Who are your favorite philosophers?

I really respect Kant, Thoreau, Whitman, Plato, and the Indian sage Nisargadatta. I'd like to know about some more thinkers.

Feel free to include insightful philosophers of art, poets, and others who inspire higher learning. I would also like to read quotes by them, so if you find something definitive to characterize their attitudes, I warmly welcome those into this thread.

For me, Whitman embodies the philosophical ideal of all of the above mentioned thinkers in his poetry, so here is an excerpt from Song of Myself:

  Quote

I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

Redruth

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JCVD

Great thread so far.

Agreed.

Me too.

Emerson is my main man.

yeah aristotle, plato, socrates, anselm of canterbury, thomas aquinas, friedrich nietzsche, kant and

g.carlin

descartes

sun tzu

Machiavelli

ice cube

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is a personal favorite of mine. i don't necessarily agree with everything he was putting forth, but i enjoyed a lot of it conceptually. he's the only philosopher i've read to any extent that i feel i can much comment on. i've read some Plato, Nietzsche, a few other bits and pieces here and there.

i agree with yikes above me that Carlin should count. i'd include Bill Hicks in with that category.

  On 1/7/2013 at 4:42 AM, Nebraska said:

For real?

i honestly have a great deal of respect for any/all well known philosophers regardless of whether I ultimately agree with them or not.

But if I had to pick absolutely one Im probably gonna go boring and say Nietzsche. Though lately Ive been reading a lot of Descartes and that man can write some vivid explanations. It seems to be a recurring trend with philosophy.....its incredibly hard to write your ideas eloquently and with vivid images.

Derrida and Deleuze are my top 2 guys.

The whole movie, Examined Life, is a good intro to contemporary philosophy.

The bit at 5:50 is informative.

Right on, Vamos. Nice vid. She's very lucid and very Kantian.

And also very trinity

Marquis De Sade's p. good.

Not a philosopher but I like her world-view:

It's a bit hard for me to name names but in general I have respect for these guys though I don't necessarily agree with them on all points: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, Roger Penrose, Kurt Gödel and some classical Taoist philosophers like Zhuangzi and Laozi (probably fictional but anyway..).

Probably there are some others too but can't come up with them now.

Slavoj Zizek

lol !

zizek is fucking hilarious....i swear hes the andy kaufman of academia

[youtubehd]U0jxclqEJD8[/youtubehd]

Buddha pretty much nailed it for me - but I've been enjoying Douglas Harding recently, another enlightened bloke who developed a series of straightforward 'experiments' to help people realise what they actually are:

http://headless.org/experiments-video.htm

  On 1/7/2013 at 4:44 AM, yikes said:

ice cube

I'm in the Ice T camp

Much prefer Calvin and Hobbes the kid and tiger over Calvin and Hobbes the theologian and political philosopher.

I like Plato, Kant, and little Nietzsche I've managed to read. I regret not taking philosophy in college. In the future I hope to study it more - (any recommendations btw? - the more introductory the better)

I've become irreligious, especially toward Christianity. I it I attribute partially to reading and being enlightened by the Gnostic Gospels. It was like discovering an truthful alternative to mainstream Christian theology and for me personally it illuminated the illogical and immoral aspects of Christianity that troubled me in the first place. I'm now a spiritually inclined person with no set of beliefs to attach myself too - I feel like at some point I might explore Buddhism and other Eastern philosophy.

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote'data-author="mokz" data-cid="1927604" data-time="1357565879"><p>

It's a bit hard for me to name names but in general I have respect for these guys though I don't necessarily agree with them on all points: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, Roger Penrose, Kurt Gödel and some classical Taoist philosophers like Zhuangzi and Laozi (probably fictional but anyway..).<br />

<br />

Probably there are some others too but can't come up with them now.</p></blockquote>

first sensible post ITT

cant quote on phone?

The greatest philosophers of the last century were Godel and Einstein, because they contributed the most in the way of an actual concrete advancement of human knowledge.