• Top 10 Philosophers of All Time

  

  Written by Zeromage 110 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.

  5. Immanuel Kant
  Kant’s importance is unprecedented. As Kant would claim, “Hume woke me up from my dogmatic slumber”. It was with this claim that Kant would go on to create the most celebrated and accepted idealist (privileging the mind) philosophy to ever hold sway in the western world. His influence over other philosophers is great to say the least. What Kant saw in the popularity of Hume’s empiricism was nothing other than the diminution of the human mind in being able to know its universe. It was Kant’s turn back to cartesianism that made him state “knowledge comes from experience, but doesn’t arise out of experience” signifying the mind as a co-accomplishing force with the external world that is able to give us the knowledge we have. It is with Kant, that epistemology (theory of knowledge) becomes a formal discipline. By re-appropriating the status of the mind in total nature, Kant gave relief to a plethora of philosophers who wanted to champion the romantic self in being able to create large systematic totalities (Hegel, Fitche, Schelling). In his most famous work, the “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant analyzed all the ways in which the mind worked demarcating a “judging faculty” here and discovering a “transcendental intuition” there. His hyper-analysis of the subjective intake of experience would lead to an increase want for the understanding the mind. His influence paved the way for Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Phenomenology. Kant is the philosopher the west has always been proud of.

  4. Rene Descartes

  Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. Why is he the father of modern philosophy? It is with two publications of Descartes that philosophy takes its “subjective” turn into the absolute experience of the self. It is in his “Discourse on Method” and “Mediations” that philosophy recognizes itself first and foremost as a personal experience of the world. Prior to Descartes, philosophy was guided by the metaphysics of the schoolmen in the middle-ages who were always invested in neo-aristotelian and platonic interpretations of the world. “Change”, “The Infinite”, “Movement” as objects of inquiry into first principles was substituted for the cogito sum as the first principle; “I think therefore I am” with Descartes. Before we can ask questions on the world and how it moves, we first must ask questions on how I can interpret the world in such a way in the first place. In his mediations, we gain a systematic account of a man who was applying his deduction to everything; even God, which he knew would procure himself an endless amount of punishment. It’s with this in mind, that we learn from his “Discourse on Method” that he would wait until he was dead for his work to be published. Totally devoid of any want for fame while he was alive, totally devoid of any want of acceptance of others, totally in want for the basic truth of reality as he was only able to see as one human being, this is what gives Descartes the worthy claim of “the father of modern philosophy”. The sheer amount of philosophers that were influenced by him (E.G. Kant, Husserl, Hegel) would prove to lengthen his work and name for a long time to come.

  3. Fredrick Nietzsche
  As we live in the new 21st century, there is no doubt that Nietzsche is the most influential philosopher of our time. As a late 19th century German, he predicted the social structure of the 20th century. Not only have philosophers been influenced by Nietzsche, but so have artists, musicians, social theorists, and even theologians! In his famous remark in the “The Gay Science”, Nietzsche states “God is Dead”, but what is often forgotten in the quote is “but you and I killed him”. It is here that Nietzsche introduces us into a godless world that is not bleak and lugubrious, but colorful and vivacious. It is here that Nietzsche becomes the consummate existentialist in placing total responsibility in the hands of the human being, so much responsibility that it was necessary to transcend the “mawkish” desires and emotions of the human being as we know it, and to ascend to the “Ubermensch”, the superman, who acted out of much more pure instincts that those of the self-satisfied bourgeois human being that we have come to know. Nietzsche saw that the mass-industrialization of the late 19th century would make men weak and “herd-animals” looking for the most easy, voluptuous existence possible. It’s with this in mind that Nietzsche would try to cure civilization by over-turning Christianity which he denominated as “Platonism for the masses”. Only when we could overturn our insistence on being sinful and guilty, could we return to a much more magnanimous Greek ethic of strength and vigor. When reading Nietzsche, you feel alive and not guilty about something that may have gone wrong. It is with this in mind that Nietzsche always exercises a profound influence in those younger in age.

  2. Edmund Husserl

  Nietzsche thought that man must progress forward to become better than what he is. Heidegger thought that man must dive backwards into his roots to become better than what he is. Husserl though, completely ignored the question of “How is it I can become better”, creating an absolute black hole for all proprietary existential thought. By ignoring the existential significance of philosophical themes, Husserl proved to be the true “ubermensch”. Husserl advocated a giant leap “into the things themselves”, echoing the complications of Kantian idealism, but this time, they would be figured out. Only by the most intensive radical Cartesian reduction can we hope to understand anything about the absolute grounds of experience. No philosopher before or after has ever worked on the most grounding of grounds than Edmund Husserl. As a thinker of the early 20th century, Husserl would go on to create the discipline of phenomenology, a radical new account of the workings of inner-consciousness, and how it interacted with the outside “Life-World”. It is here that we gain the fundamental insight of phenomenology, that there is a logic to the purely perceptive world, before it enters into active consciousness that is computing its raw hyletic data by “formal logic”. Husserl through his tireless reductions away from the always-relativistic motivations of existential philosophies saw philosophy as at one time having a much nobler task than what it had become in the earlier part of the 20th century. His insistence on returning philosophy to a “rigorous” discipline of pure forms and explication of pure passive phenomena, places him in the absolute outer-most reaches that philosophy has ever been. We at old-wizard believe that Husserl will be studied 1,000 years from now as much as Plato is studied now.

