Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:
Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.
And here’s Group B:
Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.
Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?
Answer under the cut, but… stare at those two lists. Take a moment; give it a try. Do you see it?
Hints: It’s something pretty straightforward. Frege is an edge case. And while Rousseau is formally part of Group B, he really belongs with Group A.
If you have a guess, put it in a comment, then come and look.
Group A never had children. Group B did.
Frege is an edge case because he and his wife had two children that died in infancy, but then years later they adopted a boy and raised him as their own. Rousseau is formally part of Group B because he did have children, but then he abandoned them as babies to an orphanage. But I set the bar low, at “had kids” rather than “raised kids / acted as a parent”, because it was more clear and simple, so he slips in.
This was triggered by this Aeon essay about the late Mary Midgley. Midgley was a feminist philosopher who pointed out that most Western philosophers were not only men, but single unmarried man. This, she suggested, led to some deep problems with their thinking:
“None of these [great] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children, which is, after all, quite an important aspect of human life. I wrote [‘Rings and Books’] drawing attention to this statistic and asking whether it might not account for a certain over-abstractness, a certain remoteness from life, in the European philosophical tradition.”
Midgley apparently took particular beef with Descartes and the “problem of other minds”:
I wonder whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience. But you don’t get it in examples in the textbooks. It is supposed to be an irrational topic.
Okay, so that got me thinking. The biological experience of motherhood — pregnancy, nursing — isn’t available to half the human race. But the social experience of parenthood? Of engaging with and raising a young human from infancy to adulthood? That is at least potentially available to almost everyone, and always has been. In fact, for much of human history, most adults were either parents, or trying to be.
Yet if you look at those two groups — which includes the top 25 philosophers from this list (h/t Brian Leiter), along with a scattering of others — you’ll see that Group A is comfortably larger, by about 3 to 2. A clear majority of “canonical” philosophers have been childless. And this has been true for a very long time.
— Let me pause here to note while Midgley focused on marriage, unmarried and childless are two different things. A startling number of philosophers, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, were married but had no children. (Which raises its own set of interesting questions, but never mind that now.) Meanwhile Descartes never married, but had a daughter with one of his servants. (And _pace_ Midgley, he seems to have been reasonably engaged with the daughter, maintaining a relationship with her until his death.)
So. Do we see any patterns? Well, a couple of names in Group A were priests. But only a couple; and plenty of priests had children, and then of course there’s dear old Bishop Berkeley. And a number of names are either known or generally believed to have been asexual or gay. But again, only a few. We could remove these guys, and Aquinas and Scotus too, and Group A would still be very large.
So the question remains: why were so many major Western philosophers childless?
One simple and obvious answer is that philosophy requires solitude for thought. Children are a huge distraction! Basically the Room Of One’s Own argument. 
I don’t buy it for a moment.
Multiple reasons. First, Virginia Woolf was talking about writing. Writing is an inherently solitary action. Thinking is not. You can do philosophy in a crowd. Socrates and Plato did exactly that!
Second, look again at Group A. Many of those guys lived very busy and active lives, full of friendship, correspondence, professional achievement, and every sort of social interaction. Bacon was a lawyer, courtier, diplomat and Member of Parliament who served for years as Attorney General and then Chancellor. Hume was a diplomatic secretary, university librarian and historian who had a network of friends spread across two continents; his correspondence fills volumes. Leibniz was a diplomat and courtier who was deeply involved in politics for forty years. Sartre was an international celebrity and political activist who was always juggling affairs; he was constantly making public appearances and had sexual relations with over a hundred women. These guys didn’t need long hours of solitude to generate philosophical thoughts.
And third, for most of Western history, fatherhood was much, much less demanding than motherhood. Consider Karl Marx. He had four children who survived infancy, and he seems to have been a moderately affectionate parent. But he could spend as much or as little time with them as he cared to, because the heavy lifting of child care was done by his wife and the occasional servant.
And this was true of almost every man in Group B. Fathers could walk away. It seems very unlikely that Heidegger or Bertrand Russell ever changed a diaper. And if Hegel or Dewey or Camus needed a room of his own, he could always find one.
Keep in mind that I’m setting the bar really low here. Bad dads, deadbeat dads, dads who neglected their kids… I mean, I let Rousseau in. The qualification for Group B is just, have a kid. One kid. Yet a clear majority of major western philosophers couldn’t manage that.
Finally, I don’t think we see this level of childlessness in other intellectual or creative professions. Consider… oh, composition of classical music. That’s a highly intellectual and creative endeavor that really does require long periods of solitary concentration. I grabbed a randomly chosen list of “greatest classical music composers of all time” off google. Here are the first 20.
No kids: Beethoven, Hildegard von Bingen, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Schubert, Chopin. (Two people in religious orders, one gay man.)
One or more kids: Bach, Mozart, Monteverdi, Handel, Debussy, Schumann, Elgar, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, Saint-Saens, Stravinsky.
Among composers, parents outnumber nonparents almost 2 to 1. Okay, let’s pick a different intellectual profession. How about, let’s say, physicists? Grab a random list, pick the top 25?
