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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

The 20 “Most Important” Philosophers of the Modern Era

Brian Leiter

At last we know the truth, thanks to input from nearly 750 readers:

1. Immanuel Kant  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. David Hume  loses to Immanuel Kant by 409–209
3. Rene Descartes  loses to Immanuel Kant by 474–138, loses to David Hume by 351–242
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein  loses to Immanuel Kant by 497–123, loses to Rene Descartes by 382–218
5. John Locke  loses to Immanuel Kant by 549–63, loses to Ludwig Wittgenstein by 359–219
6. Gottlob Frege  loses to Immanuel Kant by 538–77, loses to John Locke by 295–242
7. John Stuart Mill  loses to Immanuel Kant by 550–65, loses to Gottlob Frege by 285–260
8. G.W.F. Hegel  loses to Immanuel Kant by 555–48, loses to John Stuart Mill by 280–265
9. Gottfried Leibniz  loses to Immanuel Kant by 564–69, loses to G.W.F. Hegel by 286–262
10. Bertrand Russell  loses to Immanuel Kant by 561–97, loses to Gottfried Leibniz by 291–274
11. Baruch Spinoza  loses to Immanuel Kant by 564–81, loses to Bertrand Russell by 295–274
12. Thomas Hobbes  loses to Immanuel Kant by 564–68, loses to Baruch Spinoza by 303–254
13. Friedrich Nietzsche  loses to Immanuel Kant by 557–78, loses to Thomas Hobbes by 325–244
14. Karl Marx  loses to Immanuel Kant by 558–55, loses to Friedrich Nietzsche by 264–252
15. Soren Kierkegaard  loses to Immanuel Kant by 541–62, loses to Karl Marx by 287–263
16. George Berkeley  loses to Immanuel Kant by 583–57, loses to Soren Kierkegaard by 299–261
17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau  loses to Immanuel Kant by 577–66, loses to George Berkeley by 281–257
18. W.V.O. Quine  loses to Immanuel Kant by 572–43, loses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau by 287–283
19. Saul Kripke  loses to Immanuel Kant by 570–89, loses to W.V.O. Quine by 328–215
20. John Rawls  loses to Immanuel Kant by 588–24, loses to Saul Kripke by 270–242

Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl came close to the top 20.  Personally, I ranked Nietzsche 1st, Hume 2nd, and Marx 3rd, so I guess I wasn't quite with the program.  Some enterprising reader can click on the detailed results and tally up how many #1 votes each philosopher got (Kant led, obviously).  How many readers think that in 100 years a survey like this will put Kripke or Rawls in the top 20?  Or Frege or Hegel or Russell in the top 10?  Other thoughts on the results?  Signed comments only:  full name and e-mail.

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39 responses to “The 20 “Most Important” Philosophers of the Modern Era”

  1. Roger Suda

    Brian, you don't even have to wait a 100 years. If this poll was conducted on a blog with a "Continental Philosopher" readership;

    Kant, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Husserl, Rousseau, Spinoza and Locke would easily make top 12. And maybe Wittgenstein, Hobbes and Berkeley would round out the top 15.

    Russell, Kripke, Rawls, and Frege would be lucky to even make top 20 in that type of survey.

    Reply
  2. Nicolas Del

    God! How can Mill stand in the top 10 and not Nietzsche, Spinoza or Husserl? I agree with Brian's claim about Kripke (less about Rawls) and I would include Russell who might be a great logician but certainly not a philosopher. Moreover almost one philosopher out of two is English-speaking! God! By the way, Rousseau proved worth including!

    Reply
  3. Jozef Muller

    It'd be interesting to see what would the results be in Germany, or France (to name two obvious choices). My guess is that the top 3-4 places would not change, but the rest?

    Reply
  4. Aaron

    If the History of Modern courses taught to undergraduates serve as any guide to philosophical importance, it looks like the canon picks out about four philosophers per century who are considered the "great philosophers" of the given century. So, the 1600s has Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke; the 1700s has Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. The question is: who will fill those "greatness" roles in the 1800s and 1900s? Given the expansion of access to and professionalization of the discipline over the last 150 years, I don't think that answering this question is very easy.

