For those that don't know, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog is an influential blog regarding philosophy. I found out about it when I was looking at Graduate Schools because Leiter is a reliable source for ranking them regarding philosophy.
I'm not sure how this was determined, but personally I'm interested in thoughts about it. For example, I think that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche should have probably been higher on the list (so says the person studying Existentialism). Other thoughts?
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It looks like quite a hit list to me. Obviously the ordering is going to be dependent on perspective, and due to what I'd like to think is an ironclad argument about the significance of their arguments but what is probably really my bias as a mathematician I'd like to see Tarski or Goedel on there somewhere. I'd push Marx off for Tarski in a second. But really, it's an excellent reading list, nitpicking aside.
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It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I'm not sure how Plato nabbed the top spot, name recognition aside. To use Medieval Europe as an example, whenever a society had Plato, but rediscovered Aristotle, Plato was pushed right to the side. I would tend to agree, Aristotle's feet in the ground discipline, focused on logic and the observable, trump Plato's head in the clouds mysticism.
I'm also pretty surprised at the very bottom of this list; I'm not even sure Rousseau could be counted as a philosopher at all, let alone a great one. Too airy, fantastical, and (to derisively use a word he himself embraced) sentimental.
Finally, as my own signature can attest to, I have a real bias for Bertrand Russell, and was disappointed he didn't make the cut (though I suppose adding Gottlob Frege shows respect for his field). The clarity, grace, and deceptively simple logic he used to present, describe, or dismantle arguments, either his own or those of his opponents, would definitely put him toward the top of my list of Greatest Writers of Philosophy, even if that's not quite the same as Greatest Philosophers.
Finally, as my own signature can attest to, I have a real bias for Bertrand Russell, and was disappointed he didn't make the cut (though I suppose adding Gottlob Frege shows respect for his field). The clarity, grace, and deceptively simple logic he used to present, describe, or dismantle arguments, either his own or those of his opponents, would definitely put him toward the top of my list of Greatest Writers of Philosophy, even if that's not quite the same as Greatest Philosophers.
Wow, I can't believe I didn't notice Russell didn't make the cut. I think you're right, they're probably thinking Frege suffices as Russell's intellectual ancestor, and they didn't want to clutter up the list with logicians as I probably would. Still, quite an omission.
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
If you're going by pure influence, it's unpardonably chauvinistic not to have Confucius or any other Easterner on the list. Confucius was an awful philosopher by the rigorous standards of the discipline as it exists today. But the global impact of his thought dwarfs that of anyone else on that list except maybe Aristotle, Locke, and Marx.
Then there's Gautama Buddha. If Augustine makes the list, clearly religious thought is being counted as part of philosophy (and the Buddha is far more a pure philosopher than Augustine anyway). Adi Shankara is worth serious consideration as well.
Finally, Zhuangzi. Was he influential? Not really. Was he correct? No. Was he rigorous? Hell no. But he was a total boss.
I'm not sure how Plato nabbed the top spot, name recognition aside. To use Medieval Europe as an example, whenever a society had Plato, but rediscovered Aristotle, Plato was pushed right to the side. I would tend to agree, Aristotle's feet in the ground discipline, focused on logic and the observable, trump Plato's head in the clouds mysticism.
Aristotle:
Philosophy is about observing and explaining the phenomena.
Let's have some sort of system of formal logic to reason with.
Examine the arguments of others sympathetically, and answer them carefully.
Plato:
You know what would be cool? A totalitarian state run by people like me!
The world is fake, and the real world can only be perceived by, you guessed it, people like me!
Yeah, no contest there. Aristotle's methods set the stage for the regular practice of philosophy, and ultimately, of science. Unless somebody in the future discovers some qualitatively different and even better method, he will always be number one.
Also, almost all of Socrates' long-term influence seems to be contained in Plato. Non-Platonic attitudes towards the man may best be summarized as "What a goofball!" (Cf. Aristophanes.) So do we really need a whole separate spot on the list for him?
I'm also pretty surprised at the very bottom of this list; I'm not even sure Rousseau could be counted as a philosopher at all, let alone a great one. Too airy, fantastical, and (to derisively use a word he himself embraced) sentimental.
He's not. No more than Voltaire or Goethe. He's a man of literature. Also a vile little hypocrite, but that's beside the point.