No kids: Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Meitner, Pauli, Fourier, Kelvin, Carnot
One or more kids: Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Feynman, Fermi, Bohr, Rutherford, Dirac, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bose, Weinberg, Boltzmann, Poincare, Michelson, Gauss
Kids outnumber no-kids two to one. Apparently physicists and composers could consistently find time to have children.
So I’m really not impressed by the idea that philosophers simply couldn’t do philosophy if kids were in the house. If Einstein and Mozart and Galileo and Gauss and Bach and Socrates could get the job done while being a parent, surely Wittgenstein or Bentham could have managed it too.
More seriously, while all professions are going to include both parents and non-parents, the proportion of non-parents among philosophers seems unusually high. And this was true even in premodern societies where most adults were parents. And it seems to have stayed true well into the 20th century.
This leads to a number of other interesting questions, such as “has this had an influence on Western philosophy, and if so, what”. But let’s leave that for the moment. First: is this a correct observation? Historically, have philosophers really tended to be childless at an unusually high rate?
And if so… why?
{ 78 comments… read them below or add one }
MisterMr 03.17.25 at 9:22 am
Jungian explanation[fn1]: philosophy, being funadamentally an occupation where one overthinks his/her own thoughts, is usually done by introverts.
Introverts are not necessarily shy, they might have many social relations, but only when they control those social relation (e.g. they will love discussions abut their interests, but they will find it difficult when other people are thinking about stuff they’re not interested in and expect their opinions).
So the many philosophers who had a rich social life were introverts who were able to pull other people in their area of interest, not really extroverts.
There is the assumption that introverts will have less kids/don’t marry.
[fn1]: many, many years ago I read Jung’s psychological types and it stuck with me, although it is not considered scientific.
Matt 03.17.25 at 10:57 am
To some degree this will be sensative to who is included in the list, of course. (This is even more so if we take Midgley’s original claim about “married or had children”, but is so even if we take “had children” as the standard.) We can add in Cicero and Seneca, Ficthe, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, G.E. Moore, Carnap and Reichenbach (both easily as “great” as Popper, if not more), Hilary Putnam, William James, and others. Once we exlcude the Catholic priests/monks (though even Augustin had a child), and the gay men, then one group that stands out is the “real weirdos”. There’s also the “died young” – Kiekegaard, Ramsey (not listed, but a strong case). Once we get to that point, I wonder if there’s really such a clear phenomena anymore. And, by that point, the explanation, if one is needed, it probably too various to draw too much of a conclusion.
engels 03.17.25 at 11:11 am
None of these [great] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children, which is, after all, quite an important aspect of human life.
A few years ago, Angela Leadsom was cancelled for saying something very similar to this. Maybe she should have run for leader of the APA instead of the Tory party?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36752865
Stephen 03.17.25 at 11:35 am
Minor point.
Childless British philosophers: Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing.
British philosophers with children: Bishop George Berkeley, Bertrand Russell.
Childless British physicists: Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin
British physicists with children: nil.
There is only one British composer listed, Elgar (with children), and this is of low statistical significance.
So it looks as if the childlessness effect is even stronger in Britain than elsewhere.
Possible explanations?
Stephen 03.17.25 at 11:38 am
Should have added: But also, the childlessness effect in Britain is even stronger in physicists than in philosophers.
engels 03.17.25 at 12:03 pm
First: is this a correct observation? Historically, have philosophers really tended to be childless at an unusually high rate?
I believe so: Anthony Kenny also mentions it in his history of philosophy.
M Caswell 03.17.25 at 12:27 pm
Maybe philosophical reflection is demanding in a certain way other intellectual pursuits aren’t. It is true that children and spouses could have been in a sense ignored, but maybe the thinkers in question would have found that objectionable. (Rousseau was not admired as a social model.) The ‘distraction’ (for lack of a better term) thesis, broadly considered, is actually attested by some of Group A themselves. Were they mistaken about their own decisions?
To say that a religious contemplative like Aquinas didn’t have children because he was a priest just pushes the question back a step. Why was he a priest? (Augustine is an interesting case– belongs in Group B, but post-kid chose celibacy. Why?) Also, what are the stats for ‘eastern’ philosophers? Finally, I can think of a few women philosophers, as well, who made the Group A choice.
Dave Maier 03.17.25 at 1:46 pm
I was once in a group of people which included two philosophy graduate students, me and one other, both male. One of the other people asked us why we went to graduate school in philosophy. I said “to meet girls!” This cracked the other guy up so much he had trouble breathing for several minutes.
Mike Huben 03.17.25 at 2:10 pm
“Assume a woman…”
J, not that one 03.17.25 at 2:14 pm
The point of the OP is to point out to women that philosophy is a thing that has a history, and that history is one of men without families, who think about ideas rather than reality for that reason, and that women interested in history have to accommodate ourselves to that . . . correct?
The rules about married dons at Oxbridge may have something to do with it, but I’m hesitant to say that because I’m sure I’m missing the point. This is the Internet after all, and the goal is surely to allow born philosophers worldwide to participate.
Slanted Answer 03.17.25 at 2:23 pm
Really enjoyed the post.
