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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 most important Western philosophers of all time?

Brian Leiter

So our poll got over 1160 votes (even more than the one eight years ago); in the final 48 hours there was a surge of voting by pro-metaphysics philosophers, leading Hegel to overtake Nietzsche (though he still did not fare as well as previously), Aristotle to overtake Plato, and David K. Lewis to crack the top 30.  Here are the results:

1. Aristotle  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Plato  loses to Aristotle by 458–455
3. Kant  loses to Aristotle by 678–256, loses to Plato by 623–312
4. Hume  loses to Aristotle by 721–203, loses to Kant by 606–273
5. Descartes  loses to Aristotle by 801–105, loses to Hume by 463–365
6. Socrates  loses to Aristotle by 720–146, loses to Descartes by 417–332
7. Locke  loses to Aristotle by 855–45, loses to Socrates by 420–237
8. Wittgenstein  loses to Aristotle by 826–94, loses to Locke by 366–313
9. Aquinas  loses to Aristotle by 848–33, loses to Wittgenstein by 380–322
10. Leibniz  loses to Aristotle by 853–43, loses to Aquinas by 337–304
11. Hobbes  loses to Aristotle by 853–37, loses to Leibniz by 332–257
12. Marx  loses to Aristotle by 837–72, loses to Hobbes by 318–302
13. J.S. Mill  loses to Aristotle by 854–47, loses to Marx by 322–283
14. Spinoza  loses to Aristotle by 846–53, loses to J.S. Mill by 300–274
15. Augustine  loses to Aristotle by 841–41, loses to Spinoza by 296–276
16. Frege  loses to Aristotle by 848–48, loses to Augustine by 307–281
17. Hegel  loses to Aristotle by 839–55, loses to Frege by 362–277
18. Nietzsche  loses to Aristotle by 851–77, loses to Hegel by 344–303
19. B. Russell  loses to Aristotle by 850–54, loses to Nietzsche by 358–334
20. Kierkegaard  loses to Aristotle by 836–54, loses to B. Russell by 294–289
21. Berkeley  loses to Aristotle by 844–35, loses to Kierkegaard by 284–258
22. Quine  loses to Aristotle by 855–48, loses to Berkeley by 304–226
23. Epicurus  loses to Aristotle by 825–33, loses to Quine by 236–224
24. Rousseau  loses to Aristotle by 842–31, loses to Epicurus by 204–194
25. Kripke  loses to Aristotle by 848–37, loses to Rousseau by 215–199
26. Rawls  loses to Aristotle by 859–27, loses to Kripke by 209–202
27. Carnap  loses to Aristotle by 841–36, loses to Rawls by 241–213
28. Bacon  loses to Aristotle by 828–21, loses to Carnap by 188–176
29. Bentham  loses to Aristotle by 842–19, loses to Bacon by 172–164
30. D.K. Lewis  loses to Aristotle by 835–39, loses to Bentham by 201–181
31. Democritus  loses to Aristotle by 818–27, loses to D.K. Lewis by 175–174
32. Heraclitus  loses to Aristotle by 821–29, loses to Democritus by 155–141

Democrticus and Hercalitus were close to the top 30, so I included them as well.  Ordinal order aside, it's interesting how farely stable the top 20 has remained.  My own top ten (not in exact order) included Plato, Nietzsche, Marx, Hume, Kant, Mill, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Aristotle, and Hobbes.  Feel free to list yours, but do it with your name attached, since it's not interesting to anyone what an anonymous person thinks are the "top ten" or thereabouts.

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37 responses to “The most important Western philosophers of all time?”

  1. Dan Johnson

    Brian, out of curiosity, why is Schopenhauer in your top ten? That's the one that surprises me from your list.

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    No Nietzsche without Schopenhauer (or Plato or Kant)! But Schopenhauer is a brilliant diagnostician of the human situation, often rivaling Nietzsche for insight. To be sure, the NeoKantian metaphysics is crackpot, but one can forgive that.

