Who is your favorite philosopher?

[Sitnam]

I still continue to be fascinated by B. F. Skinner. Although officially under the heading of psychologist he asks social questions in a narrative form in Walden Two that a decade later I haven’t an answer for. Are humans machine-like? If so how so? Can they be ‘programmed’ or ‘engineered’ better? If we can should we? For the life of me I still cannot decide if his idea of a communal Utopia is wrong.

[ITR_champion]

@Lakai

So for this thread pick your favorite philosopher and explain at least of their ideas that made them your favorite. Recommend a book if possible.

My favorite philosopher is G. K. Chesterton, and he’s also my favorite writer, my favorite poet, and my favorite sketch artist, among other things. Why is he such a great philosopher? Well, first of all, he actually was a philosopher, which is to say that he really loved wisdom. He looked into all the most important topics, from ethics to metaphysics to theory of knowledge to all the rest, and he cared about getting the right answers. Second, he was a great writer. He puts a memorable turn of phrase into every paragraph. Virtually everything he says is quotable. Thirdly, he wrote about everything in addition to philosophy: history, art, literature, music, architecture, politics, economics, cheese, religion, current events, and everything else as well. Fourthly, his writing is actually fun to read, while most philosophers are boring, to put it mildly.

Ideas. He had lots of ideas, so it’s tough to know where to start. His most common idea is common sense. In other words, things that almost all people agree to be true, are true. There is one empirical reality. Humans are capable of knowing it and interacting with it. We have free will. We are responsible for our actions. All humans are created equal. We should be nice to each other, respect our elders, teach our children well. Live is a wonderful thing. It’s all common sense, really, or in other words it’s all just believing what we believed as children before adults came along and lead us astray. He had lots of other ideas as well. Politics should be about freedom for everyone, the freedom to do what we actually want to do, not what somebody else thinks we should want to do. Economics should be about helping ordinary people get what they want, not about lifting arbitrary numbers that most people couldn’t even define. Art and literature should uplift us. We should study the history of everyone, not just of a few people. And on and on.

Books. Well, Chesterton wrote a number of them. All of them are good, so there’s no particular one that I’d recommend above the others. You could start with Heretics:

@G. K. Chesterton

At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, “Life is not worth living.” We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins.

Or perhaps Orthodoxy:

@G. K. Chesterton

It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

Or maybe What is Wrong with the World:

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about “young nations” and “dying nations,” as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in subtlety of the parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether an empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its old age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.

Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it.

But social science is by no means always content with the normal human soul; it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist will say “I am tired of being a Puritan; I want to be a Pagan,” or “Beyond this dark probation of Individualism I see the shining paradise of Collectivism.” Now in bodily ills there is none of this difference about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly wants health No one says “I am tired of this headache; I want some toothache,” or “The only thing for this Russian influenza is a few German measles,” or “Through this dark probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism.” But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics.

Or perhaps St. Thomas Aquinas:

So much is familiar; but what is not even now realised is that not only the practical politics, but the abstract philosophies of the modern world have had this queer twist. Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson. to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.

It will be understood that in these matters I speak as a fool; or, as our democratic cousins would say, a moron; anyhow as a man in the street; and the only object of this chapter is to show that the Thomist philosophy is nearer than most philosophies to the mind of the man in the street. I am not, like Father D’Arcy, whose admirable book on St. Thomas has illuminated many problems for me, a trained philosopher, acquainted with the technique of the trade. But I hope Father D’Arcy will forgive me if I take one example from his book, which exactly illustrates what I mean. He, being a trained philosopher, is naturally trained to put up with philosophers. Also, being a trained priest, he is naturally accustomed, not only to suffer fools gladly, but (what is sometimes even harder) to suffer clever people gladly. Above all, his wide reading in metaphysics has made him patient with clever people when they indulge in folly. The consequence is that he can write calmly and even blandly sentences like these. “A certain likeness can be detected between the aim and method of St. Thomas and those of Hegel. There are, however, also remarkable differences. For St. Thomas it is impossible that contradictories should exist together, and again reality and intelligibility correspond, but a thing must first be, to be intelligible.”

