Who are your favorite philosophers?

Some Recent:

Michael Dummett,

Saul Kripke,

W.V.O. Quine,

G.E. Moore,

David Kaplan,

Ernest Sosa,

Frege,

David Lewis,

Lewis Carroll ("What the Tortoise Said to Achilles")

Some Classic:

Leibniz,

Mill,

Hume,

Parmenides,

Aquinas,

and others who were already mentioned.

Nagarjuna

you massive kant

WE COME from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both streams well up from the depths of primordial essence. Life startles us at first; it seems somewhat beyond the law, somewhat contrary to nature, somewhat like a transitory counteraction to the dark eternal fountains; but deeper down we feel that Life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe. Otherwise, from where did that superhuman strength come which hurls us from the unborn to the born and gives us - plants, animals, men - courage for the struggle? But both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

http://www.angel.net/~nic/askitiki.html

Nikos Kazantzakis

  On 1/7/2013 at 3:53 PM, Joseph said:

<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?

  On 1/7/2013 at 4:03 PM, Joseph said:

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.

wtf? i mean, i figured someone was going to get arrogant sooner or later, but really? is that necessary?

  On 1/7/2013 at 4:18 PM, apriorion said:

Some Recent:

Michael Dummett,

Saul Kripke,

W.V.O. Quine,

G.E. Moore,

David Kaplan,

Ernest Sosa,

Frege,

David Lewis,

Lewis Carroll ("What the Tortoise Said to Achilles")

 

Some Classic:

Leibniz,

Mill,

Hume,

Parmenides,

Aquinas,

and others who were already mentioned.

oh man, funny you mentioned Leibnitz....I heard his name thrown around all the time but never bothered to read him...that guy has some "thick" ideas....but I never knew that he had technically figured out the calculus Asimov became famous for separately, as well as making some of the earliest advanced calculators. Dude was pretty badass.

<3 Zizek

opening up instead of closing off

closing, closing, closing, closing, closing off

Well, perhaps my first post was uncalled for, but I stand by my second one.

Zizek is such a loveable bastard. Smettingham's analogy of him Zizek being the Kaufman of academia is pretty damn spot-on, except from the fact that Zizek is sincere.

If any of you are interested in an a really good philosophical and psychoanalytical "documentary" about movies then check out Slavoj Zizek's "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema". It's a movie/documentary where he discusses everything from David Lynch to Star Wars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBBoxXEBrxU

"...and so on, and so on"

Definitely David Lewis

I also like:

Thomas Nagel

Hilary Putnam

David Hume

and Fred Dretske (check out his article titled "can events move ?")

AND Bertrand Russell

Major edit:

William James

David Lewis was an exceptional philosopher.

Yes, his writing style also, far away from the usual stiffness we are used to. I discovered him with his article on time travel paradoxes, I was blown away. Then came the possible worlds stuff.

if anyone likes Bertrand Russell, I'd highly recommend his History of Philosophy, not necessarily because it is historically accurate, but it shows what an exciting and interesting writer he is (especially when he puts in his own cleverly worded snipes at others).....but all the same you can tell he retains an immense respect for his predecessors.

I've just started into Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy series....will see how that turns out.

I just really like seeing the chronology of ideas.

He is a very clear and engaging writer; actually I can't think of a clearer expositor (he's perhaps the Feynmann of philosophy). The possible worlds stuff is very deep; I'm wading into Counterfactuals right now, but the going is slow and I clearly need to learn some modal logic.

  vamos scorcho said:

This is a great one, apart from the fact that the buddhists in the audience trying to answer his questions are dimwits.

i'd have to say that i like chalmers, block and gallagher a lot, cause my favorite topic in philosophy is the mind.

in addition, i really like spinoza's thoughts on god.

DeSelby

  On 1/7/2013 at 7:07 PM, Hoodie said:

i'd have to say that i like chalmers, block and gallagher a lot, cause my favorite topic in philosophy is the mind.

