NOW That's What Call the Greatest Philosopher Ever Volume 2005!

DadaKopf

BBC Radio is running a poll for the greatest philosopher in history.

I'm disappointed many more influential philosophers are left out, and many who are in were just wrong.

I'd say, judging the list purely on influence, Hegel should be there. I'd also liked to have seen a few braver contemporary nominations, too, like Derrida or Foucault.

But not having Hegel in the list is crazy.

nesf

Eh, it's a shortlist, it's going to be missing choices I'd like to see on there anyway!

But yeah, I agree, missing Hegel is a crime and one or two more "radical" or "unusual" philosophers would be nice.

Although, it's an open public vote, so tbh, I can see why they left them out.

DadaKopf

I can understand exactly why they left philosophers I like out. It's just another popular poll. Hegel's a little Herder (little philosophy joke there) to understand, though.

I don't know anything about Popper, but I'm actually worried that so many people seem to be voting for him. From what I can gather, he was the scientific face of Thatcherism, and was used as a poster-boy of the neoliberal right in the 80s, even though Popper himself admitted to knowing very little about the social sciences. As a guage of British thinking, the list is interesting.

More interesting are the nomination comments. Good few people voting for Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Deleuze & Guattari (who I really need to get stuck into), and, alas, more Popper. Some even called for the philosophically bankrupt Robert Nozick.

There's people there who know their philosophy, but still hardly any shout outs to Hegel.

If I was to replace a few people in that list with others, it'd go something like:

OUT: Sartre, IN: Merleau-Ponty
OUT: Heidegger, IN: Ricoeur
OUT: Russell, IN: W.V.O. Quine

Just my three cents.

nesf

DadaKopf wrote:

OUT: Sartre, IN: Merleau-Ponty
OUT: Heidegger, IN: Ricoeur
OUT: Russell, IN: W.V.O. Quine

Just my three cents.

LOL. That's the best summation of what such polls truly are that I've seen yet.

Good to be back debating with you again actually. Although, I'm not sure if you remember debating with me back in the early days when we were young naive and opinionated...

DadaKopf

Remind me...

nesf

DadaKopf wrote:

Remind me...

I've some vague memories of you and arguing with you. I can't remember what exactly. It was a long time ago.

*shrugs*

It's no biggie really.

meditraitor

DadaKopf wrote:

If I was to replace a few people in that list with others, it'd go something like:

OUT: Sartre, IN: Merleau-Ponty
OUT: Heidegger, IN: Ricoeur
OUT: Russell, IN: W.V.O. Quine

Just my three cents.

how fashionable

DadaKopf

How-so? Not that I particularly care, but since it's a philosophy forum, you're expected to support your views.

Neuro

DadaKopf wrote:

I'd say, judging the list purely on influence, Hegel should be there.

But there's a difference between historical influence and modern day relevance.

At least my boy Schopenhauer is up there. Although his philosophy doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well, he was one of the few people to see and describe the world for what it was. Most of his observations about how and why people interact are accurate and are supported by modern evolutionary psychology theory.

nesf

DadaKopf wrote:

How-so? Not that I particularly care, but since it's a philosophy forum, you're expected to support your views.

Well ok, to support my position I present the following argument:

I stopped posting and reading this site for 2 years (long story) and only came back recently.

If I see someone who triggers a memory from back before then it means one of two things:

Either their posts were so infuriating that my hatred of them has stayed with me.

Or I enjoyed reading their posts and they seemed like an intelligent and interesting person.


I'm giving you the benifit of the doubt here perhaps.

DadaKopf

Neuro:

Influence would imply "modern-day relevance" because Hegel's ideas have been reworked and made perpetually relevant by relevant modern-day philosophers and political theorists.

Schopenhauer should be up there, and obviously he strikes a chord with you as he does with many an Alain de Botton reader, but you've got to admit he's less of a touchstone than Hegel. Not that that proves anything - comparatively, how many people have registered the importance of Feuerbach or Dilthey?

DadaKopf

nesf wrote:

Well ok, to support my position I present the following argument:

I stopped posting and reading this site for 2 years (long story) and only came back recently.

If I see someone who triggers a memory from back before then it means one of two things:

Either their posts were so infuriating that my hatred of them has stayed with me.

Or I enjoyed reading their posts and they seemed like an intelligent and interesting person.