  1. Socrates / Plato
  While Plato and Socrates seem like the obvious choice for a #1 on a top 10 philosophers list, it doesn’t go without justification. The texts of Plato have shaped the entire roots and history of western civilization. There have never been ideas that have grabbed hold of the western world as severely as Plato’s dialogues, to the point that most people don’t even realize they are acting platonically, or at least posit platonic ideals. Of course, the catholic churches appropriating of Plato into their own thought helped established his reign as the most influential philosopher of all time, but the influence that holds sway is not because they are simply “widely accepted”.

  Within the platonic dialogues, we find every philosophical concern addressed from the more existential themes of love (Symposium) to the wildly abstract metaphysical concepts of number (Parmenides), all in the graceful, easy-to-read, format of the platonic dialogue. How easy it was to understand philosophy when you became a spectator in the interlocution itself, sometimes even participating when you put down the book and started thinking for yourself.

  It was with the idea of the Platonic “Forms” that Plato defined the west for the next 2,000 years to come. “The Forms” are never-changing ideas that ground all of our existence that are non-material and all pervading in our thoughts and actions. It was with Plato that speculative thought lost its relativistic subtleties from the pre-socratic thinkers (Heraclitus, Democritus) for an all-embracing philosophy of true forms and right conduct. Never has there been more germane ideas on ethical and civil conduct than Plato’s “Republic”. Never do we witness a more salubrious restrain than when Socrates is debating Thrasymachus of the fine points of principalities.

  The Socratic restrain, even in the face of an unjust death created the platonic ideal that all people of the west aspire to; to not be in fear in the face of death, to dialogue with others when something needs to be solved, and to exercise restraint and moderation when the body is in want of excesses. While it seems as if the immediate western world has forgotten these values, this would not be an accurate claim. That the immediate western world would agree with the platonic mentality of the good life is true, however, this does not mean that they necessarily follow them, often feeling guilty about their actions. It’s with this in mind that Platonism stands as the signature mark of western values of decency, even if we have increasingly fallen short of the ideals that have come before us. We are aware of ourselves as always falling short of something better for ourselves. That which is better for is nothing other than what the Platonic dialogues have established perennially for the Western World.

110 Comments

1. #1 Monique says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 1:14 am

   Mountain,

   I have a cousin and an uncle who gay. Be yourself; ain’t nothing wrong with it.

   Peace out,
   Monique
2. #2 Randy says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 1:21 am

   I thought this was a page about philosophy, not a support group for gay people like Mountain.

   I personally don’t like gay people and think they are going to hell unless the repent.

   Mountain, Jesus loves you and died for your sins, but God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

   Don’t read philosophy; it will just confuse you. Read the Bible and pray. Tony, Jesus loves you, but he hates your si,
3. #3 College Stud says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 1:24 am

   Mountain and others,

   Gay people conflict with evolution and natural selection. Homosexuality is unnatural.

   People like Tony, Mountain, and Pat make me sick.
4. #4 Lover Man says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 2:23 am

   If Mountain is gay, than less competition for the rest of us. I wish more men were gay.

   Lover Man
5. #5 3:16 says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 2:35 am

   To Tony, Pat and Mountain

   God loves and sent his Son to die for your sins. God will save you. Repent before its too late.

   The wages of sin are death
6. #6 Dope says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 2:37 am

   I think all yaw is gay or crack heads.
7. #7 The Mountain says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 3:19 am

   I must admit to everyone right now. I am…..a gay man. I will come out of the closet now…on Old-Wizard. You have uncovered this deep secret.
   I thank you for your prayers Tony. I accept your apology Tex. And I hope everyone can accept my apology for calling them “gay fucks”. This was really inappropriate. I hope I can soon accept myself and become a better person. I apologize.
8. #8 Gareth says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 11:27 pm

   Hi Mr Mountain. Is your first name Brokeback, if so I saw your film. It saddened me deeply. Those poor horses must have been so confused.

   I’m far to sleepy to commment on the list but it’s missing Jarvis Cocker.
9. #9 Foreigner says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 6:09 am

   Hey! guys I have read the whole conversation. And I have to admit it was really interesting. To uncover a gay person and make him come out of the closet, that was freaking awesome. You guys are masters.
   And The Mountain, I think you are cool. Sooner or later we all face the truth about ourselves.
   Peace !