Finally, as my own signature can attest to, I have a real bias for Bertrand Russell, and was disappointed he didn't make the cut (though I suppose adding Gottlob Frege shows respect for his field). The clarity, grace, and deceptively simple logic he used to present, describe, or dismantle arguments, either his own or those of his opponents, would definitely put him toward the top of my list of Greatest Writers of Philosophy, even if that's not quite the same as Greatest Philosophers.
Hear hear!
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I haven't read that much philosophy, but Plato always came off as a hack to me.
Not entirely fair. He had an enormously fertile mind. It's just that his ideas had a tendency to be based on wishful thinking more than concrete reasoning from observed phenomena.
Only in the sense that all satirists are trolls. His "gadfly" schtick shined a light on people's intellectual vices and preconceptions. Did it provoke anger? Oh yeah. They ****ing executed him. But unlike trollery, it was a fundamentally educational and productive endeavor. Trolls don't create students like Plato.
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Also, almost all of Socrates' long-term influence seems to be contained in Plato. Non-Platonic attitudes towards the man may best be summarized as "What a goofball!" (Cf. Aristophanes.) So do we really need a whole separate spot on the list for him?
I doubt it, but the poll was done by voting, so enough people thought so. And reading in the comments of the blog entry, there are other influential philosopher polls floating around on the site where the results are different (including Russell making the cut).
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~~~~~
I doubt it, but the poll was done by voting, so enough people thought so.
Yeah, I saw that. It strikes me as a fundamentally flawed methodology. If there is some very important philosophical school or concept that is associated with two or more thinkers, then you'll end up getting both rather than settling on one or the other, because the voters will not be able to settle on one as the more important. We see both Socrates and Plato on that list, and also both Hobbes and Locke. If it were an ethics-focused list, Mill might well have been split with Bentham. And so on.
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Arthur Schopenhauer should be on this list, at least in the top 3. His essay on Women is true on so many levels; that and we are all just meat puppets.:tongue:
Arthur Schopenhauer should be on this list, at least in the top 3. His essay on Women is true on so many levels; that and we are all just meat puppets.:tongue:
For others' reference, here is his "Of Women". And for those who don't care to read the essay, be it ever so mercifully brief, here is its conclusion:
That woman is by nature meant to obey may be seen by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of complete independence, immediately attaches herself to some man, by whom she allows herself to be guided and ruled. It is because she needs a lord and master. If she is young, it will be a lover; if she is old, a priest.
...No.
But if a male philosopher's merit were to be judged solely by the stupid things he said about women, we'd have to drop practically the whole list - Aristotle in particular is infamous for his sexism. (Though Plato is actually pretty egalitarian.) Schopenhauer does not deserve to be on the list because his ideas are largely (and knowingly) a Western repackaging of the more self-denying strains of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Adi Shankara should be on the list way ahead of Arthur Schopenhauer.
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One of my favourite parts of The Republic is were Plato talks about how he sees no reason women can't be put into positions of power like men. He almost literally says "No, I'm not joking."
One of my favourite parts of The Republic is were Plato talks about how he sees no reason women can't be put into positions of power like men. He almost literally says "No, I'm not joking."
One peculiar trend I've noticed throughout the history of letters is the divide between texts that pontificate about women in the abstract and those that are actually required to represent them. A few decades before Aristotle put women in the same social category as young children, Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata*. Medieval Islam, which produced Sharia law, also produced the Arabian Nights. And just after the reign of a queen who had to apologize at Tilbury for having "the body of but a weak and feeble woman", Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra. It seems like men all recognized intuitively the reality of a woman's intelligence and independent agency, and expected it to appear in representational art, but somehow this recognition rarely made its way over to intellectual theory. And all this may seem boneheaded, hypocritical, and unfair, but as a historian I look on the bright side: it suggests that we cannot rely on the philosophers for a picture of how gender relations actually played out in everyday life.
*Side note: Subversively cast post-modern productions of classic plays are all well and good, but don't try to do an all-female Lysistrata. It ain't pretty.
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All this talk of Russell intrigues me. I definitely see Frege and Wittgentstein as more influential philosophers (according to philosphers). I've only really encountered Russell in an intro Philosophy Course (due to "The Problems of Philosophy") and in a course on Wittgenstein. Is he honestly one of the most 20 influential/important philosophers ever?
@Blinking Spirt
Didn't you know that "Philosophy" means "Western Philosophy"?
