• Top 10 Philosophers of All Time

  

  Written by Zeromage 63 Comments
  Last Updated:: May 7, 2008

  When making the list for the top 10 philosophers of all time, much dismay came over us when we realized how many great philosophers were not being included. More than any of them, Wittgenstein was the most difficult to omit. Aristotle was not so much of a problem because he was not as much of a “pure” philosopher as the ones on our list. If we were to make a top 10 scientists of all time, certainly Aristotle would be in the top 3 for creating the idea of experiential science in the first place. Augustine, Spinoza, Locke, and Schopenhauer were other figures that were difficult to omit. We feel that Wittgenstein more than any of the omissions, could be placed anywhere in our top 10, for having the same groundbreaking effect on philosophy that Hume had in absolutely challenging its truth claims and limiting its job to making language and thought less muddy from the philosophers who muddied it up in the first place. We share these thoughts with you before releasing our list in hopes of circumscribing the debate and argument to substantial content rather than defamatory gestures. When creating a list for the top 10 philosophers of all time, you have to expect an inordinate amount of passion and alacrity with others addressing where they think each philosopher should be in their placements. Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, hits at the core of all human beings. It defines them as a specific self in the face of everything else. When people discuss philosophy in a serious, rigorous manner, not only is there a conversation happening between a group of interlocutors, but a feeling of their own lives being on the line in defining the best way for the human being to live and the best way for the human being to describe his world. We welcome an endless and eternal dialogue. Let the games begin.

  10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Rousseau acted as a romantic counter-weight to the often convoluted nature of Kantian enlightenment. His political and social theories influenced not only his own generation but much of the 20th century French social theory. Here we had a man who was not afraid to be other than what it was to be a human being. Here we had a man who would even privilege the life of animals and “prior-man” in his “Discourse on Inequality” where he traces the genealogy of man solely to the nexus of private property, where man sees other men building huts from the sediments and eventually asks himself “Why can’t I have one of those?”, or “I wonder if I can use the structure that he has made.”. In his famous political treatise “The Social Contract”, Rousseau states his more enduring maxim; “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” referring to his own political situation and reflection on instituted law. It is there where we have one of the more strong insistences on human freedom in distinction to the competition that makes man dependent on other men. Rousseau serves as a sign of the individual in the face of a possible myth created by those wealthier that there is a certain defined social hierarchy. While government must implement its laws as long as we are human beings in need of security, we as human beings must recognize that this counter-influence to the “state of nature” may not be the whole truth to our whole happiness.

  9. David Hume

  David Hume is the primer empiricist and skeptical philosopher of the 18th century. A simple and often jolly man, no one would have thought that his ideas would serve as the benchmark for skeptical thought centuries after. His influence not only traversed the myriad of 20th century social Darwinists, but also the counter-influence of German enlightenment, especially Kant. What Hume advocated was nothing other than philosophical destruction. By negating the fact that we can know anything about the external world, we were led to believe that our scientific audacity was nothing other than exaggerated hubris. All we have for Hume are recognized patterns from external phenomena. That something should happen twice, there is no necessity for this in the external world. That we should form mental patterns from the external world, this is simply limited to itself, in other words, we should be quite foolish to think our mental patterns can tell us anything about the world “in itself”. All we can understand is our own subjective experience of the world. We can’t know total truths, we can state aggrandized maxims, and we can only know what we experience. With this fact in mind, Hume stands as the “Bulldozer of Metaphysics”, as the ever-consummate challenger to the value of abstract thought.

  8. Friedrich Hegel

  After Kant had rescued abstract philosophical thought from Hume, Hegel took it upon himself to describe the entire existence of the totality of the world in his magnum opus appropriately titled “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. The task was so big, some say it drove him to madness. Carl Jung has been quoted as saying that “If Hegel lived in the 20th century, he would have been diagnosed with a mania”. 20th century pedestrian psychological thinking aside, Hegel would prove to be the foremost thinker in romantic philosophy for his large leaps of logic that covered all that could be known in the human world. In the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel traces the human being from his purely conscious state to his self-conscious state and then his fall back into non-consciousness. This would be referred to later as the Hegelian Dialectic. For Hegel, with the recent accomplishments of enlightenment reason and science, we have become self-aware of ourselves in a grandiose historical narrative, where we realize we had a large past and possible future where we no longer recognized ourselves like we do now. We see ourselves in a time with ancestors before us. For Hegel, because we see ourselves, there is no more left for the human-being to accomplish, making the goal of human existence the realization of the self. Francis Fukuyama would echo this sentiment in his book “The End of History and The Last Man”, where he foresees democracy and world-wide communication ending history as we know it, because we have fulfilled what we have needed to fulfill. Hegel swayed by the trust in reason of the enlightenment created the greatest and most sweeping of systematic philosophies, one that wanted to exemplify everything in one text.

  7. Martin Heidegger

  In the early part of the 20th century 2 world wars devastated the morale and spirit of both the west and the east. During this time, there were massive vacuums for spirited leaders to find the “groundings” of all existence in hopes of gaining clarity on their situations. Heidegger was the foremost thinker of this period who insisted that we reestablish what it is we mean by “being”. We all use the word, but none of us really understand what it means. In Heidegger’s most famous work “Being and Time”, Heidegger sets out to reestablish what “Being” is concretely. Through his existential analytic, we are brought to the most insightful, basic, understandings of the Dasein (Being-There, Human Being). We are simply “Looking-around-for-things-to-do” circumspectively. We are influenced by the “They-Self”. We are always calculating for future purposes, what Heidegger denominates as “Running-ahead-of-itself” when referring to the futural Dasein. It’s in this explanation, this subtle criticism of what he found man to become, that he demands a look back to the pre-socratic thought of greek antiquity, a time where thinkers were more in awe of the world than in trying to calculate an infinite amount of sediments that ostensibly make it up. Heidegger would become a Nazi, a move that he tacitly apologized for, a move that would repudiate him of the legacy as a philosopher he deserves. The task when reading Heidegger is trying to understand how one could be such a brilliant philosopher while at the same time being a nefarious Nazi. It’s in Heidegger that we learn more than anywhere, how deep the divisions are between politics and philosophy.