 

in addition, i really like spinoza's thoughts on god.

off the top of my head, isn't he the one that said God is basically just an amalgamation of all possible attributes? Like, souls "seem" independent to us, but they are actually components of a much larger God

if that's him, the way I read it was almost like Satre trying to explain existentialism but with God.....like looking at an obscured 4-dimensional painting through an infinite series of mirrors or something.

he must have been HUGELY influential upon Kierkegaard.

If you have time to consider this man's words, they're worth hearing.

G.I. Gurdjieff

A couple mentions of Godel? A philosopher? What? No f-ing way! ;P As a formal logician he was an entirely different beast, imo. He was more a Newton of logic, if you ask me. A couple of incredible important proofs with some implied philosophical consequences, but important philosophical insights by the man himself? He tried to produce a formal proof of the existence of God!?

A couple of new names for the thread are Husserl and Korzybski.

Husserl for stubbornly trying to create a new science which would influence cognitive science much later on (google Varela's research in his self proclaimed field of neurophenomenology, for instance). It's essentially an attempt to create serious scientific research based on subjective experiences. Sounds contradictory, but if you think about it: without it it's impossible to tackle the so-called Hard-AI problem.

And Korzybski is some sort of personal favorite in the sense that he tried to redefine "man" as a "time binding" creature. In a way this notion is the prerequisite for things like memes. Ideas and knowledge which extend time and place. And this was in the 1920's/30's. Long before the first computer or even the internet.

He's also known for the quote "the map is not the territory" and basically invented NLP and related psychotherapies along with it. In his views mental sanity needs to be trained by acknowledging that people create (personal) abstractions from their perceptions which have "some" relation with actual reality. Insanity to a certain extent, is therefore the inability to acknowledge this discrepancy (accompanied with some faulty Aristotelian logics applied upon those abstractions).

Sounds awkward, I'm sure, but you'd be amazed how many people he inspired with his ideas. Alan Watts, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, William Burroughs and last but not least Ron L. Hubbard (of all people!), for instance.

Apart from his ideas, the interesting part is his ability to combine/transcend the field of mathematics, natural sciences and philosophy. And in a way, it's a sort of Western way to arrive at similar points that the Eastern philosophies arrive. Same holds for Husserl as well, btw. Crossovers like that do definitely help to spark some extra interest.

Also, it might be my personal nostalgia, but I'm surprised how much "thinking" has been done in the first half in the previous century. The Einstein-period so to speak. After that period there were some developments in computers and string theories, but most of these were afterthoughts to the concepts created in this period. Probably my personal insanity...

Jean Baudrillard

goDel (any relation?), I think your conception of "philosopher" is too restrictive. Godel was a philosopher, because he did philosophy, although by training he was a logician, and his formal work was primarily in logic and set theory (although he did important work in physics too). How are the incompleteness results not "philosophical insights"? How would trying to prove God's existence render one "not a philosopher"?

He argued extensively for a realist conception of mathematics and the non-reality of time (even using general relativity to show that certain solutions allowed for time-travel; this result has been unjustifiably ignored), and later in life he attempted to lay a groundwork for a "monadology" with a "central monad" i.e. God. (His formalization of the ontological argument for God's existence, by the way, was only an exercise, and not actually meant to convince anyone. Or so he said.)

He believed that an absolute metaphysics was possible, although philosophy as a discipline was only roughly at the point the physics was in the middle ages. A Leibnizian's Leibnizian.

Of course, he was the Newton of logic. He also did revolutionary work in set theory though, and if you ask me, set theory is metaphysics made rigorous, in some sense.

  On 1/7/2013 at 8:39 PM, goDel said:

A couple mentions of Godel? A philosopher? What? No f-ing way! ;P As a formal logician he was an entirely different beast, imo. He was more a Newton of logic, if you ask me. A couple of incredible important proofs with some implied philosophical consequences, but important philosophical insights by the man himself? He tried to produce a formal proof of the existence of God!?

I said I didn't agree with everything he said, but he pretty much changed the whole field of philosophy of mathematics and logic with the proof of the incompleteness theorem undermining the whole foundations of mathematics project of Russel and Whitehead. That warrants him a pretty solid place in my list of favorite philosophers.

Besides that the guy was pretty much a nutter.