    But if we ask which philosophers will continue to be taught in "Philosophy in the 19th and 20th Centuries" courses, it seems like any list will include Mill and Nietzsche for the 19th century, and Wittgenstein, Quine, and maybe Russell for the 20th. But it does seem like Frege, Hegel, Kripke, and Rawls stand to be thinned from the philosophical herd. I don't mean to say that their contributions will disappear (obviously) or that academic philosophers won't continue to read them (even more obviously)–only that they seem likely to fade from the ranks of the "great philosophers" as those ranks are filled by more contemporary members and as the Standard of Taste begins to work its magic.

    [Perhaps that's material another interesting survey: which philosophers of the last 25 years will continue to be read 100 years from now?]

    Reply
  5. Brian Leiter

    I'm curious how Roger Suda knows so much about who is reading this blog. Also, I resist the idea that "Continental philosopher" readership means philosophically incompetent, which is what Mr. Suda's speculations about the ranking might suggest. On the other hand, it would be interesting if a blog with a wide philosophy readership in Germany and France conducted a similar poll.

    Reply
  6. mark lance

    So just for fun, here's my thoughts, or if you like, predictions for 50 years from now of a reasonable vote:
    (Why is this game so enticing?)

    top 3 Kant, Hegel, Hume.

    should/will be lower: Frege (if philosophers were educated in math, they wouldn't attribute nearly as much to him, though he might deserve top 20), Locke (by far the most over-rated of the period); Russell; Kierkegaard (ugh); Quine (will drop out of top 50); Kripke (not top 20); Wittgenstein (love him, but 4th? Really? More important than Hegel and Marx? Leibniz, Nietzsche, Rousseau? Sellars?)

    Will be higher: Sellars (should be top ten; ranking him below Kripke or Quine is simply absurd); Carnap (should be top 20); Rousseau and Marx should be a bit higher; McDowell and Evans both might make the top 20; Foucault; Heidegger (sorry, Brian, he is top 10). Long-shot possibility: Dewey.

    Reply
  7. Eric Schliesser

    There is a complicated interplay between contemporary philosophic trends and the current curriculum, which is reflected in such a list. If interest in Platonizing metaphysics would revive more then Proclus and Plotinus would (and, perhaps, Spinoza) find more of an audience. If naturalism really becomes more like experimental & natural philosophy then (say) Philopenus and Newton will creep back. If philosophical political economy then Adam Smith and Mill (etc). Of course, exciting historical work also can generate contemporary interest.
    I just re-read *Word and Object* with a Dutch, largely analytic reading group. The Bayesian found Quine's argumentative style insufferable. The philosopher of physics thought that Quine was despite the naturalistic rhetoric very arm-chair. I don't think that the students felt that Quine spoke to them. So, I predict that Quine will slowly disappear from the curriculum. Even Two Dogmas is hard to motivate (unless one is willing to teach Carnap). It made me wonder how long his stock will stay high. (I suppose Epistemology Naturalized may be longer-lasting.) These things can go very rapidly–think of how important Davidson loomed a decade or two ago. Now he doesn't even crack the top 20. Carnap, by contrast, is actually fun to teach and resonates more easily with contemporary issues.
    Rawls, by contrast, is still setting philosophic agendas in political and moral philosophy and is routinely taught at all levels. That looks like a promising sign of endurance.
    Meanwhile, somebody who barely figures in central discussions (he has no PhD sudents), Jody Azzouni, is putting together an awe-inspiring and largely innovative analytic oeuvre. It will be mined and re-discovered for decades to come.

    Reply
  8. John Protevi

    Two passages from Eric Schliesser's comment caught my eye:

    1. "There is a complicated interplay between contemporary philosophic trends and the current curriculum"

    2. "Meanwhile, somebody who barely figures in central discussions (he has no PhD sudents)"

    If both these are relevant, it seems there's at least a three-factor feedback system here: philosophical trends / current curriculum / social networks.

    The million-dollar question (maybe that's not enough money these days? I don't want to sound like Dr Evil!) is the relation of that already complex system to "externalist" factors: has university admin pressure for faculty to produce grant revenue reached the point where we have to factor in what appeals to grant agencies too?

