To say the least. And worse than that. This was a top 10 list. “the short list of 20 philosophers that was put to vote a month earlier.” Apparently this was a different poll with only 10 listed. (Although curiously results for only 9 are listed. Maybe someone got zero votes?) The omission of Sartre was glaring. I have a degree in philosophy, and no way would I leave Sartre out of the 10 choices.
Which link are you looking at? The BBC page gives all ten.
And what it will almost certainly have been is that the twenty were narrowed down to ten, for ten programmes each featuring one person (or five each featuring two). Practicalities, practicalities.
(BTW, if somebody who knows their stuff could bother to listen to the ten episodes, they could let us know how highbrow or lowbrow the approach actually was?!)
I don’t have a degree in anything, and I despise Sartre’s philosophy. But I still would put him in the top ten. In fact, here’s my list:
- Aristotle
- Laozi (Lao Tzu)
- Immanuel Kant
- Karl Popper
- Al-Farabi
- René Descartes
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Saul Kripke
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- William of Ockham
Well, that’s your opinion. It’s apparently not one shared by the people voting in the poll, and I’m not sure you can logically defend it or demonstrate that the world’s community of students of philosophy would agree with you.
However, looking at the percentages of the vote, I’d argue that it doesn’t even prove the voters had a leftward bias. Marx got about a quarter of the vote. If you were to place the question to a group that consisted of 150 people who were utterly convinced Marx was a crackpot and 50 who were convinced Marx is essentially the secular Jesus Christ, Marx would win the poll easily, just by virtue of the other 19 philosophers splitting three quarters of the vote. It’s an artifact of the way the poll was sttructured.
That’s odd . . . Marx being so heavily influenced by Hegel, you’d think the latter would have done better in the poll.
Are you talking about people who actually spied for the Soviets, or what?
Well there was the Cambridge spy ring Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. There were London School of Economics’ spys LSE link and probably an Oxford University spy ring though not well documented.
Was Hegel on the list when they polled? Hegel who?
The BBC is a socialist state within a state. It has its own police-chasers of the licence fee, to terrorise the population. YOU MUST PAY! No matter rich or poor, no matter watch much BBC or non at all, YOU MUST PAY, ALL THE SAME AMOUNT.
Aah…the realities of socialist power. Therefore it comes as no surprise to learn that in some bull BBC poll the monster Marx comes top. No simple conspiracy mind you! Modern socialists are much too sophisticated! The power of the BBC is profoundly deep and wide.
Very funny, stop-1. (You are joking?)
I agree(not modestly), 'tis funny. So is life, tragic too. No, I am not joking. Are you not of this blessed land led by our great saviour the hallowed blair? Do you not know of such things?
Marx wins a poll of philosophers because of the TV licence? You’re going to need to back up this argument with something more than a vague allusion to the BBC having sinister powers!
all telly has sinister powers. I think that the BBC which constantly preaches ‘equality’ and many other things has the power to track down non-licence payers who dare to have a telly and prosecute them, sometimes sending people to jail, is deeply sinister. Especially when the licence fee is in effect a poll tax, something which the BBC is always preaching is wrong.
As to the Marx poll thing, I alluded to the non-directness of it. I’m sorry that my pathetic words past you by.
Erm, you do understand the concepts of socialism? “From each according to their means”? That sort of thing? A flat tax rate is about as unsocialist you can get.
The BBC do not prosecute in cases of criminal law.
No one is forced to own a television, therefore it cannot be a poll tax.
Cite?
Check out this blog and you might not be surprised that Marx won that poll.
http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/
When you buy a TV in the UK, you have to give your name and address. The government keeps a list of all addresses witha TV licence. Any address without one is checked to make sure that no TV is used there. The agency paid to do this harrasses people who don’t have a TV, often refusing to believe them.
To watch any TV on any channel you must purchase a TV licence. The government gives all the revenue from the licence to the BBC. Even if you never want to watch the BBC’s TV channels you must pay for them if you want to watch TV from other providers.
How would you like a system like that over in the USA? Government TV that pumps left-wing propaganda at you using your money to do it. It’s not nice.
So what? It was a poll of viewers (and anyone else interested in voting on the poll), not of BBC writers or producers. And in the UK, who doesn’t watch the BBC now and then? If the network has a political bias different from that of the general public, there’s no reason why that should come through in the poll results.
I dont mind people running left wing TV stations, it’s just that I hate having to pay them to do it. And I just thought I’d tell you about the blog because I think that most people in the US who know that the BBC exists have a rather romantic idea of it. If the BBC went to subscription I wouldn’t pay for it and wouldn’t watch. The BBC constantly tells the public how wonderful it is, but it seems scared, or even terrified of losing its guaranteed income. If the BBC was really as wonderful as it says it is, it would have no problem in selling its product to willing customers, rather than needing the government and the court system to bully the money out of people. Why can’t it fund itself through advertisments like other TV stations? One reason may be that most BBC staff have a dislike of commerce and business, which they regard as somewhat vulgar. They are above that sort of thing.
None of which, if true, would be any help in explaining why Marx won the “greatest philosophers” poll.
was run by discussion program run by a left winger and Labour party supporter, Melvyn Bragg. The BBC is institutionally left wing. So you have a left wing organisation running a poll on a program run by a left winger and nobody but that organisation gets to count the votes. And Marx won. From this message board I can see that many people are surprised by the result. In the UK it was no surprise. Maybe the result was decided in advance, and the BBC has decided Marx needs a bit of publicity. The BBC is well known for its desire to teach us the correct way to think and behave. It even decides what words we should be allowed to hear, refusing to call the London bombers ‘terrorists’.
This is a whoosh, right?