    Reply
  3. Steven Hales

    Obviously these are all great philosophers. But I think there is a good deal of bias towards present and recent heroes. When people are still talking about Carnap, Quine, Rawls, Kripke, and Lewis 2500 years from now, I'll rank them alongside Heraclitus and Democritus.

    Reply
  4. Eli H

    I wonder what explains Frege's big drop from 9 to 16. Any insights?

    Reply
  5. Jared Liebergen

    Plato/Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Russell, Mill, Locke, Kant, Aristotle, Moore, Chisholm.

    Reply
  6. Jared Liebergen

    I found it interesting that Moore was not included in the original poll.

    BL COMMENT: I doubted he would come close to the top 30, but maybe I was wrong.

    Reply
  7. TJ

    Where's Ayn Rand?

    BL: this was a list of great Western philosophers, not random hacks who appeal to the ignorant.

    Reply
  8. Daniel Propson

    Democritus over Parmenides?

    Reply
  9. Jonathan Livengood

    Several people I would have put in my top ten or top twenty weren't offered as options: Newton, Laplace, Galileo, Faraday, Boole, Boyle, Priestley, Bayes, Babbage, Church, and Godel were all better (and more influential) philosophers than at least half of the names on the actual list. Newton should probably be either first or second overall. And Galileo should be in the top five. Some will no doubt object that most of the names on my list are *scientists*, not *philosophers*, but they were neither more nor less philosophers (or scientists) than Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume. And I haven't really even stretched here. I'm not, for example, including Darwin, since he didn't self-conceptualize as a philosopher (as far as I know). I'm only including people who thought of themselves as philosophers (often natural or experimental philosophers), who wrote books with "philosophy" or a cognate in the title, or who are listed as philosophers in standard references.

    Reply
  10. IMH

    Epicurus, but No Zeno or Chrysippus, huh?

    Reply
  11. Charles Young

    Not a lot of women on the list. Not a lot of blacks, either. Ditto for the list of influences on her recently given by Professor Leiter's colleague, Professor Nussbaum: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Lucretius, Seneca, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, J.S. Mill, Rawls, Bernard Williams, Donald Winnicott. The list is here:

    http://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/4/23/15343212/9-questions-for-martha-nussbaum.

    BL COMMENT: Martha does not think the non-philosophers on that list are philosophers, I assure you; the major philosophers on that list were in the poll. This was a list of some of the most important Western philosophers of all time, not a list of Western philosophers based on race or gender.

    Reply
  12. ravi

    To stretch it a bit more… also Mach, Poincare, Einstein.

    Reply
  13. Daniel Kaufman

    Putting Aristotle as low as you do strikes me as rather bizarre. Just one better than Moore and two better than Chisholm? Doesn't seem serious.

    Reply
  14. Carlo Ierna

    Perhaps they wouldn't have cracked the top-30 of the readership of this blog, but it would have been nice to have Brentano, Bolzano, Lotze, Sigwart, Herbart, Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur, Bruno, Pico, and Ficino as options. Also, beside the issue of not having Newton, Galileo, et al. as options (I'd add Huygens), there is also the other issue of not having more literary figures like Dante and Leopardi. If you are clutching at straws as to which women philosophers to include, perhaps Du Chatelet, Arendt, and De Beauvoir would be better options, but if you include figures like Socrates and Pyrrho, you might as well add Hypatia.
    The exclusions and neglect make the list seem very parochial: next to no Austrian philosophers (Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Ehrenfels, Mach), no French materialists (D'Holbach, La Mettrie), no Polish philosophers (Adjukewicz, Lukasjewicz, Lesjniewski), barely any renaissance, etc. also no Boole, Hilbert, or Turing.

    BL COMMENT: I confess it's a bit funny to have the list described as "parochial" by someone who thinks Pico, Sigwart, Lotze, and Lukasjewicz were omissions from a list of the most important Western philosophers of all time! And Dante and Lipardi aren't philosophers: this isn't hard!