One correction: If we go by the low bar standard, Schopenhauer should be in Group B:
https://lennysarchive.wordpress.com/2024/06/05/schopenhauers-children-examining-the-evidence/
Octavian 03.17.25 at 2:36 pm
Loneliness and personal anguish or pain in general might push people toward contemplation or to search for something beyond mere sensual gratification. People who live in pleasure and comfort, the two things most humans strive, unthinking, towards, might not feel any need or desire to rethink existence except as a vehicle to better maximize their own and their friend’s pleasures by elevating their statuses in the world.
But my question is why do you think this is unique among “western” philosophers? Do eastern philosophers tend to have children more frequently than western philosophers?
Alan White 03.17.25 at 3:00 pm
Ok no peek. I’d wager idealists A and Realists B, of some sort.
steven t johnson 03.17.25 at 3:18 pm
Insofar as it is true…Because philosophy as a social activity overlaps with religion, save that the philosopher speaks on his own authority with his unique rationalizations. When cultural tradition tacitly assumes that the philosopher, like official priests, should be unmarried, officially celibate? Religious authorities are in many cultures set apart and that often includes not being a regular part of a kinship group.
CarlD 03.17.25 at 3:29 pm
This feels a bit like the argument that scientific innovation is related to family birth order and disproportionately achieved by laterborns. It’s got a spicy plausibility but breaks down around the definition of terms and selection of the data set.
I think it’s important about Wittgenstein that he taught elementary school. Confounds all of the gay childless weirdo man reductions, without of course ruling them out as dimensions of a properly complex analysis.
I was also reminded of the classic The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (1979), where anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood argue that the periodicity of tasks is a primary marker of status. High-frequency, non-postponable entropic tasks describable as chores are the specialty of women, children, and servants. This is economically rational, they propose, in the way that any specialization is.
“Thus, the division of labor between the sexes is set, the world over, by the best possible economic principles as follows: work frequencies tend to cluster into complementary role categories. These differentiate upward: the higher the status, the less periodicity constraints; the lower the status, the greater the periodicity constraints” (86).
It follows that “[a]nyone with influence and status would be a fool to get encumbered with a high-frequency responsibility (86-7).”
As women and poc keep pointing out about committee and advising work.
Michael Cain 03.17.25 at 3:43 pm
I picked, at random, one of the many lists of the 25 greatest mathematicians. There are many such lists, with all sorts of criteria. A superficial search (Wikipedia and possibly a couple of their references) yields: nine that are not known, nine with zero children, and seven with children. The group of unknowns are Arab, Chinese, Indian, or ancient Greek. The zero group includes Emmy Noether, the only woman on the list, and Abel and Galois who both died young. Euler, who is #1 on many of the lists and makes almost everyone’s top five, had 13 children.
To Dave Maier @8, I was at a party in college where a woman asked my major. When I told her math, she said, “Oh, you can’t be a math major, you’re much too normal.”
J, not that one 03.17.25 at 4:11 pm
“ I was also reminded of the classic The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (1979), where anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood argue that the periodicity of tasks is a primary marker of status. High-frequency, non-postponable entropic tasks describable as chores are the specialty of women, children, and servants. This is economically rational, they propose, in the way that any specialization is.”
This is interesting to compare with standard books on organization that use (uncredited) the Eisenhower grid, and even more “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” These books break out tasks that either have to be done in a specific timeframe, or will have to be done again, as the kind of thing the reader should ignore or delegate to someone else. The Seven Habits book advises the reader that people who are always doing tasks that have to be done today are people who are rightly viewed as slovenly and untrustworthy. (The latter book is somewhat more focused on daily household life, at least to the extent of implying that if you plan ahead and are regular in your habits, things like mowing the lawn won’t count as “urgent tasks that have to be done now” but as something more high-status.)
Edward Harsen 03.17.25 at 5:08 pm
Two things: the prevailing criteria which drives popularity of philosophical texts cannot be measured statistically, so such a list is not even eligible for the gedanken experiment; looking at the childless men I know (outside the clergy and LGBTQ), I think it likely that these men were simply insufferable in their social lives.
Kenny Easwaran 03.17.25 at 8:17 pm
I think the difference between 60% childless (philosophers) and 30% childless (physicists) is maybe only slightly more significant than the difference between 30% childless (physicists) and 15% childless (contemporary Americans). And my guess is that in the historical periods these people lived, the percent childless for a lifetime is even smaller.
There’s something weird about all these groups of people, even if philosophers are weirder in this particular way.
(But it’s also notable that if you break out “rationalists” vs “empiricists”, the tendency seems to be even stronger among “rationalists”. I put these in quotes because the terms aren’t really clear for a lot of these people.)
oldster 03.17.25 at 8:32 pm
“Now, some people are pregnant in body, and for this reason turn more ?to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness, as they think,? for all time to come; while others are pregnant in soul—because there surely are those who are even more pregnant in their souls than in their bodies, and these are pregnant with what is fitting for a soul to bear and bring to birth. And what is fitting? Wisdom and the rest of virtue…such people, therefore, have much more to share than do the parents of human children, and have a firmer bond of friendship, because the children in whom they have a share are more beautiful and more immortal. Everyone would rather have such children than human ones, and would look up to Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets with envy and admiration for the offspring they have left behind—offspring, which, because they are immortal themselves, provide their parents with immortal glory and remembrance.”