All this talk of Russell intrigues me. I definitely see Frege and Wittgentstein as more influential philosophers (according to philosphers). I've only really encountered Russell in an intro Philosophy Course (due to "The Problems of Philosophy") and in a course on Wittgenstein. Is he honestly one of the most 20 influential/important philosophers [I]ever[/I?
While I don't know if Bertrand Russell is one of the most influential philosophers ever, he is one of the cornerstone philosophers in developing Analytic Philosophy. Considering most studying/studied philosophers that post here tend to be analytic (as it is one of two central thought processes in Philosophy in the world; the other being Continental), Russell is important in the history of Philosophy because of the focus he gave to language.
By the way, if you studied 19th and 20th Century Philosophy, his name should have come. Also, his name occasionally appears in Existentialism studies because of his disposition [I]against[/I] Existentialism.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
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~~~~~
All this talk of Russell intrigues me. I definitely see Frege and Wittgentstein as more influential philosophers (according to philosphers). I've only really encountered Russell in an intro Philosophy Course (due to "The Problems of Philosophy") and in a course on Wittgenstein. Is he honestly one of the most 20 influential/important philosophers ever?
@Blinking Spirt
Didn't you know that "Philosophy" means "Western Philosophy"?
Russell was a great popularizer of philosophy rather than a great philosopher in his own right. Like in science, for example, we have scientists and then we have popularizers of science i.e. the people who are trying to introduce the results of scientific research to the laymen (it is often the case that a great scientist is a poor popularizer and a great popularizer is a poor scientist). Similarly in philosophy we have philosophers and we have popularizers of philosophy. Russell was a popularizer of philosophy and he was great at it. He had a gift for writing and was great at expressing some very complex ideas in lucid prose.
This is one of the main reasons Russell had such a tortured relationship with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, who was a man of high integrity, always suspected Russell of being a phony. When Wittgenstein published his masterpiece (the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus), it was Russell who wrote the introduction to the English version of that book (because Russell's name carried a lot of weight in the English speaking world). But then, when Russell's introduction appeared in the German version of that work, here's what Wittgenstein had to say to Russell:
"When I got the German translation of the introduction, I couldn't bring myself to have it printed with my work after all. For the fineness of your English style was - of course - quite lost and what was left was superficiality and misunderstanding."
Russell was a great popularizer of philosophy rather than a great philosopher in his own right. Like in science, for example, we have scientists and then we have popularizers of science i.e. the people who are trying to introduce the results of scientific research to the laymen (it is often the case that a great scientist is a poor popularizer and a great popularizer is a poor scientist). Similarly in philosophy we have philosophers and we have popularizers of philosophy. Russell was a popularizer of philosophy and he was great at it. He had a gift for writing and was great at expressing some very complex ideas in lucid prose.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that he was only a "popularizer." He certainly was also a philosopher in his own right (and some might even say he was a great philosopher), but his status as a member of the intelligentsia or the intellectual elite is not owed to his greatness as a philosopher or as a logician.
As the co-author of Principia Mathematica, certainly he does deserve a place of his own in the history of philosophy and in the history of logic. But his place in the history of philosophy is far overshadowed by figures such as Frege and Wittgenstein and his place in the history of logic is far overshadowed by Goedel. You could also consider his place in the history of mathematics but once again you'll find that it wasn't of significant impact because modern mathematics is founded on axiomatic set theory (which is quite opposed to Russell's own proposal of a type-theory). There is no field (mathematics, logic or philosophy) in which the Principia Mathematica is of singular importance. There is no work in any of these fields presently that builds on Russell's Principia - it is just a historical artifact.
He was sort of a Jack of all trades. He ventured in to many areas of philosophy and got to some level of depth in all of them, but when he encountered a really deep problem, he always pushed it aside rather than encounter it head on. Thus, he wasn't a thinker of great depth.
James Conant, a prominent scholar of analytic philosophy, has written an article called "On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy" that tries to explain a sentiment expressed by Wittgenstein in the preface to the Tractatus: Wittgenstein says
"I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts."
Why does Wittgenstein thank his mentors Frege and Russell in this curious way? He invites us to contrast the work of his two mentors - one the one hand we have the great works of Frege and on the other hand we have the mere writings of his friend Bertrand Russell. Why this indifference from Russell's own protege? Conant explains this difference by analyzing the differences in philosophical style between the works of Russell and Frege - the point being that Russell refuses to go the "bloody hard way," i.e. when the going gets tough, he gets going. Frege's writings on the other hand are willing to think problems through all the way to the end.