    Reply
  9. Eric Schliesser

    There is no doubt that national and European funding agencies have a growing influence on the mix and goals of philosophic research in Europe. Some of that has been very salutary (a frontal attack on intellectual nepotism, insularity, etc), some of it is very depressing (even for somebody like me who is very successful in the system).

    Reply
  10. Jason Stanley

    I'm sure it's right that if only George Boolos and John Burgess knew as much math as Mark Lance, they would have realized that Frege was not a great philosopher. Frege was roughly contemporaneous with Nietzsche, so we can now say his reputation has lasted sufficiently long that we have no special reason to think it will dim – any more than we do with Nietzsche or the others from the late 19th century on the list.

    As one can see from the comments, each individual philosopher has far too much of an idiosyncratic viewpoint to give any kind of insight at all into the hive mind. At least some of us however are able to be sufficiently objective so as not to put the minor celebrities of our PhD granting institutions on the list.

    Reply
  11. Karen McCarthy

    Coming from a largely continental background, what's striking to me is the lack of interaction I have with many of the "most important" names on the list. I wonder if it's just a symptom of specialization (continental political philosophy leads you to read Rawls, true, but also to read more critiques of his position as well) or if, as a discipline, there isn't a tendency to a sort of idiosyncratic ordering that resembles gosling imprinting. The philosophers I rate as "most important" tend to be the ones I read when I first found philosophy. I wonder how much that is the case for others?

    Reply
  12. Jon Cogburn

    With Schliesser and Lance, I too think Quine will completely drop out. His import is I think mainly that he motivated some of the very best philosophers of the generation right after him (and this is a great service to Lady Philosophy, but not one that renders philosophical immortality). His actual writing-style and argumentation is just terrible, and even worse if you just read it you'd also have no idea how much it owes to similar or identical views put forward by Carnap (How many people know that the phrase "the unit of meaning is the language as a whole" occurs in Carnap's "Aufbau" for god's sake? Or that what we now erroneously call the "Quine-Duhem thesis" was explicitly defended at length by Ayer in "Language, Truth, and Logic" for that matter?). I think ignorance of Carnap has done more to raise Quine's ranking than anything else. But in a post Friedman world, this is no longer cutting it.

    Most important, you get the important "Quinean" (genuinely non-Carnapian) conclusions vastly better argued and applied in much more interesting ways in Mark Wilson, Stephen Stich, and Hillary Putnam. If these guys stay in and Quine drops out nothing will be lost, and a lot will be gained.

    Besides the ones Mark Lance already pitched for (Sellars, MacDowell, Evans, Carnap, Foucault, Heidegger) the only philosopher I'd also strongly make the case for would be Schopenhauer.

    Finally, the problem with Davidson is that "Convention T" was important to him in the sense of the positivist's "context of discovery" but it is totally inessential to arguing for the actual claims (for example about charity, normativity, animal cognition, akrasia, etc.) he makes. Also he is inconsistent from text to text on what is actually supposed to be on each side of the T Schema and how a grammar is supposed to get from one side to the other (he was most precise during the time when "Convention T" was lined up with the absolutely hopelessly unconstrainable 1970's pre-Montague "Generative Semantics" view that one would derive a natural language sentence from a deep structure logical form). All the resulting epicycles makes him needlessly hard to teach and also much of the secondary literature about him dated and weird. [Much of it talks about "Convention T" as if it really is a unified thesis about the syntax-semantics interface as opposed to nothing more than (from a linguistics perspective) a set of vague suggestions that changes from paper to paper.] Anyhow, I think this dynamic is why he and the whole "theory of meaning" approach to philosophy is losing in relevance. Which is sad, because he and Dummett really were philosophers of deep vision.

    Reply
  13. Brian Leiter

    Jason, play nice! I think Professor Lance's comments bring out, quite appropriately, how important basic philosophical assumptions and orientations are to answering questions like these.

    Reply
  14. Eric Schliesser

    I am surprised David Lewis did not score higher; he seems terribly important to much of contemporary M&E, logic, and meta-ethics.

    Reply
  15. dankaufman!

    mark lance – locke is the most overrated of the period??? very easily asserted, but i'd be interested in hearing why you say such things.

    locke's ESSAY: over 300 years old, and it doesn't look like it is on the decline.