Symposium 209, Plato sock-puppeting Socrates sock-puppeting Diotima.
SusanC 03.17.25 at 9:25 pm
There is an anti-philosophy argument to the effect that philosophy in the western tradition is stupid, and we should stop doing it. (See, e.g., Wittgenstein)
So one theory you could have is that the encounter with the reality of bringing up children suffices, in many cases, to disabuse people of the idea that philosophy is a worthwhile activity.
====
Priests, gay, or too weird to get laid would also explain many of the examples.
Jonathan Hallam 03.17.25 at 10:25 pm
My money would be on memes sabotaging genes, but who knows? I.e. they are host to a kind of mind-virus that sabotages the body (ie the genes) ability to reproduce in order to maximise their own memetic propagation.
Milan 03.18.25 at 12:48 am
The optimistic (?) answer might be: It is hard to be a philosopher and a good parent, and philosophers are unusually conscientious. Thus, they’d rather be childless than be a bad parent. I’m not sure if I buy that though….
Dogen 03.18.25 at 2:19 am
Thank you for an amusing and diverting game.
What stands out to me the most is the recurring thought: “So many centuries, and so few names!”
Could there be a better example of what statisticians call “chasing noise?” ;-)
Alan White 03.18.25 at 2:58 am
@19 “(But it’s also notable that if you break out “rationalists” vs “empiricists”, the tendency seems to be even stronger among “rationalists”. I put these in quotes because the terms aren’t really clear for a lot of these people.)”
Now I don’t feel so bad about my guess about idealists versus realists, mapping on KE’s comment.
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 03.18.25 at 4:05 am
Alan Turing was a philosopher?
John Q 03.18.25 at 6:21 am
I was entirely unaware/unconscious of this biographical fact, except in a couple of cases (Marx, because I’d read descriptions of his home life and Turing, obviously).
Matt 03.18.25 at 6:22 am
Stephen @4:
There are plenty of counter-examples: Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, Max Born, and Rodger Penrose all had kids—and three of them won the Nobel Prize.
Chris Bertram 03.18.25 at 9:37 am
The problem here is that the groupings of A and B are really quite arbitrary, exclude lots of philosophers, include people who are not philosophers etc and others who were not thought of as philosophers when they were active. You really can’t then write about the relative sizes of such groups as evidence of anything very much. If you take a group of contemporaneous philosophers active at the same time: Hume, Smith, Hutcheson, Stewart, Reid, then while the first two were childless (as far as we know) the latter three had lots.
Matt 03.18.25 at 10:31 am
To add to my first comment (Matt at 28 isn’t me, but it also goes along the same line), and Dogen at 24, at least part of SusanC at 21, and Chris at 29, one of the important things I learned in grad school was, before you start looking for what explains a phenomenon, it’s important to be sure that there’s a clear phenomenon to be explained. I’m not all that sure there is one here, or at least not a unified one.
novakant 03.18.25 at 11:19 am
It would be interesting to see how that applies to philosophers born after WW2 or only those working today. With many caveats, I do think it has an impact on your outlook on life and my guess is that the profession has been normalised to an extent. I’m glad that gay and lesbian philosophers are not automatically excluded anymore.
Doug Muir 03.18.25 at 11:20 am
@30 and @29, that is literally my question: is there a phenomenon here? I think there is, but I’m open to evidence otherwise.
@Chris @29, they’re not actually arbitrary. I started with Brian Leiter’s Top 25 philosophers, which was chosen by polling a couple of hundred philosophy professors. That broke something like 16-9. I then googled “top philosophers”, “most famous philosophers”, and “most important philosophers” until I had another dozen or so names to add.
You can absolutely argue with this methodology! But it’s not arbitrary. These are the guys who The Internet is calling the most important, discussed, famous philosophers. A bit more seriously, I think this list includes pretty much all the guys who’ll get name-checked if someone says “What is the Canon of Western Philosophy?”
Would any broadly accepted list of “top 40 philosophers” be very different from this one? A couple of names might be missing, a few names might be added. But /very/ different?
But if you don’t like it, no worries. Can you think of a methodology that’s better? And if so, does it give different results?
Doug M.
novakant 03.18.25 at 11:23 am
Picking up on my last thought, I would say that the criterion “had kids” is actually unintentionally discriminatory, also towards adoptive parents or those raising children in other settings.
Doug Muir 03.18.25 at 11:23 am
@26, “Alan Turing was a philosopher?”
— His entry in the Stamford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy is over 10,000 words long, so I’d call that a “yes”.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 03.18.25 at 11:34 am
Oldster @19, there are a number of philosophers I would describe as downright hostile to children, and Plato is near the top of that list. Topic for another post, perhaps.
I will say that when writing this post it did occur to me that (1) one of the biggest cultural differences between Greeks and Romans was the Roman obsession with family, and the near-obsessive need to perpetuate the family, including through adoption if necessary; and (2) the Romans didn’t produce nearly as many philosophers as the Greeks, and basically none that were A-list.
Octavian @12, “But my question is why do you think this is unique among “western” philosophers? Do eastern philosophers tend to have children more frequently than western philosophers?”