    Reply
  15. LM

    Sad to see not a single woman made this list. However, there were conspicuous absences on the list of options; most notably (in my opinion) de Beauvoir and Butler, whose influence on philosophy of sex and gender has been monumental. I'd be interested in hearing your methodology in choosing the names?

    BL COMMENT: Contributing to one narrow sub-field of philosophy would not in general justify being on this list. Obviously if the criteria were gender (or race or nationality) then the list would be different. (There were women in the poll, they did not make the top 30.)

    Reply
  16. Zain Ali

    I hope, and pray, that one day a Muslim Philosopher can make the top 10, 20 or 50 list of most important Western Philosophers…perhaps al-Ghazali or Ibn Rushd (Averroes)…

    Reply
  17. Christopher Faille

    I agree with JL that it would have been a good idea to include Moore. Not for the "common sense" epistemology stuff, which hasn't aged well, but his ideas on ethics and meta-ethics remain a powerful influence.

    Reply
  18. Keith Douglas

    I always find that these polls have a bit of ambiguity in the question: *important for what?* is always my question. I do participate, since data from someone with some graduate training but who doesn't do (paid) work in the field anymore might be handy.

    I always answer the question to mean *important for humanity and for philosophy more narrowly* (NOT important to my intellectual pedigree) – most responses, enduring cultural or political importance, etc. That's why I (even as a secularist who vehemently opposes their philosophies, especially their lasting influence) was willing to rate folks like Aquinas fairly high up and find it hard to say that someone like David Lewis (who is incredibly important in contemporary philosophy) is at all as influential. I try to "adjust for the time interval", but it is difficult.

    It is for this reason that I find inclusion of Schopenhauer near the top strange. My musician friends still mention him, but they also mention "Pythagoras" in the same way.

    I agree that Galileo, however, is a severe omission, particularly for the history of the philosophy of science and the history of metaphysics (as far as I can tell, anyway) – though the experts can tell me how much of the Assayer and other works was actually read and how much just "was in the air" – so to speak. And Newton? Well, I have trouble balancing concrete "natural philosophical" contributions vs. methodological ones – and I tip slightly in the favour of Galileo's more methodological – for example, the stuff about what are now called "secondary qualities".

    I do, however, mostly agree with the outcome around the first 10 or so – until Hegel and Mill etc. However, I think I would put Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Protagoras a bit higher up in the way that Hegel gets magnified by Marx, Plato magnifies those four.

    Reply
  19. UK Grad student

    'Important for what?' is a good question. Take Schopenhauer: if it's purely his importance for philosophy that we're considering, then he'd be in my top-20 but not my top-10. If it's his importance for 'humanity' or 'intellectual life' generally, then he's got to be top 10 given the number of artists, novelists, poets etc. that he's influenced.

    Or take Aquinas? Clearly influential, but you might think the schools of thought he's influenced are a drain on rather than a boon for humanity. Does that make him important?

    BL COMMENT: Given the academic readership here, I had assumed that the question pertained to importance for philosophy, not something else.

    Reply
  20. DPhil student

    I find it pretty sad to see all these comments complaining about minority representation in this list.

    It is no doubt for me one of the most depressing facts of life that innumerable people over the course of history were denied access or recognition in philosophy on the grounds of their gender or race. But it is nonetheless a fact – and whilst surely there are things that can be done to address this in practice and the way philosophy is taught – when composing a little poll on the most influential figures in the history of Western philosophy, I think we might have to come to terms with that fact. Raising the minority issue without context sensitity in this way just contributes to unjustly trivialise the matter, I am afraid.

    Luckily minds are not essentially gendered.

