Top Ten Favorite Philosophers of All Time
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. For some odd reasons he is at the top of every philosopher list. I guess most people haven't really read his philosophy or his idea of Ubermensch. Most people are voting probably because he was a critic of Christian morality and wrote that God is Dead.
Nietzsche's relativistic philosophy of "perspectivism" is another manifestation of collectivism; another Utopian fantasy of man's ability to perfect man. It has its ostensible diametric opposition in Ayn Rand's "objectivism," which, as with all ideologies that deny any authority above man, is deeply flawed and hardly "objective." Nietzsche and Rand each is minefield set in a morass.
Nietzsche literature bucks top of the leader-board. Sublime.
René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who invented analytical geometry, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. After analyzed every radical doubt he came to the conclusion that one thing is sure; that he exist. His saying "I think therefore I am" was true, even when he was dreaming or when his senses played tricks with his mind. It was even necessarily true because it's impossible to deny it without being in contradiction with yourself. If you're saying that you have doubts about your existence, it proves in fact that you exist, otherwise you wouldn't have a doubt to begin with. You also can't ignore the existence of your thinking because it is with your ability to think that you are able to have doubts or to understand when your dreaming or not, when your mind is playing tricks or not (third parties who agree on reality). Therefore, thinking and I (my existence) are the same. A proven self identity that has a body with a conscience. Comments who are saying that "I am, therefore I think" are not always necessarily true are misled by concepts like intelligence that has nothing to do with the ...more
It's a pitiful shame that "I think, therefore I am" does not guarantee "I am, therefore I think"-- the essence of the burgeoning modern tragedy.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. Fancy words to say that we are limited in our knowledge to seek an absolute truth (and that it is futile to even trying) and that we have therefore to try to accept our existence in the here and now. It's more a way of life than a philosophy. I think that he's too overrated and sometimes he is even boring.
Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a middle-class family, Marx studied law and Hegelian philosophy. Viva las revolution
François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation ...read more.
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira, Chalkidice, on the northern periphery of Classical Greece. Gave western civilization a rational argument, a logical need, for a Creator.
"Quality is not an act, it is a habit."
A conflicted and disjointed "philosophy" (more a stream of consciousness) that greatly influenced and abetted the oppressive collectivisms to come.
Confucius was a Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. He is the founder of the religion with the same name as him. Confucius believed he was doing the Will of Ti'en (God or 'Heaven') by preaching ethics.Groundbreaking, anarchic and surreal anti-capitalist academic who paved the way for the internet age, coining the concept of a "virtual world" in 1967, as well as laying much of the groundwork for modern-day neurodiversity and alternative education movements in his works the with anti-authoritarian communist psychoanalyst Felix Guattari.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.