— I have no idea whether it’s unique! I kept it to Western philosophers because that’s a relatively small and well-defined group.
That said, I will note that the two non-Western philosophers who are household names — Buddha and Confucius — both had kids.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 03.18.25 at 12:04 pm
Novakant @31, “It would be interesting to see how that applies to philosophers born after WW2 or only those working today.”
— I have the very strong impression that it applies to philosophers born after WWII just fine. Of course, most modern philosophers are academics, and modern academics aren’t exactly famous for large families either.
Novakant @33, “I would say that the criterion “had kids” is actually unintentionally discriminatory, also towards adoptive parents or those raising children in other settings.”
— I pointed out in the OP that I was included adoptive parent Frege, so I’m not sure I see the problem here. Adoptive parents are parents.
Doug M.
Ian Douglas RushlauRushlau 03.18.25 at 12:21 pm
I thought Midgley’s point was whether the philosophical perspectives of a childless male, especially an unmarried childless male, would be influenced either by their lack of direct experience, as adults, with parenting, or if one were the proverbial perpetual bachelor, lack of experience establishing and maintaining a committed relationship with a romantic companion.
Similarly, one might ask why the postulations of men who never assumed the responsibilities, or permitted themselves the joys and sorrows of raising children with a lifelong partner, would be idealized as guidebooks to understanding the world or living a meaningful life.
What Midgley seemed to suggest was that the unmarried, childless males would formulate attitudes born of a certain isolation and alienation from intimate relationships; in fact quite a few of those revered in the academic world as philosophers were outright dismissive of this fundamental aspect of human life, not merely for perpetuation of the species, but as the very core of our social nature as humans, our basic humanity.
I doubt that childless perpetual bachelors actually represent the majority of those who pursued philosophy as a vocation, even in antiquity. Rather, there has been an oddly systematic valorization of the writings of this unusual demographic, and it begs the question what might prompt the generations of self-appointed arbiters of what constitutes philosophizing worthy of inclusion in ‘The Western Canon’ to over-select from this peculiar cohort, to proclaim them as icons and avatars of the intellect.
Enough to make one wonder what unexpressed motives prompted the self-appointed arbiters of ‘The Western Canon’ to do so.
engels 03.18.25 at 12:36 pm
Here’s what Kenny says, if anyone is interested:
Mike Huben 03.18.25 at 12:44 pm
A few years ago, I wondered about the same thing with libertarians, since they have a very poor track record of making their philosophy work with children.
It’s interesting to note that of the most important libertarian authors, only
Milton Friedman and Nozick had children. Children and their concerns are pretty much
absent from all those authors except Friedman.
Mises: married, had no children.
Hayek: unmarried, had no children.
Rothbard: married, had no children.
Rand: married, had no children.
Friedman, Milton: married, had children
Nozick: married, had one child. He discusses only ownership of children.
I just noticed also that Rose Wilder Lane and Alfred J. Nock also were childless.
Still, it’s a small enough sample size that I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions.
novakant 03.18.25 at 1:18 pm
Sorry Doug, I missed that.
MisterMr 03.18.25 at 3:09 pm
Still going with Jung, originally Jung proposed only two personalities, the introvert and the extrovert, but later came out with a more complex system with 8 “types”, the original ones correspont to the “introvert tought” and “extrovert feeling” types.
In Jung description, the “feeling” and “tought” attitudes are strongly gendered, and obviously depend on the logic that women are the “angel of the fireplace” (feelings) whereas men are the hard nosed breadwinners (tought; the hardnosed businessowner is the example of the “extrovert tought” type).
A question arises on what does the word “rationality” mean.
Jung considers both “feelings” and “tought” as two opposed kinds of rationality, however if people by “rational” mean what Jung calls “tought” (that implicitly works by repressing “feelings”).
This is a weird definition of “rationality” but not so strange when, for example, most ancient philosophy has the ideal of controlling one’s own emotions.
So there is a question about what the concept of “rationality” is supposed to mean (though this is not so related to having childs, but is IMHO closer to what Midgley meant, at least in terms of traditional gender roles).
sy 03.18.25 at 3:13 pm
1) I’ve thought about this a bit in the early modern/Enlightenment context. Not only did Smith, Hume, Gibbon, and Kant not have kids, but there is no strong evidence that any of them ever had sex with anyone. Pretty wild that three of those four are among the most important foundations for our modern ideas about social organization and moral obligation!
2) I like to point out that on average Handel and Bach had nine kids each.
SusanC 03.18.25 at 7:32 pm
Others in the thread have pointed out that this might not be a real phenomenon, but, assuming that it is for the sake of argument …
Philosophy in these western tradition has a certain amount of distain for embodiment and the physical world; so maybe there’s a correlation between that attitude and not being in to sex, having children etc.
engels 03.18.25 at 8:23 pm
It seems like quite a lot of the comments that aren’t rejecting the premise are basically JD Vance’s opinions about “childless cat ladies” applied to men/metaphysics.