    Reply
  21. ES

    Jonathan, I'm sympathetic to your post. I would point out a loosely holding correlation that is perhaps of some interest regarding the rankings. Setting aside whether it makes sense to give Socrates an entry separate from Plato, we will observe that the top philosophers (mostly) all thought and probed deeply into *several* areas of study: the motions of the natural world (physics), ethics, politics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Those at the very top did not confine their pursuit of wisdom to the mathematical sciences. While I agree with you that Newton was one bad mamma jamma who deserves to be on the list, his contributions were, in the main, limited to mathematics and physics (mechanics, astronomy, and optics). Ditto Galileo. Their thinking was less comprehensive (although more accurate in their sphere) than the top seven. Descartes, Galileo's contemporary, especially ran the gamut, even if his dear vortexes did not pan out. So I wonder that Newton, even if more accurate in his mechanics and optics, is just as much a philosopher as Descartes or Kant or Plato?

    Reply
  22. PhDStudent

    I just can't believe Wittgenstein rates ahead of Russell and Frege…

    Reply
  23. Daniel A. Kaufman

    I think exactly the opposite. The common sense epistemology has aged much better than the ethics.

    Reply
  24. HistPhilosophy

    Peter Adamson here from the History of Philosophy podcast… as you might imagine I find this list rather provocative and with some glaring gaps. Obviously "important" is, as the winning philosopher might say, said in many ways. But a couple of comments from someone who believes in the history of philosophy without any gaps: first, I actually tend to agree with the top three. Second, Plotinus is not on there. He initiated Neoplatonism, arguably the most successful philosophical approach of all time (measured by sheer duration). Maybe he is not top 5 but to claim that he is not among the top 10 (never mind top 32) most important figures in Western philosophy is plain ignorant, unless "important" means "had views we tend to agree with now and by 'we', we mean English speaking analytic philosophers." Third, there is a problem with the word "Western": presumably this is to free us from the responsibility of pretending we are in a position to compare, say, Hume to Confucius or Nagarjuna. However as I have noted elsewhere it isn't clear how "western" applies, or doesn't, to figures from the Islamic world: Avicenna was from central Asia but Averroes and Maimonides from Spain (which is further West than most of the places that produced the philosophers on this list). Avicenna is the most influential philosopher between Plotinus and, perhaps, Descartes – and was both deeply influenced by and deeply influential on the figures on this list; but he hasn't been allowed to compete because he is not "Western." Fourth, it's unsurprising that the only Latin medieval thinker on there is Aquinas, but I personally would put him behind Scotus, Abelard, and Ockham (as well as Avicenna) on any interpretation of "important." Aquinas is great of course but actually wasn't as influential as most people assume, less so in the subsequent generations than Scotus for example.

    BL COMMENT: Many of the figures Prof. Adamson mentions were included in the poll, but did not rank well. Prof. Adamson is certainly entitled to his opinion that people who disagree with his judgments about who is important are ignorant.

    Reply
  25. HistPhilosophy

    Well, I do think that if someone sits down to devise a list of 30 (or 32!) most historically important (in the sense of influential) "Western" philosophers of all time and leaves out Plotinus, the only explanation could be ignorance. I mean, this isn't controversial or a matter of quirky opinion on my part: Neoplatonism was a dominant force in philosophy for more than a millenium.

    As I concede here though, one could perfectly well exclude him if one means by "important" something like "speaks to our concerns" or "says things we tend to agree with." By those standards he arguably ranks very low!

    BL COMMENT: This was a poll, Plotinus was one of 87 choices, but the thousand plus readers who participated did not rank him among the top 32. If it cheers you up, the Plotinus volume I commissioned for my Routledge Philosophers series recently appeared!

    Reply
  26. Lisce

    How is al-Ghazali more deserving than Avicenna?
    Honestly, I'd put the three of them in the top 10 (Avicenna top 5 if not 3), but al-Ghazali hated most aspects of philosophy, and some would argue that he had also put an end to the golden age of arabic philosophy.

    Reply
  27. WeThePeople

    Plotinus for president!