    Reply
  16. mark lance

    Wow, Jason, I didn't realize that saying someone was a good candidate for top 20 philosophers in the last 400 years meant that they weren't great. Guess you have some serious standards of greatness. Please do let me know just how high up one has to be to count as great so that I can appropriately defer to your invocation of Boolos and Burgess.

    Frege is an important philosopher, as I said, but most philosophers attribute developments in logic to him that are attributed to others by mathematicians. (Most mathematicians, including those who study history and work in foundational areas) have barely heard of Frege. (Why don't you check in with Harvey Friedman about the relative importance of Frege vis a vis, Peano, Boole, Hilbert, Zermelo, etc.) My claim is that if you take a more appropriate view of who did what in math and logic, you don't put Frege 6th, but somewhere closer to 20th.

    As for unnamed "minor celebrities" – Sellars? – and your superior objectivity – I certainly agree with Brian that one's basic philosophical views coordinate with one's evaluations of the things they read. At least they do for us paparazzi, maybe not for objective folks. (I would imagine that there is causation in both directions.) I will say that before forming views about the relative importance of Sellars, McDowell, Quine, and Kripke I read virtually everything published by every one of them. That's surely not sufficient for objectivity, but I'm inclined to think it necessary. I realize that this is, at least de facto, a controversial position.

    On the basis of that reading, and despite my no doubt star-struck subjectivity, I think there is a clear partial ordering: Sellars > Kripke, McDowell > Quine. Kripke and McDowell have made contributions of such different forms that I find it hard to compare them. (And to again echo Brian, really, this whole exercise is just for fun. Would it be ok to keep it like that?)

    DanKaufman: I obviously can't give you arguments about Locke here. But I've been through two grad courses on the guy and read all his work. I say such things because I found the political philosophy to be far less original than most people take it to be, and the rest to be nowhere remotely in the same league as Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, Spinoza, for example. Just didn't seem to be very good philosophy to me. (Is there any other way to make these judgments?)

    Finally, Karen: Actually it is not that way it went for me. Quine was the person I first studied seriously. Spent lots and lots of time with his work and it seemed less and less good on subsequent readings. I developed general themes of disagreement mostly from trying so hard to make his work work. Went to Pitt because there seemed to be people there developing the sorts of ideas that were emerging in my own thought as I turned against Quine. And as for my higher than normal ranking of Foucault, that started with a conversation with Todd May when we were both in jail near the end of grad school, but that's quite another story.

    Reply
  17. Margaret Atherton

    My reaction to Mark Lance's assessment of Locke was initially the same as Dan's, but I think it can be easily explained. It is the result of what is in sad fact the actual truth, that Locke is one of the most UNDERRATED philosophers, largely because many people do not take the trouble to find out what the whole book is all about.

    Reply
  18. Eric Schliesser

    Frege is so wound up with Analytic Philosophy's founding (myths) that it is almost impossible to have a sane conversation about his merits (– pace Lance — original) and defects (a bit narrow to count as great).

    Reply
  19. Eric Schliesser

    On Locke: Locke bashing is surprisingly common. Much of Locke is a strange mixture of Hobbes, Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, and Aristotle (no doubt I am leaving out others) . By the of his life, Hume ended up having a very dismal picture of Locke (Ken Winkler has an amusing paper on this). Yet, from the middle of eighteenth century his stature rose and then became more secure, first, in French Enlightenment, when D'Alembert proclaimed him the metaphysician of the scientific revolution, and Kant used Locke as a target in some important arguments.
    So in addition to the hugely influential political works, Locke has had enduring work on personal identity, free will, the nature of essentialism, and the nature of knowledge; that's no small thing.

    Reply
  20. Jason Stanley

    Mark,

    I've certainly read (and taught) a lot of Sellars. I think he'll be remembered most for low-hanging fruit points about the given in intro epistemology classes. Most of these points were already made earlier by Pritchard – but hey, Pritchard didn't teach at the University of Pittsburgh, so I guess he isn't on the table.

    Reply
  21. mark lance

    Margaret:
    On this list, I'm pretty sure Locke isn't under-rated by more than four positions. Whether or not that makes him one of the most underrated depends on how underrated you think others are I guess. (Of course I may not know what the book is about, but I tried.)