This topic is also explored by Ray Monk, who is a prominent biographer of both Russell and Wittgenstein. He has written the most well respected biographies of both of these figures and he offers a similar estimation of Russell from a biographical point of view.
Mathematical logic is not my area of expertise, so I can't comment in any detail on Russell's alleged depth or lack thereof. You've identified three scholars who have been critical of his work, and maybe they're right to be. But finding three people to criticize a philosopher certainly does not mean he or she is not an "important philosopher" - indeed, it is tentative evidence to the contrary. If Russell, even when he is incomplete or wrong, stimulates this kind of thought and discussion - and even a cursory overview of the field tells me that he does - then I would say that he is an important philosopher.
In my first post in this thread I mentioned Confucius and Adi Shankara. I find Confucius to be little better than a pompous twit and Adi Shankara a navel-gazing mystic. Surely Russell, whatever his merits, had more depth and rigor than these men. But they were still important.
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his place in the history of logic is far overshadowed by Goedel.
Oh, I don't know about that. It's true that Goedel's results were deeper, but Russell was one of the main builders of the foundation that Goedel was about to tear down. Russell didn't have the genius-bordering-on-insanity of Goedel, but Goedel didn't have Russell's work ethic. And Tarski beats them both quite soundly.
You could also consider his place in the history of mathematics but once again you'll find that it wasn't of significant impact because modern mathematics is founded on axiomatic set theory (which is quite opposed to Russell's own proposal of a type-theory).
I'm afraid this summary is quite badly mistaken.
- You're mischaracterizing the relationship between axiomatic set theory and type theory. They are not in any sense "opposed." Indeed, that mathematicians choose to teach the foundations in terms of set theory is essentially a matter of fiat, and some mathematicians wish it were otherwise. For students of mathematics that actually go on to study logic or set theory, type theory is taught and used extensively.
- Type theory and set theory are bridged by a set of constructions that make them equivalent. For instance, Goedel's L is both a model of ZF set theory and a type theory over the ordinals. (There are also deep theorems in category theory relating type theories to objects called topoi, on which you can build any kind of set theory, but I'm not going to get into that at the moment.)
- Type theory was invented in order to solve what problem, again? That's right, Russell's paradox. In other words, not only was Russell instrumental in discovering some of the problems with naive set theory, he was instrumental in fixing them as well.
The idea that type theory should be counted as a black mark against Russell is absurd, because it was and is and always will be a fundamental tool of mathematical logic. If anything, it's greatly to his credit.
There is no field (mathematics, logic or philosophy) in which the Principia Mathematica is of singular importance. There is no work in any of these fields presently that builds on Russell's Principia - it is just a historical artifact.
A student of modern physics would not glean much from reading Newton's Principia either.
Russell's Principia is a dry and boring collection of formal logical proofs, not light reading material. And while it's not going to help anyone discover new mathematics at this point, what's glorious about the Principia is that many of the formal proofs contained therein were not known or attempted prior to the Principia. Remember, this was contemporaneous with Hilbert, before Bourbaki, before the axiomatic revolution. Actually sitting down and figuring out how we knew the basic truths we thought we knew was kind of a big deal at the time.
He ventured in to many areas of philosophy and got to some level of depth in all of them, but when he encountered a really deep problem, he always pushed it aside rather than encounter it head on. Thus, he wasn't a thinker of great depth.
Yes, the only man on Earth who was able to carry out Hilbert's program of formalization as far as it could go at the time was clearly a man who shrank from a challenge.
James Conant, a prominent scholar of analytic philosophy, has written an article called "On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy" that tries to explain a sentiment expressed by Wittgenstein in the preface to the Tractatus: Wittgenstein says
"I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts."
Why does Wittgenstein thank his mentors Frege and Russell in this curious way?
I don't know if Wittgenstein's opinion ought to be regarded as in any sense authoritative in this matter, but even if it were -- isn't this reading an awful lot into one sentence?
I would like to add William Lane Craig and Alvin Platinga as very prominent figures in the philosophy of religion. Especially in this modern age.
