15 July 2005

Top ten philosophers

Last year the CBC sponsored a competition to name the greatest Canadian. This year, casting its net a bit more widely and deeply, the BBC has determined the ten greatest philosophers of all time. They are, in order: Karl Marx, David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Socrates, Aristotle and Karl Popper. If I were determining the list, it would look something like this: Aristotle, Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Plato/Socrates, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, Locke and Hegel.

Admittedly, this is off the top of my head, and I might change all this an hour from now. Dooyeweerd is not on my list, because, although I do regard him as a great philosopher, he has not been influential on a large scale. I put Kant higher up on the list, because, in my ongoing research on authority, I am seeing his ghost virtually everywhere. It would be difficult to underestimate his influence on particularly social and political thought. Marx is a second-rate philosopher, as is Locke, so I've put them both further down the list. Locke I have included mostly because of his huge influence on the American founding. Marx's influence is seen in the communist movement of the 20th century, but also in postmodern philosophies, where Nietzsche's mark is discernible as well. Hobbes is brilliant and could plausibly be called the first really modern philosopher. I am reluctant to list Socrates separately from Plato, because our received portrait of Socrates comes from Plato. (Aristophanes has his own portrait, of course, but his is not a flattering one.) I have placed Aristotle at the top. I judge his influence to have outweighed that of his mentor Plato, but here I may be displaying the influence of my Catholic graduate education. As for Augustine, were I not a Christian I might not have included him. Yet his significance is considerable for the development of western Christianity and the civilization that would produce many of these philosophers.

What would your list look like?

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