because he’s basically ignored (everybody reads “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” once apiece, and that’s it). Also, few philosophers know enough about logic, science, or the history of philosophy to read Peirce productively. Hell, I know I don’t.

Anyway, it’s too early to include him on the list, but I predict that in 50 years he will be viewed very differently than he is today.

I vote for Zippy.

I voted for Mill. He didn’t have the best arguments, and he was short on charm, but he had perfect philosophical instincts. As John Quiggin says, you can vote for liberalism when you vote for Mill. But you can also vote for hardcore philosophical naturalism and vote against the existence of a priori knowledge.

It is truly bizarre that Hegel’s not listed. I’m also a it surprised Locke didn’t get on there, though I’d be shocked if he won. To have Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre also seems a bit existentialist-heavy.
Anyway, this conversation, as I understand it, is about stating preferences more than (well, ok, in addition to) rubbishing the list [and I’ve rubbished the list over at my own blog, anyway]. I can’t really select a greatest philosopher, without violating my own philosophical views. My own preference would be for Hume or Mill — Hume for his temperament or spirit, Mill for his commitments and allegiances. But the one figure on the list who seems to me utterly inescapable is Kant, and if a gun were put to my head by some deranged BBC operative, I’d go with him.

No Siddhartha Gautama is a travesty. It’s not like he had any incredibly profound insights into the nature of human life and suffering or anything. Certainly more profound than, say, Nietszche’s shots at the same subject matter. His extended treatises on bodily fluids probably moved him out of the running.

Popper and Wittgenstein are bizarre entrants in that august company, Wittgenstein’s self-regard and my love for Popper notwithstanding.

Why no love for the Locke? Not even worth a mention?

I’m going with Kant. Popper soured me on Plato.

Although, I have to admit that the one example of clear philosophical progress in 2500 years is in logic.

So, if you are going by who made the most progress on the list, you’d almost have to go with Bertrand Russell for modern logic (with Frege and Carnap) or Hume for his revelation of causation/induction as a serious philosophical problem (though I didn’t vote for either…Go Kant!).

Hume says in his history of England that the greatest Scot was Napier. He says in “Of the Middle Station in Life” that the only two really great philosophers in the history of the world are Galileo and Newton.

I would have voted for Locke, but since he wasn’t an option, I went with Plato.

As so many have already said, this list is slightly nuts. No Locke, no Leibniz. No effort to think that maybe, just maybe, Confucius or Mencius or Chuang-tzu or Lao-tse might have something to offer. (Or Gandhi. It’s not as though non-Western philosophy only existed anciently.) And, of course, no Hegel. And this should be clear: trying to appreciate Marx philosophically without giving due credit to Hegel is simply impossible. So to include the latter but not the former shows some pretty cracked intellectual priorities on the part of those who did the nominating.

My personal favorite out of those left out: Rousseau. Granted, Hume was a better philosopher, as well as a better person. But Rousseau has the advantage over Hume for having actually struggled with something important.

I was torn on the Greeks, but since Socrates’ advocate was Karen Armstrong, who I worship slavishly, I had no choice.

I’d vote for all the epigones.

So, Gordon Banks in goal…

Banks in for the absent Leibniz, I suppose?

The Germans playing 4-2-4, Leibniz in goal, back four Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schelling, front-runners Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the mid-field duo of Beckenbauer and Jaspers. Beckenbauer obviously a bit of a surprise there.

I still think they’re going to suffer without Hegel in central defence, though.

I cheated and voted twice. (Once from my work IP address and once from my home IP address – what a clever cheat am I.) And I was doubly selfish, I didn’t vote for “greatest” as viewed from Olympus; I defined “greatness” as “who did the most for me.”

Because I work for a living, of the twenty candidates maybe a third are open, active enemies, almost all the rest were loftily indifferent to my low crummy sort. From work I voted for the one and only positive advocate I’ve got on the ballot, Uncle Karl. At home I live my home life, such as it is. Natch, from there I could not vote for anyone else but my man Arthur, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres, who writes:

…If now, from the standpoint of this last consideration, we contemplate the turmoil of life, we behold all occupied with its want and misery, straining all their powers to satisfy its infinite needs and to ward off its multifarious sorrows, yet without daring to hope anything else than simply the preservation of this tormented existence for a short span of time. In between, however, in the midst of the tumult, we see the glances of two lovers meet longingly; yet why so secretly, fearfully, and stealthily? Because the lovers are the traitors who seek to perpetuate the whole want and drudgery, which would otherwise speedily reach an end; this they wish to frustrate, as others like them have frustrated it before.

I wouldn’t have believed that In Our Time’s PR wheeze would succeed so brilliantly. How many browser and column inches are they reaping from this, and how much would that have cost to buy? Fair play to ’em, I say. BBC Radio’s IOT (oh alright, and the sportsy Fighting Talk) broke me to PodCasting. The commute is a lot easier with an IOT in one’s headphones.

Oh, and Firstest with the Mostest, surely – Plato.

you would find fewer than a dozen jokes, ten of them in Schopenhauer.

There’s passages in Hume that raise a chuckle too.

“Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they every where rejected by men of sense… A gloomy, hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself.”

Makes me laugh, anyway.

It’s Johnson’s putdown then:

“Prof. Ayer, your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

Kant, obviously.

He has jokes too; just not good ones.

(Kierkegaard is really funny, though.)

Ok, this might have been said, but I still want to say it myself.

No Hegel, but Heidegger.
No Frege, but Russell.
No Adi Shankara (or even a single non-european), but Epicurus
No LEIBNIZ, but Schopenhauer (!)

What a dumb poll.

I’m voting for Barney.

What, no Gottlob Frege?

Since he wasn’t on the list, I voted for the Scotsman. I was kind of torn between him and the Konigsberger.

I’ve always thought the Greeks were a bit overrated.