    Reply
  28. Jonathan Livengood

    ES,

    I don't have a good sense for individuating areas of study. It seems to me that Newton didn't have substantially narrower interests than those of Descartes or Locke or Hobbes. (It's interesting to me that you say Descartes "especially ran the gamut" given that he wrote next to nothing on ethics or politics.) But maybe I'm thinking about the space all wrong here.

    Supposing that you're right, though, it seems to me that Newton should still end up in the top two or three. Because while his main research lines are narrow, he absolutely *dominated* the conversation for a couple hundred years in those areas (and in seemingly unrelated areas where people wanted to be *like* Newton, e.g. Hume's desire to be the Newton of moral philosophy) in a fashion unlike anyone had since Aristotle.

    Reply
  29. Zain Ali

    You're right, Avicenna is certainly deserving. Al-Ghazali was deeply critical of the proponents of Greek philosophy, however, his works are deeply philosophical (a closeted philosopher perhaps).

    …the point I was trying to make was this: can we consider Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna & Averroes, to be both 'important' and 'Western'?

    Reply
  30. HistPhilosophy

    Yes, I have a copy! People should get it: it's by Emilsson who is one of the best Plotinus scholars out there.

    Reply
  31. Francesco

    A couple of comments on different issues.

    (1) It is interesting to pay attention not just to the ranking itself but to the number of votes each candidate received. Plato almost tied the score with Aristotle; but there seems to be a huge gap between them and no. 3, namely Kant. In fact I think that the only sensible way of taking part in these polls is by ranking not individual philosophers but tied groups, by assigning (say) Plato and Aristotle to Group 1; Socrates and Kant to Group 2; Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume to Group 4; etc.

    (2) That 33 philosophers should consider Aquinas as more ‘important’ than Aristotle is hilarious in the light of how important Aristotle was for Aquinas himself. However, to be honest, I also find amazing that some thirty philosophers should consider Quine, Kripke, or Lewis (whose work is doubtless important) more ‘important’ than Aristotle.

    (3) Brian (comment on # 14): of course Leopardi is a philosopher, whatever his ranking! One should consider not just his poems but also the prose works, the Operette morali and the Zibaldone, which are widely regarded as containing a lot of philosophy.

    Reply
  32. Gautama

    Dare we hope for a poll of the most important non-Western philosophers of all time?

    BL COMMENT: I doubt the readers of this blog are well-placed to vote in such a poll. Perhaps find the Chinese or Hindi version of this blog and ask them.

    Reply
  33. Sue

    Aquinas sux!
    Remember that at one stage towards the end of his life he had a beatific experience. As far as I know, after that he didnt have much more to say, having realized that most of his speculative metaphysics etc was crapp.
    His pretentious metaphysics, has a strong influence of right-wing "catholics" – most/all of the denizens that promote Thomist studies.

    And yes in my opinion Plotinus is easily the best Western philosopher. His philosophy was based on one-pointed contemplation and as such was based on his real and extraordinary experience.

    Reply
  34. HistPhilosophy

    I think Brian's reply here is a bit pessimistic. There are plenty of English speaking scholars with a strong interest in non-Western philosophy. Probably it wouldn't be a thousand-plus votes again but it could get into the hundreds, I'd have thought, if word got around on the net that the poll was happening. And that might be interesting in a similar way as this poll was. It would be very hard to compare the importance of figures from different traditions though (even if we could agree on what "importance" means). I mean, how would you decide whether Ibn Gabirol is more or less important than Praśastapāda? I've written podcasts on both and the best I'd be able to say is that both should be known far better than they are. Even comparing the importance of figures from different periods of the "Western" tradition, as I've intimated in my previous comments, is hard enough to make truly well-informed voting all but impossible. I have accused the voters of ignorance of the importance of Plotinus, but I myself am equally ignorant of the relative significance of many early modern thinkers.

    BL COMMENT: You're very optimistic!