Matt 03.18.25 at 9:44 pm
Doug at 32 – if you look at the “top 30” on that list (I’m not sure we know anything reliable about Heraclitus and am unsure about democritus, so I’ll stop at 30) you get 14 with children, 16 without. Then, if you look at those 16, there are lots of plausible reasons, but they are all various – priest/monk, died young, gay man, tragic love-life that prevented marriage until too late, extreme weirdo, etc. So, even looking there, I don’t think there’s something that can be seen as a “phenomenon” in any clear way. And then, when you expand (as you’d want to do – it would be surprising if anything could be drawn from such a small list) the list and results gets really sensitive to who is included. So, I think, “not much to see here, and certainly not enough to draw any conclusion from” has to be the answer.
As to Kenny’s list noted by engles, it is mildly interesting, but even more obviously cherry-picked, and again due to a wildly different set of reasons (as he himself obviously knew.) So, again, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s much here once we push a bit.
Doug Muir 03.18.25 at 10:22 pm
Matt @43, firm disagreement.
First off, looking at the top 30 of Leiter’s list, I see Aristotle, Descartes, Socrates, Marx, Frege, Hegel, Russell, Berkeley, Quine, Rousseau, Rawls, and Carnap in Group B. That’s just 12, not 14. Am I missing someone?
Next, with regard to the last two, Democritus was an outright anti-natalist and Heraclitus was a notorious misanthrope. So while we don’t know for sure, I’d say they’re both almost certainly in Group A. Leiter’s list ends at 32, so if I’m counting right that would be 12 parents, 20 childless.
But even if we disqualify the two poorly attested Greeks and I’m somehow counting the
others wrong, and it’s 14-16, then that is still strange. I don’t see any other intellectual profession where the top 30 (or top 25 or 40 or 50) is dominated by a clear majority of childless. Lots of professions have priests and monks — there were several among the composers — and gay men, geniuses who died young, and eccentric oddballs not suited for family life. But we’re not seeing any other profession where the childless are a clear majority.
Again — historically, most adults have been parents. In premodern and early modern societies, basically everyone was expected to produce children. Even in the USA today, in 2025, about 70% of adults are already parents.
So a majority childless group is noticeably strange. If it’s a big majority, it’s beyond strange and into weird. But even if the majority is relatively modest, it’s still odd.
Doug M.
novakant 03.18.25 at 10:32 pm
Funny how Kenny has Hegel as a childless bachelor: he was married with three kids, one of them a very prominent historian.
oldster 03.18.25 at 10:58 pm
Anthony Kenny is being uncharacteristically careless in his report of Thales. He is relying on the evidence of Diogenes Laertius, who lived almost 800 (!) years after Thales. Laertius had no well-sourced information, just gossip that had been generated in the intervening centuries. (Laertius can quote none of Thales’ writings, and indeed refers to “some” who said he wrote nothing.)
Kenny also excerpts in a misleading way. Here is the larger quotation:
“Some authorities say that he married and had a son Cybisthus; others that he remained unmarried and adopted his sister’s son, and that when he was asked why he had no children of his own he replied “because he loved children.””
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1
There were no “authorities” — it was all just gossip and speculation by then — but it is worth noting that two of these “authorities” make Thales a parent (natural or adoptive), and none makes him childless. Accordingly, Kenny’s quotation of the line about “why he had no children” distorts the only evidence — such as it is — that we have. Kenny is a great scholar, but this report was more for amusement than for enlightenment.
Paul delany 03.18.25 at 11:53 pm
I wrote about this, with regard to Isaiah Berlin:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349697333_Isaiah_Berlin_and_the_Animal_Instinct
Matt 03.19.25 at 2:22 am
Am I missing someone?
Augustine – who had an (illegitimate) son before his conversion. I’d thought David Lewis had kids, but I was wrong there, so it’s 13, not 14. But, I think you’re too certain on people we legitimately know very little about, and for the others, again, the reasons are so various that I really think it’s a mistake to think there’s any conclsion to draw. That’s even before any line drawing issues come up, though they are not trivial.
A Different Matt 03.19.25 at 3:54 am
Freud should be included in B (in light of several books arguing he counts as a philosopher).
Doug Muir 03.19.25 at 8:54 am
Paul @39, what a great article!
Also, I guess we add Berlin to the pile of “married, but childless”. There are a surprising lot of these, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. Which suggests that a lot of philosophers were either married and not having sex, or married and having sex but practicing some form of birth control long term.
Doug M.
Zamfir 03.19.25 at 9:52 am
@Doug, there is third possibility, besides not having much sex and practicing birth control . Namely, having children might change the way men write, in a way that makes it less likely that they join future lists of famous philosophers. That mechanism would work on men who do not had much sex with women or who practiced birth control, but also on men who didn’t have children through random effects of fertility.
Matt 03.19.25 at 10:03 am
Which suggests that a lot of philosophers were either married and not having sex
This is very likely the case for Henry Sidgwick, who hasn’t been mentioned. But in his case (as with some of the others here, I suspect) it’s likely because he was gay, though perhaps not actively a gay man sexually as an adult, either. Some of them may well have been having sex, but with men, even though married to women.