Plantinga, though not top-twenty-of-all-time material, is a notable name in recent philosophy*. Craig... really isn't. He's made his reputation through public apologetic debate with the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris (none of whom are even professional philosophers). Don't get me wrong, he's a very smart man and a very good debater. But as far as importance goes he really is, by the distinction beast89 made, a popularizer. The top three recent Christian religious philosophers would be more like Anscombe, Swinburne, and Plantinga.
*The term "modern philosophy", confusingly, refers to everything from the Enlightenment and afterwards. Kant, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, all are "modern philosophers". So instead we have to say something like "recent", "Twentieth-Century", or "contemporary".
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Platinga's work on the evolutionary arguments against naturalism and William Lane Craig's work on the Kalaam cosmological arguments is worth noting.
Plantinga gave a talk at my school about that. I'm not a philosopher but his argument seemed like a bunch of obfuscatory nonsense. Then again I feel like that about most recent philosophers---zing!
So, should we just start including people from Abrahamic faiths because they're you know, Western and it's politically correct?
Harkius
I haven't read Augustine, but Aquinas offered a lot of interesting thoughts about stuff (including, of all things, economics). He was wrong or incomplete about a lot of it, but I don't think we're ranking people on correctness.
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Do I Contradict Myself? Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
I haven't read Augustine, but Aquinas offered a lot of interesting thoughts about stuff (including, of all things, economics). He was wrong or incomplete about a lot of it, but I don't think we're ranking people on correctness.
Their was this one little argument for God's existence which first premise scientist have recently found out to be true. So he at least got that right.
So I was browsing it the other day, and I found an interesting poll he did a couple of years ago where he ranked the Top 20 Most Important Philosophers of All Time.
1: Plato
2: Aristotle
3: Immanuel Kant
4: David Hume
5: René Descartes
6: Socrates
7: Ludwig Wittgenstein
8: John Locke
9: Gottlob Frege
10: St. Thomas Aquinas
11: G.W.F. Hegel
12: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
13: Baruch Spinoza
14: John Stuart Mill
15: Thomas Hobbes
16: St. Augustine
17: Karl Marx
18: Fredrich Nietzsche
19: Søren Kierkegaard
20: Jean Jacques Rousseau
I'm not sure how this was determined, but personally I'm interested in thoughts about it. For example, I think that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche should have probably been higher on the list (so says the person studying Existentialism). Other thoughts?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I'm also pretty surprised at the very bottom of this list; I'm not even sure Rousseau could be counted as a philosopher at all, let alone a great one. Too airy, fantastical, and (to derisively use a word he himself embraced) sentimental.
Finally, as my own signature can attest to, I have a real bias for Bertrand Russell, and was disappointed he didn't make the cut (though I suppose adding Gottlob Frege shows respect for his field). The clarity, grace, and deceptively simple logic he used to present, describe, or dismantle arguments, either his own or those of his opponents, would definitely put him toward the top of my list of Greatest Writers of Philosophy, even if that's not quite the same as Greatest Philosophers.
Wow, I can't believe I didn't notice Russell didn't make the cut. I think you're right, they're probably thinking Frege suffices as Russell's intellectual ancestor, and they didn't want to clutter up the list with logicians as I probably would. Still, quite an omission.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Then there's Gautama Buddha. If Augustine makes the list, clearly religious thought is being counted as part of philosophy (and the Buddha is far more a pure philosopher than Augustine anyway). Adi Shankara is worth serious consideration as well.
Finally, Zhuangzi. Was he influential? Not really. Was he correct? No. Was he rigorous? Hell no. But he was a total boss.
Aristotle:
Plato:
Yeah, no contest there. Aristotle's methods set the stage for the regular practice of philosophy, and ultimately, of science. Unless somebody in the future discovers some qualitatively different and even better method, he will always be number one.
Also, almost all of Socrates' long-term influence seems to be contained in Plato. Non-Platonic attitudes towards the man may best be summarized as "What a goofball!" (Cf. Aristophanes.) So do we really need a whole separate spot on the list for him?
He's not. No more than Voltaire or Goethe. He's a man of literature. Also a vile little hypocrite, but that's beside the point.
Hear hear!
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Not entirely fair. He had an enormously fertile mind. It's just that his ideas had a tendency to be based on wishful thinking more than concrete reasoning from observed phenomena.
Only in the sense that all satirists are trolls. His "gadfly" schtick shined a light on people's intellectual vices and preconceptions. Did it provoke anger? Oh yeah. They ****ing executed him. But unlike trollery, it was a fundamentally educational and productive endeavor. Trolls don't create students like Plato.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I doubt it, but the poll was done by voting, so enough people thought so. And reading in the comments of the blog entry, there are other influential philosopher polls floating around on the site where the results are different (including Russell making the cut).