    Eric: I hardly think it fair to call expressing the view that Locke is not in the same league as Hume and Descartes "bashing". At least if it is, I guess I'm guilty of bashing almost every philosopher who ever lived – and so are you I suspect.

    Jason: Prichard made most of the points that Sellars is remembered for .. well, that's another view. As for who is "on the table," I think Brian set that table, and I didn't know he had a fetish for Pittsburgh. As for me, I mentioned 5 philosophers that I thought should be brought to the table, only two of whom were associated with Pittsburgh, and one of those for the minority of his career, but again, don't let what I actually said get in the way of sarcasm.

    Reply
  22. Richard Moore

    Please can we have a poll on which living philosophers will be remembered in 100 years or so? Yes, it's massively speculative – but isn't that what the internet is for?

    There are still plenty of criteria to which one could appeal to decide matters. For example, Jerry Fodor is hugely influential now. But one might think his work so hostage to empirical fortune that, depending on how things turn out, he'll just have been forgotten in 100 years. (I'm not suggesting that's the case – it's just an example I pulled out of my hat.)

    Reply
  23. Alastair Norcross

    Well, if "important" means "influential", and especially if it means "influential beyond the narrow confines of the academy", then perhaps Locke is underrated, even at no. 5. He has certainly had a large, and largely regrettable, influence on politics and political thought. I suspect, though, that most who voted in this poll did so more on the basis of how good they thought the philosophers were. In that case, Locke is obviously overrated by the poll results. That he should come in above Mill is clearly absurd.

    Some philosophers get better with repeated readings. From the top half of this list, Mill, Hume, and Descartes fit that category. Others get worse. Locke, Russell, and Wittgenstein are prime examples of emperors in increasing states of undress. I'm not sure about Kant. The only bits I can bring myself to reread are the funny parts (there's lots of them) in the Metaphysics of Morals (not the Groundwork, which is one of the least funny things ever written).

    Reply
  24. Heath White

    I’ll put in a good word for two philosophers who didn’t even make the survey, one early modern and one contemporary.

    Thomas Reid is the granddaddy of epistemological externalism, which I would say is closer to the right track than the empiricism of Locke, the skepticism of Hume, or the anti-realism of Kant. He is also the granddaddy of so-called “common sense” philosophy, a theme picked up by Moore, and given considerable play in Soames’ history of analytic philosophy. I do not know how “closer to the right track” correlates with “more important than” but Reid is surely worth mentioning.

    Alasdair MacIntyre’s political and moral thought has had influence comparable to Rawls’, though probably not with the same audience. I suspect that if the US continues to evolve in an imperial direction then MacIntyre will look prescient and Rawls will look like a provider of ideological cover for that evolution, while if self-government reasserts itself in this country Rawls will remain vital and MacIntyre will become a niche interest.

    Reply
  25. Margaret Atherton

    I see on the long list Reid appears at 31, between Montaigne and Malebranche and below Davidson among other notables. I can entirely understand that people get offended when I suggest they don't know what they are talking about, but the temptation is there. Fortunately this is just a game.

    Reply
  26. Martin Lin

    I just can't believe that Leibniz is ranked below Hegel. 🙁

    I had Frege ranked 3rd.

    Reply
  27. James Trudell

    My thought process might explain why I ranked the top 10 philosophers I ranked. The poll is not about influence, but about importance. And without a criteria of what is important, I tried to rank according to the philosopher's originality and not whether they have enormous influence on non-philosophical fields or society in general or whether they're right or wrong (they're all wrong, though some less so than others).

    I ranked Hume, Kant, Descartes and Spinoza, in the top 4. They are highly original and persuasive in any measure of importance in their place in the history of philosophy.

    I rated Frege, and Leibniz in top 6. I rated Frege as high as I did because Frege's logic, flawed, as Russell pointed out, is highly original. He has less influence today and maybe that's because we take logic for granted, but he's still very important. I'm a little iffy on Leibniz, he's original, but I personally disagree with some aspects; his theory of monads, really makes me raise my eyebrow.

    I rated Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche top 10. Mill, is not as original, as his line comes from Bentham and Epicurus, but I ranked him high since they're not in the poll, and his formulation of the utilitarian philosophy is probably the most mature statement. Marx, would probably be top 3 in an influence poll, but in terms of philosophy proper, he must defer to the others I've mentioned.