Thinking about this a bit more, I suppse you can take as a sort of “high level” “explanation” that philosophers are somewhat (not all of them, and not totally, for most of them, but somewhat) less likely to care about social conventions than average, and so to give more weight to the variety of more specific reasons that don’t lend themselves to any good generalization.
novakant 03.19.25 at 12:16 pm
Funny how Kenny thinks Hegel was a childless bachelor, while he was married with three children, one of whom was a renowned historian.
Tm 03.19.25 at 2:31 pm
It may matter that the most influential intellectual force in Western history, the Christian church, has since at least Augustine held and maintained that sex is inherently sinful and that the most virtuous lifestyle consists in abstinence and childlessness.
PatinIowa 03.19.25 at 5:51 pm
I suspect that Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own,” theory still has some purchase. Nobody gets ranked as an important philosopher without somebody writing something down. After all, Socrates needed time to walk up and down talking to his adherents, and they needed time first, to listen to him, and second, to record what they heard.
It would be interesting to see if there were a positive correlation between pragmatism and parenting. I’m betting not.
A couple of random things: Derrida’s three children show up in Marguerite Aucouturier’s Wikipedia article, not his, which is telling, I think.
Marie and Pierre Curie had two daughters. They also had nannies galore.
Andrew 03.19.25 at 7:02 pm
Not sure if it is relevant, but the writer Milan Kundera (who himself did not have children) wrote this about the history of the novel:
I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaasons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil’s major characters…and Kafka’s protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason — to erase the infant from his life — that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.
engels 03.19.25 at 10:31 pm
Btw if anyone thinks not having 2.4 children is weird, wait till you hear some of these guys’ opinions!
Austin G Loomis 03.20.25 at 2:51 am
Answer as blind as I can get: I see Group A as heavily into the noumenal/abstract (intellectual) and Group B as more focused on the phenomenal/concrete (material).
oldster 03.20.25 at 12:43 pm
” Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. ”
Kundera’s memory fails him. Tom Jones is married in the final chapter, to his beloved Sophia, and in one of the final paragraphs of the book we read a description of Tom and Sophia several years later living with Sophia’s elderly father (the “old gentleman” below):
“Sophia hath already produced him [sc. TJ] two fine children, a boy and a girl, of whom the old gentleman is so fond, that he spends much of his time in the nursery, where he declares the tattling of his little grand-daughter, who is above a year and a half old, is sweeter music than the finest cry of dogs in England.”
It’s a bit silly to observe that the heroes of comedies are generally childless, given that one of the central markers of the genre is that they culminate in the marriage of the hero.
marcel proust 03.20.25 at 1:30 pm
I am reminded of my favorite passage from Plato: Book 1 of the Republic.
Socrates is visiting Polemarchus and his father Cephalus. Socrates is apparently much younger than Cephalus and asks him what to expect when he too is old. The nut graf is:
I remember hearing Sophocles the poet greeted by a fellow who asked, ‘How about your service of Aphrodite, Sophocles—is your natural force still unabated?’ And he replied, ‘Hush, man, most gladly have I escaped this thing you talk of, as if I had run away from a raging and savage beast of a master.’ I thought it a good answer then and now I think so still more. For in very truth there comes to old age a great tranquility in such matters and a blessed release. When the fierce tensions of the passions and desires relax, then is the word of Sophocles approved, and we are rid of many and mad masters.
Someone who approves this view of sex and is willing to express it, especially before experiencing this “blessed release” (According to Claude, Plato is thought to have been no more than early 50s when he composed The Republic), is unlikely to look with approval on the fruits of the libido (i.e., children). oldster’s comment@20 above makes this inference explicit.
John Q 03.24.25 at 6:51 am
In one of the coincidences that seems to happen whenever I pick up a book these days, I just started reading a novel by Alexander McCall Smith The Careful Use of Compliments. The protagonist is a female philosopher with a young baby, wondering how Kant (List A) would have done trying to raise a baby. Meanwhile, she is busy editing a journal’s special issue on the ethics of migration policy.
JW the Hoople 03.25.25 at 6:14 pm
Others have pointed it out, but there are many reasons that a person in general, and a man in particular, doesn’t have children, and many of these are more pronounced the further back you go. And we get lots of crossover between groups. I’ve dealt with Newton enough that I’m positive that he was queer – likely gay or asexual by today’s terms, which would have been meaningless back then. Similarly, I can’t fathom that French mathematician and jurist Francois Viete was straight by our modern way of thinking, yet he was married and had children.
All this to say that there seem to be way too many factors to make such a reductivist argument.
John pettigrew 03.26.25 at 1:51 pm
My children = joy and sorrow!
clew 03.27.25 at 3:00 am
Seconding Zamfir’s point that the difference may be entirely in the reception of “childless philosophy”, especially if that’s reliably more abstract than the kids kind.
How many of the childed wrote important work both before and after? Did it change?
(Frege counts no question, and twice – both for raising a child and for losing two. Maybe extra for those extremes of experience.)
thechandra 03.27.25 at 10:38 am
Interesting…given that Western Philosophy’s canonical origins with Socrates,and Plato clearly relegated women and procreation to baser roles compared to male friendship, love, thinking and success is this really surprising?
Matt 03.27.25 at 11:39 am
Socrates,and Plato clearly relegated women and procreation to baser roles compared to male friendship, love, thinking and success is this really surprising?