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Yeah, I saw that. It strikes me as a fundamentally flawed methodology. If there is some very important philosophical school or concept that is associated with two or more thinkers, then you'll end up getting both rather than settling on one or the other, because the voters will not be able to settle on one as the more important. We see both Socrates and Plato on that list, and also both Hobbes and Locke. If it were an ethics-focused list, Mill might well have been split with Bentham. And so on.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
For others' reference, here is his "Of Women". And for those who don't care to read the essay, be it ever so mercifully brief, here is its conclusion: ...No.
But if a male philosopher's merit were to be judged solely by the stupid things he said about women, we'd have to drop practically the whole list - Aristotle in particular is infamous for his sexism. (Though Plato is actually pretty egalitarian.) Schopenhauer does not deserve to be on the list because his ideas are largely (and knowingly) a Western repackaging of the more self-denying strains of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Adi Shankara should be on the list way ahead of Arthur Schopenhauer.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
*Side note: Subversively cast post-modern productions of classic plays are all well and good, but don't try to do an all-female Lysistrata. It ain't pretty.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
@Blinking Spirt
Didn't you know that "Philosophy" means "Western Philosophy"?
While I don't know if Bertrand Russell is one of the most influential philosophers ever, he is one of the cornerstone philosophers in developing Analytic Philosophy. Considering most studying/studied philosophers that post here tend to be analytic (as it is one of two central thought processes in Philosophy in the world; the other being Continental), Russell is important in the history of Philosophy because of the focus he gave to language.
By the way, if you studied 19th and 20th Century Philosophy, his name should have come. Also, his name occasionally appears in Existentialism studies because of his disposition [I]against[/I] Existentialism.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Russell was a great popularizer of philosophy rather than a great philosopher in his own right. Like in science, for example, we have scientists and then we have popularizers of science i.e. the people who are trying to introduce the results of scientific research to the laymen (it is often the case that a great scientist is a poor popularizer and a great popularizer is a poor scientist). Similarly in philosophy we have philosophers and we have popularizers of philosophy. Russell was a popularizer of philosophy and he was great at it. He had a gift for writing and was great at expressing some very complex ideas in lucid prose.
This is one of the main reasons Russell had such a tortured relationship with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, who was a man of high integrity, always suspected Russell of being a phony. When Wittgenstein published his masterpiece (the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus), it was Russell who wrote the introduction to the English version of that book (because Russell's name carried a lot of weight in the English speaking world). But then, when Russell's introduction appeared in the German version of that work, here's what Wittgenstein had to say to Russell:
"When I got the German translation of the introduction, I couldn't bring myself to have it printed with my work after all. For the fineness of your English style was - of course - quite lost and what was left was superficiality and misunderstanding."
BRG Loam Control (Assault - Loam) BRG
W Mono White Control (Martyr - Proc) W
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that he was only a "popularizer." He certainly was also a philosopher in his own right (and some might even say he was a great philosopher), but his status as a member of the intelligentsia or the intellectual elite is not owed to his greatness as a philosopher or as a logician.
As the co-author of Principia Mathematica, certainly he does deserve a place of his own in the history of philosophy and in the history of logic. But his place in the history of philosophy is far overshadowed by figures such as Frege and Wittgenstein and his place in the history of logic is far overshadowed by Goedel. You could also consider his place in the history of mathematics but once again you'll find that it wasn't of significant impact because modern mathematics is founded on axiomatic set theory (which is quite opposed to Russell's own proposal of a type-theory). There is no field (mathematics, logic or philosophy) in which the Principia Mathematica is of singular importance. There is no work in any of these fields presently that builds on Russell's Principia - it is just a historical artifact.
He was sort of a Jack of all trades. He ventured in to many areas of philosophy and got to some level of depth in all of them, but when he encountered a really deep problem, he always pushed it aside rather than encounter it head on. Thus, he wasn't a thinker of great depth.
James Conant, a prominent scholar of analytic philosophy, has written an article called "On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy" that tries to explain a sentiment expressed by Wittgenstein in the preface to the Tractatus: Wittgenstein says
"I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts."