  6. Soren Kierkegaard

  Kierkegaard is undeniably the father of existentialism. It’s Kierkegaard’s reaction to Hegelian idealism that places him as the founder of personal subjective philosophy in contra-distinction to “systematic” philosophy. A thinker who thought more with his body than mind at times, Kierkegaard was known for making decisions based on sometimes ostensibly absurd reasons. As a thinker deeply influenced by the tradition of Christianity, especially the life of Jesus Christ, Kierkegaard would go on to give deep polemics against his own native church of Denmark, in hopes of restoring the passion of the actual life of Jesus Christ. In one of his more famous books “Either/Or” Kierkegaard speaks of a “Rotation Method” which is nothing other than limiting yourself as a human being to the most focused passionate existence that often defies modernity’s discursive social logic of “Being everything to everyone” ubiquitously. In his somber “Sickness unto Death” Kierkegaard would trace a genealogy of despair from the unconscious despairer to the conscious despairer, to the despairer-no-more (the man of pure faith). In all his works, he encounters the cumbersome division between faith and reason that the modern catholic church often likes to package up in a nice present, as if they may never come into conflict, a point that Kierkegaard absolutely negates. Kierkegaard places philosophy solely into the human being who has to make these difficult choices. It’s with Kierkegaard that philosophy starts to become distinctly human.

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63 Comments

1. #1 Delta says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 4:27 am

   Geoff, if you hate the site so much, why do you even bother? Your rants aren’t even contributing. If you’re going to say how they’re wrong, at least give a fucking reason instead of just saying they suck and don’t know jack shit.
2. #2 Avi says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 10:51 am

   Husserl #2?
3. #3 Justin says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 7:30 pm

   I would put Democritus somewhere in my top ten.
4. #4 sadiya says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 6:24 pm

   what about karl marx?
5. #5 zack says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 5:30 pm

   No Aristotle? Seriously?
6. #6 Clifton says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 6:36 am

   Augustine must be on this list. First modern man? Westernizing Christianity? His political thought, ontology, psychology, understanding of “self,” development of the western perspective on time and narrative, just war, etc. WAY before his time. All but one individual on this list (plato/socrates) owe their understanding of the world to augustine.
7. #7 Craig says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 5:42 am

   This list would be somewhat credible if you removed Hegel,Heidegger,Kierkegaard,Husserl,Rousseau, but that’s half the list. Arguably most of these aren’t even philosophers. Rousseau was a writer, but I don’t know if I would consider his work “philosophy”, it’s more like a type of wisdom literature. Kierkegaard is interesting and compelling, but I wouldn’t consider his writings philosophy either, maybe religious studies. I don’t know what Heidegger would be considered. There isn’t a single coherent sentence in all of Being and Time, so I don’t think it should be considered part of an academic area. Maybe for a study on the loss of capacity for coherent communication during psychosis. Or the way you start thinking and writing when you are brainwashed by Nazis. Also, all of the great 20th century philosophers of the past 200 years have been left off the list, such as, Russell, Quine, Frege, Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Lewis.
8. #8 Tex says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 10:23 pm

   This list loses all credibility for two reasons. First of all, any list of western philosophers that does not include Aristotle displays a complete ignorance of both intellectual history as well as the development of philosophical thought. Aristotle defined the scope of philosophy for near a thousand years after his death, and many basic concepts that current philosophers use today where first discovered by “The Philosopher” (e.g. potentiality versus actuality, efficient versus final causality, substance versus accident, the notion of teleology, ethics as a distinct study, metaphysics as a distinct discipline, politics as a distinct discipline, aesthetics as a distinct discipline, logic as distinct disciple as well as most of the notions associated with logic such as premises, conclusion, deductions, etc. and ad infinitum) All the philosophers on your list (except Plato and Socrates) either were influenced by Aristotle, reacted strongly to ideas Aristotle expanded on, or employed many of the conceptual discoveries Aristotle made.

   Secondly, Husserl, while a very original thinker, was eclipsed by his students (Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty), and today much of his philosophy has become antiquated; the rest of his philosophy was antiquated at the time he wrote. (Husserl’s conception of phenomenology seems naïve after the critical analysis of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and hopelessly down the wrong path when viewed in the light of cognitive science and neurobiology.) Husserl could arguably be in the top ten for his influence on early twentieth century though, but in no way number two.

   Still, thanks for the list. The debate is always enjoyable.
9. #9 Stephen says:
   November 21st, 2009 at 2:35 am

   Having no Aristotle or Karl Marx makes this list not as good as it should be. I do agree with number one though…
10. #10 Fedricco Rabaya says:
    November 21st, 2009 at 4:04 am

    Is Napoleon Bonaparte a philosopher?
11. #11 Jesse says:
    November 21st, 2009 at 12:19 am

    Hey Zeromage, have you ever read any of James Allen’s literature. Although it seems he favored to publish small pieces from time to time, I’m sure a compilation of his work has been published. Good, good stuff.
12. #12 tractor says:
    November 21st, 2009 at 1:12 pm

    its incomplete. they are all western philosophers. what about those from the east?