Is this one of those “tell me you’ve not read The Republic without telling me you’ve not read The Republic” sort of jokes?
M Caswell 03.27.25 at 3:03 pm
“Socrates,and Plato clearly relegated women and procreation to baser roles compared to male friendship, love, thinking and success”
Plato has Socrates argue in the Republic that women should receive the same education as men, so as to also become philosopher kings. In the Symposium, Socrates depicts himself as philosophical friends with a (wiser) woman.
clew 03.27.25 at 9:43 pm
Primogeniture? That is, a man either inherits everything and is too busy in the world to be an abstract thinker, or inherits at best a sufficiency and has the time to think but not enough money to marry?
(AIUI lots of people Before Fossil Wealth didn’t marry or have children. Which I remember partly from a mathematical modeling class, with an example modeling when patronyms would be extinguished, and one of the real data sets being from China, the other … I think France, from wills.)
Robert Banks 03.29.25 at 9:12 pm
Is there a connection to the requirement for, or rule of, clerical celibacy?
Fake Dave 03.29.25 at 9:27 pm
I’m with Ian at #37:
I doubt that childless perpetual bachelors actually represent the majority of those who pursued philosophy as a vocation, even in antiquity. Rather, there has been an oddly systematic valorization of the writings of this unusual demographic, and it begs the question what might prompt the generations of self-appointed arbiters of what constitutes philosophizing worthy of inclusion in ‘The Western Canon’ to over-select from this peculiar cohort, to proclaim them as icons and avatars of the intellect.”
Several people here and elsewhere have suggested a throughline in “western” culture of Platonic abstraction and disembodiment filtered through the misogyny and fear of mortal sin of various “Church Fathers” and then endlessly recapitulated in a network of elite boarding schools and universities that largely retained the characteristic gender segregation of their cloistered religious origins. The mythical “western canon” is not a broad sample of great philosophers (and not great ones), but rather it has been carefully curated and pruned by educators and intellectuals who are themselves the products and producers of that peculiar culture. These lists can tell us nothing about philosphy or philosophers except that the field, especially at elite levels, is still understood through the blinkered chauvinism of the “great man” theory. People in extreme (or “elite”) subcultures might have a tendency to seek out role models who personify that extreme/elite value and valorize them to the next generation. So Ian’s question of who makes lists like this in the first place (and why) is the only real line of inquiry I can see here.
Tony 03.29.25 at 9:29 pm
Having children has been a social norm for years. People who think for a living are less likely to follow norms unquestionably. Assuming these philosophers always make considered choices, they make an active choice to not have kids.
Alternatively – people have kids as they want to give their life meaning. Perhaps philosophers are either more comfortable with accepting the meaningless of life or find meaning through other channels.
anonYmous 03.30.25 at 8:39 am
From A.I. and internet search:
Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, likely did not have a traditional “income” as he came from a wealthy and politically active family. He was a “trust fund kid” who didn’t need to work for a living
Aristotle, He likely lived off the patronage of wealthy individuals and the resources of the city-states he lived in, rather than a salary or wages.
Alan Turing made about five million dollars. He mainly obtained income from his successful mathematical profession.
John Rawls Rawls was a prominent philosopher and a professor at Harvard University, a prestigious institution. As a professor, he would have received a salary, which would have been his primary source of income.
Kripke was a prominent philosopher and professor, known for his contributions to logic, particularly modal logic. He held positions at Harvard, Rockefeller University, and Princeton. It’s impossible to determine Saul Kripke’s net worth, as he was a philosopher and academic, not a business person, and his wealth was likely not his primary focus
Tim 03.30.25 at 12:50 pm
Modern women philosophers have been celibate and childless (Mary Astell), married and childless (Cavendish), married with children (Wollstonecraft), which means that even for women historically marriage and children are not necessarily an obstacle to being a philosopher. It would be odd that only men need more free time to concentrate on philosophy. So, considering what has been said on the problematic selection criteria for who counts as a great philosophy, childlessness and celibacy in male philosphers might be either a) irrelevant; b) being used as criteria by those doing the selection.
Ronald Burns 03.30.25 at 2:50 pm
Too simplistic. A lot of people have a child or children by mistake. Especially in the time before more readily available contraception or abortion.
Trey Casimir 03.30.25 at 3:01 pm
As a body mind spirit practitioner I’ve given tons of thought to this type of question. One possibility, which you haven’t listed but which I’ve encountered repeatedly, is that some people PREFER the simplicity of intellectual abstraction to the hurly burly of actual life. Nowhere is that hurly burly more pronounced and intrusive than in the attempt to raise little humans. And yet, without that particular hurly burly, there is no one to philosophize. Which makes me feel very confident that all those people’s philosophies were incomplete, at best. Instead of, “I think, therefore I am,” for instance, I think a more complete concept is, “I breathe, therefore I am.” Much messier and less satisfying, but so is the indispensable raising of children…
William W. 03.30.25 at 7:50 pm
Doug Muir@35:
“[T]he Romans didn’t produce nearly as many philosophers as the Greeks, and basically none that were A-list”
Not my field, but weren’t Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Lucretius, and Boethius considered “A-list”? Maybe even Cicero.