Why does Wittgenstein thank his mentors Frege and Russell in this curious way? He invites us to contrast the work of his two mentors - one the one hand we have the great works of Frege and on the other hand we have the mere writings of his friend Bertrand Russell. Why this indifference from Russell's own protege? Conant explains this difference by analyzing the differences in philosophical style between the works of Russell and Frege - the point being that Russell refuses to go the "bloody hard way," i.e. when the going gets tough, he gets going. Frege's writings on the other hand are willing to think problems through all the way to the end.
This topic is also explored by Ray Monk, who is a prominent biographer of both Russell and Wittgenstein. He has written the most well respected biographies of both of these figures and he offers a similar estimation of Russell from a biographical point of view.
BRG Loam Control (Assault - Loam) BRG
W Mono White Control (Martyr - Proc) W
In my first post in this thread I mentioned Confucius and Adi Shankara. I find Confucius to be little better than a pompous twit and Adi Shankara a navel-gazing mystic. Surely Russell, whatever his merits, had more depth and rigor than these men. But they were still important.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Oh, I don't know about that. It's true that Goedel's results were deeper, but Russell was one of the main builders of the foundation that Goedel was about to tear down. Russell didn't have the genius-bordering-on-insanity of Goedel, but Goedel didn't have Russell's work ethic. And Tarski beats them both quite soundly.
I'm afraid this summary is quite badly mistaken.
- You're mischaracterizing the relationship between axiomatic set theory and type theory. They are not in any sense "opposed." Indeed, that mathematicians choose to teach the foundations in terms of set theory is essentially a matter of fiat, and some mathematicians wish it were otherwise. For students of mathematics that actually go on to study logic or set theory, type theory is taught and used extensively.
- Type theory and set theory are bridged by a set of constructions that make them equivalent. For instance, Goedel's L is both a model of ZF set theory and a type theory over the ordinals. (There are also deep theorems in category theory relating type theories to objects called topoi, on which you can build any kind of set theory, but I'm not going to get into that at the moment.)
- Type theory was invented in order to solve what problem, again? That's right, Russell's paradox. In other words, not only was Russell instrumental in discovering some of the problems with naive set theory, he was instrumental in fixing them as well.
The idea that type theory should be counted as a black mark against Russell is absurd, because it was and is and always will be a fundamental tool of mathematical logic. If anything, it's greatly to his credit.
A student of modern physics would not glean much from reading Newton's Principia either.
Russell's Principia is a dry and boring collection of formal logical proofs, not light reading material. And while it's not going to help anyone discover new mathematics at this point, what's glorious about the Principia is that many of the formal proofs contained therein were not known or attempted prior to the Principia. Remember, this was contemporaneous with Hilbert, before Bourbaki, before the axiomatic revolution. Actually sitting down and figuring out how we knew the basic truths we thought we knew was kind of a big deal at the time.
Yes, the only man on Earth who was able to carry out Hilbert's program of formalization as far as it could go at the time was clearly a man who shrank from a challenge.
I don't know if Wittgenstein's opinion ought to be regarded as in any sense authoritative in this matter, but even if it were -- isn't this reading an awful lot into one sentence?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Platinga's work on the evolutionary arguments against naturalism and William Lane Craig's work on the Kalaam cosmological arguments is worth noting.
I'm with BS that there are some glaring eastern omissions, if the criteria is merely "importance."
Plantinga, though not top-twenty-of-all-time material, is a notable name in recent philosophy*. Craig... really isn't. He's made his reputation through public apologetic debate with the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris (none of whom are even professional philosophers). Don't get me wrong, he's a very smart man and a very good debater. But as far as importance goes he really is, by the distinction beast89 made, a popularizer. The top three recent Christian religious philosophers would be more like Anscombe, Swinburne, and Plantinga.
*The term "modern philosophy", confusingly, refers to everything from the Enlightenment and afterwards. Kant, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, all are "modern philosophers". So instead we have to say something like "recent", "Twentieth-Century", or "contemporary".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Plantinga gave a talk at my school about that. I'm not a philosopher but his argument seemed like a bunch of obfuscatory nonsense. Then again I feel like that about most recent philosophers---zing!
I haven't read Augustine, but Aquinas offered a lot of interesting thoughts about stuff (including, of all things, economics). He was wrong or incomplete about a lot of it, but I don't think we're ranking people on correctness.
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
Their was this one little argument for God's existence which first premise scientist have recently found out to be true. So he at least got that right.