I'm giving you the benifit of the doubt here perhaps.

Hmmm, that question was aimed at meditraitor .

simu

Hey, Dadakopf and Nesf, please take the reminiscing to PM.

nesf

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

and such.

meditraitor

DadaKopf wrote:

How-so? Not that I particularly care, but since it's a philosophy forum, you're expected to support your views.

Apologies,

firstly Russell, His influense on modern Philosophy is enourmous(wittgenstein, was a student and teacher, one notible), his range of thought within many of the singular disiplines(language,logical analysis and Ph of science) was incredible, his ability to re-evaluate his own beliefs (wittgensteins influence leading him to see the triviality of mathemathecal truths which he had sternly held fast up till then.) made him stand out . I could go on but its friday

Quine I enjoy but I think the interest in him will wain like a thousand good minds before him, his death in 2000 has brought him to the forefront for a while.

Sartre - his popularity in the 20th century overshadows his work nowadays and leads to a lot of "oh he's shit" comments from ill informed ..
personally(common ) I value his contribition for some of his work(not all) , and the bits I do, have a great influence
The human agent not as self but a presence to self, had my mind working for while,philosophy as a "way of life" as distinct from an academic discipline focused on epistemology or more recently on the philosophy of language, while renewing an interest in Hellenistic ethics as well as in various forms of "spirituality,"can find in Sartrean existentialism forms of "care of the self" that are in fruitful conversation with contemporary ethics, aesthetics and politics without devolving into moralism, aestheticism or fanaticism.

Merleau-Ponty, "what will philoshophy do in the 21st century, It will limp along" ?????

Jack daniels(wee hours) is preventing me from adding to this but your quote just felt wrong and maybe another time I will elaborate to a "this is the Philosophy forum replies are expected degree" fair degree

Yours
Mark

DadaKopf

We're all entitled to our differences of opinion. Russell was an interesting man, but his logicism failed. IMHO, Wittgenstein was the better of the two, if you're to compare them as contemporaries - and I'd got with Wittgenstein on influence and prescience.

In my salad days, I was mad into Sartre and Camus. Sartre was smartre, but Camus, for me, made philosophy live. When I studied phenomenology, I realised how anaemic and wrong Sartre's phenomenology is. By contrast, and like Jaspers' concrete existentialism, I found Merleau-Ponty much richer and deeper, addressing issues of the ambivalence the embodied subject-object. For me, M-P's philosophy of intersubjectivity presents a more accurate picture than Sartre's lonely Cartesian ego. As a political philosopher he was, I think, more on the ball than Sartre who I don't think managed to reconcile Marxism with a phenomenology that avoided totalitarianism at all. This, of course, is why Sartre and Camus fell out, too.

I'd replace Heidegger with Ricoeur, not because Ricoeur's just died (I was turned onto Ricoeur ovr 3 years ago) because Ricoeur built on Heidegger and ironed out many of his flaws. Ricoeur managed to combine a Heideggerian phenomenological ontology with the concrete philosophies of Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty, and developed, what I think is a very important philosophical method: philosophical anthropology, or phenomenological hermeneutics. He also managed to deliver a concrete theory of postmodernism which doesn't descent into pure solipsism.

And as for M-P's quote... I think it's a fairly accurate description of the state of philosophy today. Not a necessary state-of-affairs, though, if philosophers got their house in order.

Oh yeah, shove Habermas in that list too. Weird looking, but highly influential and relevant today.

Neuro

DadaKopf wrote:

...he strikes a chord with you as he does with many an Alain de Botton reader...

Why is he popular with Alain de Botton readers?

DadaKopf

'Cos I think de Botton is into Schopey, so people who have read his books have been exposed to him. I'd say pop-Schopenhauer strikes a chord with people who are already into Feng Shui, God and the like.

By the way, I'm not slaggin you! What I mean is, Schopenhauer seems to reflect the general issues/questions that crop up in many self-help/pop-psychology books and in the media. So, unfortunately, I get the impression that, by and large, people getting into Schopenhauer are doing it in a very superficial way. Like part-time Buddhists.

You know until de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy and stuff were published, I never heard Schopenhauer being used so gratuitously .

Manach

Thanks for the link to the interesting site. Voted for Popper ( his ideas sort as described in the book "Wittengenstein's Poker" rather appealled to me. )