    I personally enjoy reading and discussing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. They are highly original thinkers and great writers to boot. If it was a poll of favorite philosophers, I'd rank them in my top 5, and in terms of influence, Nietzsche top 5, Kierkegaard top 15. But in terms of importance in the history of philosophy, they fall short of the other eight thinkers.

    P.S. regarding Heidegger, though very influential (so much so, that I think he'd probably make top 10 in an influence poll), is very derivative; Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl were much more original, and had pizazz doing it.

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  28. Becko Copenhaver

    Reid is an interesting example of a philosopher who has been neglected but is on the rise once again. Though his position at 31 makes my heart break, it would have been much farther down the list only a decade ago. At least it shows that the conception of the early modern canon is not as ossified as it might be. The more people downplay Reid's "common sense" philosophy and explore his surprisingly contemporary contributions in matters of mind and agency, the higher his star will rise, I hope.

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  29. Joshua Harwood

    What's with this enduring love of Hegel. Sure, I can enjoy his odder offshoots in Feuerbach and Stirner (both of whom are in my own personal top twenty), but I think I find a lot of this commentary misreading the term 'important' for 'influential'. I'm with Alastair on this one.

    In terms of influence, Hegel is enormous, as are Marx, Kant, Hume, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche. But is influence all that is required to be considered "important" in philosophy? What has Hegel left that still remains of philosophical import? Maybe I'm too biased (I think Schopenhauer was right with respect to Hegel), but doesn't philosophy base its value on its proximity to truth, not on the scope of its influence?

    I think of a lot of the biggest contemporary problems — reference, consciousness, causality, knowledge, modality, value theory, metamathematics — but I don't see Hegel's work really giving much piercing insight into these matters. How does a trumped up armchair metaphysics even hope to stand up to the depth of natural scientific research needed to begin making substantive probes into the present major problems? I just don't see Hegel playing out as much more than a historical icon.

    If you guys thought this poll was fun, you should see the Facebook applet that does exactly the same thing, only to a much larger degree. Nietzsche is usually at the top of that one. Most of my favorites can't even be picked.

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  30. Eric Schliesser

    Becko (Hi!), I have to admit that I secretly rejoiced that Adam Smith easily outdistanced Reid. I think the main problem with Reid is that he is such an uncharitable reader of Hume. (This also tends to infect Reid scholarship.) But there is no doubt that Reid was one smart dude, who is indeed still surprisingly fresh as your work nicely shows.
    On Hegel. Brandom and Pippin have both been exploring Hegelian themes in debates over normativity and agency. He is also a (difficult to read) ancestor of all kinds of holistic views including familiar ones in contemporary epistemology. There is, moreover, no doubt that Hegel got something right about the complicated social nature of human beings (including in our consciousness, etc). So, it's ignorance to simply dismiss him. (I much prefer reading Schopenhauer's essays, but I doubt that Schopenhauer is the better philosopher.)

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  31. Mike Gurtard

    "what we now erroneously call the "Quine-Duhem thesis"" was above all partly introduced by Duhem himself in 1906, so before Ayer I guess… But is Duhem read in the US?

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  32. Robert Gressis

    James Trudell wrote, "Mill, is not as original, as his line comes from Bentham and Epicurus, but I ranked him high since they're not in the poll, and his formulation of the utilitarian philosophy is probably the most mature statement." On that list, perhaps. But surely Sidgwick's is a much more rigorous statement of utilitarianism?

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  33. Robert Gressis

    Oh, and I should have added: I think Sidgwick should have been on the list.

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  34. Eric Schliesser

    Duhem is certainly read and taught in some philosophy of science courses.
    Neurath frequently calls attention to Duhem's importance for what is now known as the "The Quine-Duhem thesis." Neurath, of course, was read by Quine. The thesis was 're-discovered' as a logical point by Milton Friedman, the economist, in the late 40s and deployed in his methodological writings.

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  35. Michael Cohen

    I second Eric Schliesser's comments about Jody Azzouni at Tufts. But while I certainly think he is a wonderful philosophical mind, he's far too specialized to make any list of all time greats. He doesn't seem to have the breadth of, say, Quine or Davidson or Putnam.

