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An unknown organization using an unknown methodology has produced a list of…

twenty influential philosophers, plus thirty chosen at random (the apt description of one reader who sent it along, though I see it is making the rounds on facebook as well).  Any list that includes, e.g., John McDowell and a self-promoting charlatan like Graham Harman has to be a joke.  (Maybe they got confused between Graham and Gilbert?)  Daniel Dennett and William Lane Craig?  Thomas Nagel and J.P. Moreland

UPDATE:  Turns out this is not just careless and ignorant, but it's got an ideological agenda at work, as reader Glenn Branch explains:

The Best Schools website is run by James Barham, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame; he's a proponent of "intelligent design" creationism (e.g., he testified before the Kansas BOE's kangaroo court in 2005 http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/kansas/kangaroo7.html and he contributed to the Dembski/Ruse-edited Debating Design volume http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-science/debating-design-darwin-dna#).

I don't pay a lot of attention to The Best Schools website, but it occasionally promotes "intelligent design" — e.g. this long interview with Dembski http://www.thebestschools.org/features/william-dembski-interview/— and often promotes various conservative Christian causes. So the inclusion of people like Craig and Moreland isn't due to ignorance but to ideology.

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