    Reply
  35. Jack

    In regards to the low ranking of Plotinus: the fact that this was a poll not undermine Adamson's point. Yes, readers could have chosen to rank him highly, but they didn't. The fact that he ended up being ranked outside the top 50 is clearly caused, to no small extent, by ignorance on behalf of the voters. Indeed, I think the results show that for the entire period between Aristotle and Bacon. The obvious reply is that voters are voting based upon what they consider to be relevance for contemporary concerns, but the relatively high placements of Aquinas (#9) and Augustine (#15) present a rather stark counterexample. The voters were clearly sufficiently aware of their historical import to rank them highly, even though most historians nowadays would rank their significance within the western philosophical tradition as roughly on a par with, or perhaps even below that, of Duns Scotus (#39), Ockham (#51), Abelard (#57), and Buridan (Omitted) – all of whom, with the possible exception of Scotus, would probably be agreed by said historians to be of greater contemporary relevance than Augustine and Aquinas. Medieval philosophy, even when irrelevant to contemporary concerns, is still judged by the voters as worthy of a ranking in the top 20. The relatively high ranking of Aquinas and Augustine suggests to me that the voters are still under the by now refuted belief, which is basically the result of Catholic orthodoxy of all things, that they are substantially more influential than any other philosopher from that era.
    For Brian and the other people still reading the comments, assuming you agree with me that ignorance is the primary cause of the phenomena I've described (and if not, I'd be interested in hearing your basis for disagreeing on that point), to what extent do you think this discredits the result of the poll? I'm certainly inclined to agree that it at least provides a snapshot of what philosophers, or at least readers of this blog, believe about the history of philosophy (e.g. that historians have yet to convince the broader philosophical community that there's more to that era than Aquinas and Augustine). But Brian's reply to Gautama, that readers would be poorly placed to vote in a poll on non-Western philosophy, indicates that something more is desire out of these results. Do the results of the poll not show that this blog's readers are similarly poorly placed to vote in a poll that includes late antique and medieval philosophers?
    *This is not even to mention of course, the fact that recent histories of Western medieval philosophy have been giving increasingly substantial coverage to Islamic philosophy – so at least amongst historians, they are increasingly becoming a part of the Western canon. In that case I would add Avicenna to the list, who has been described as the most influential medieval philosopher of all. The trend is still ongoing, since those works are still basically ignoring Islamic philosophy after Averroes (a position which specialists on Islamic philosophy now overwhelmingly believe is unjustified), but it seems highly likely that within a few decades at most, figures like Suhrawardi and Fakhr al-din al-Razi will have joined Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali and Averroes as core figures in the medieval Western canon.

    Reply
  36. Gregor Flock

    I very much appreciate Brian's nomination of Schopenhauer, among other reasons since the underestimated Schopenhauer was an extremely provocative and on-point metaphilosopher in my opinion.

    I, however, probably have more subtle reasons for agreeing with Brian about Schopenhauer's metaphysics (the will(!) as thing in itself) being crackpot. 😉

    Reply
  37. John Roth

    Assorted reactions:

    1. I relish seeing Epicurus ranked above Rawls and Lewis. Rightly so. Epicurus laid a solid foundation for a philosophy concerned with the human condition and human flourishing. Rawls gave us thought experiments that confused his subjective meanderings for an objective take on justice. Raymond Geuss' criticism of Rawls' holey veil still hold up.

    2. Yet again Aquinas and Augustine come out ahead of Nietzsche. Anyone willing to weigh the alleged hefty philosophical importance of Augustine over Nietzsche? Outside some general nod toward philosophy of religion, what did Augustine provide that was of great philosophical importance? Were his thoughts on the will, language and time that substantial? Were his ethical and psychological speculations really more powerful than Nietzsche's genealogy and theories of ressentiment?

    3. The comments to this poll seem to show more people whining about gender, race and minority status than the previous poll (linked above) from 2009. Is this the result of 8 years of Social Justice Warriors infecting the philosophy spheres?

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