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  36. Robert Gressis

    I have been very kindly informed that Sidgwick was on an earlier list, and, sadly, didn't make it. I still think his utilitarianism is better thought-out than Mill's. Or my previous comment!

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  37. Jon Cogburn

    Yes, but no discussion of it is as ironic as Ayer's in the chapter on the a posteriori of Language, Truth, and Logic (and Ayer gives a very clear argument for the thesis). (1) Like Carnap's claim in the Aufbau that "the unit of meaning is the language as the whole" if you gave a non-trivial number of philosophers the relevant passages of Ayer, they would tell you that it is Quine. (2) Like so much else, the cartoon version of the story has Quine refuting the logical positivists on this very point. More careful people like Alexander Miller (in his nice philosophy of language textbook) say Quine makes it more radical by applying it to logic too, but this is just to say that in the sense that Ayer explains the synthetic a priori, Quine took everything to be synthetic a priori. So Milton Friedman notwithstanding, the "Ayer-Duhem problem" would be less misleading.

    Poincare gets credit too sometimes, but if I remember right he was really just concerned with whether the universe is dense or discrete, and argued that either view could approximate the other.

    Finally, when all is said and done, it's not clear that very much of interest really follows from the phenomena Duhem concerned himself with. Mark Wilson has a nice paper where he argues that there is absolutely no reason to think that any two actual scientific theories could be empirically equivalent but non-trivially distinct. Once you get your hands dirty, as Wilson does, any plausible case of "empirical equivalence" is always best described as the same theory (e.g. the wave and matrix formulations of quantum physics). Davidson argued in a much more a prioristic fashion along similar lines (his example was the metric versus British systems of measurements) against the Q-D thesis motivated "ontological relativity." That Milton Friedman availed himself of something like it is perhaps also some inductive evidence against it, given the ratio of falsity to truth in anything he wrote.

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  38. Matt Weiner

    Joshua Harwood wrote, "[D]oesn't philosophy base its value on its proximity to truth, not on the scope of its influence?" This doesn't seem obvious to me. Leaving aside the question of what it is for philosophy to be true, it seems to me that raising important questions can be valuable in philosophy, even if you get the answers wrong.

    [None of this is to take any position on the relative value or importance of any philosophers being discussed, or of any other philosophers.]

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  39. Joshua Harwood

    Hello, Matt. My problem is a bit off from yours. I don't know what it means for philosophy to be philosophy if it isn't an effort to arrive at sound bases for assertions. I figured I was doing philosophy okay if I made deductively valid arguments on a collection of largely true premises and could accept sound criticism on those arguments. To be honest, if it's really anything more than this, I don't want much to do with it.

    Now, defining truth can be a bit of a muddle, but I don't see how the qualifier "philosophical" really makes it any more problematic. Are there some domain of truths that are uniquely philosophical? I just don't see that distinction really clarifying much of anything. That "philosophical" term also extends to the formation of problems. There doesn't appear to be a really unique way of parsing "philosophical" from "non-philosophical" ones, so is the distinction really all that meaningful?

    I've always viewed philosophy as a sort of junk box of unsolved issues. Sure, we can add to this box ourselves, or we can discard things with (dis)solution, but there are no distinct philosophical problems except for problems that other professions don't take on very specifically as their own. What do the problem of induction, the problem of free will, and the problem of skepticism really have in common that would make them particularly philosophical? Just that they've not been solved? That some of them are not dealt with in other academic areas?

    I think you're right in one respect, Matt, "Raising important questions can be valuable…even if you get the answers wrong," but I also don't see that as being particularly unique to philosophy. Isn't that what every academic discipline does?

    To Eric, I don't want to outright dismiss Hegel's work . Stirner and Feuerbach seem to have gotten something from him, and they strike me as pretty on-the-ball in their areas. However, I'm not prone to thinking of Hegel's work as an overly contrived discourse on historicity, on which I think Schopenhauer was plenty heavy-handed. Is there something that would de-legitimize the criticisms Schopenhauer made (a contrast from H's work and S's criticism, perhaps)? How unfair was S being on H in your estimation, if at all?

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