Let the man in the street be forgiven, if he adds that the “remarkable difference” seems to him to be that St. Thomas was sane and Hegel was mad. The moron refuses to admit that Hegel can both exist and not exist; or that it can be possible to understand Hegel, if there is no Hegel to understand. Yet Father D’Arcy mentions this Hegelian paradox as if it were all in the day’s work; and of course it is, if the work is reading all the modern philosophers as searchingly and sympathetically as he has done. And this is what I mean saying that all modern philosophy starts with a stumbling-block. It is surely not too much to say that there seems to be a twist, in saying that contraries are not incompatible; or that a thing can “be” intelligible and not as yet “be” at all.

Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses.

Or there are plenty of others.

[Ruminator]

@Docta_G

OK, I’ll be blunt: I think the question is somewhat juvenile.

Nonsense. I think you’re being overly elitist.

People read what various philosophers have to say and inevitably, a few of them, or maybe in one in particular, will resonate with them in a way that others do not.

If one reads the works of 100 philosophers and pretends that each one occupies equally and exactly 1% of the brain-time devoted to philosophy. That denies elemental human bias.

Even someone academically talented as Bertrand Russell expressed a bias for particular philosophers.

[Markxxx]

I like Nietzsche, cause he wasn’t too proud to write for the Family Circus

[Is_it_safe]

Tough call. Camus, Satre or Russell. All have had a major influence on my life

[Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension]

Karl Popper and Buddha are my favorite philosophers.

I just realized I may be the first person ever to write that.

[Colibri]

Bokonon

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.

God made mud,
God got lonesome,
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”,
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.

From The Books of Bokonon

[Quasimodem]

I forgot Popeye the Sailor.

Sorry.

“I 'yam what I 'yam!”

Q

[PlainJain]

@olivesmarch4th

Hands-down, Friedrich Nietzsche.

He didn’t ignore the fact that life is inherently meaningless, full of suffering, arbitrary, and horrible; yet he refused to let nihilism have the final say. If we aren’t born with a purpose in life, damn it, let’s make one. And let’s do it based on what makes us feel most powerful and alive. Better yet, let’s find meaning in our suffering, rise to meet our enemies, grow stronger from the conflict, let’s learn to live life with 1,000 contradicting truths and only accept the philosophies that have practical application to our own lives. My beloved Nietzsche. He was batshit crazy and proud of it.

I’m quoting this because I couldn’t say it any better. I can’t allow myself to believe in a lot of the woowoo BS and Nietzche tells it like it is. Life is hard, it’s better to be strong than weak. I do wish there were inherent meaning, I really do. But there isn’t so lets invent one and move on. I think he faltered when he slipped into nationalism, however.

[rowrrbazzle]

Bertrand Russell. I don’t agree with everything he wrote, but he has lots of common sense, writes clearly, and on occasion he’s very funny. One example:

For [Hegel] the course of logic and the course of history were broadly identical. Logic, for him, consisted of a series of self-correcting attempts to describe the world. If your first attempt is too simple, as it is sure to be, you will find that it contradicts itself; you will then try the opposite, or “antithesis”, but this will also contradict itself. This leads you to a “synthesis”, containing something of the original idea and something of its opposite, but more complex and less self-contradictory than either. This new idea, however, will also prove inadequate, and you will be driven, through its opposite, to a new synthesis. This process goes on until you reach the “Absolute Idea”, in which there is no contradiction, and which, therefore, describes the real world.

But the real world, in Hegel as in Kant, is not the apparent world. The apparent world goes through developments which are the same as those the logician goes through if he starts from Pure Being and travels on to the Absolute Idea. Pure Being is exemplified by ancient China, of which Hegel knew only that it had existed; the Absolute Idea is exemplified by the Prussian State, which had given Hegel a professorship at Berlin.

Why the world should go through this logical evolution is not clear; one is tempted to suppose that the Absolute Idea did not quite understand itself at first, and made mistakes when it tried to embody itself in events.

But this, of course, was not what Hegel would have said.

from “Philosophy’s Ulterior Motives” in Unpopular Essays.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

The Evil Demon.

[kidneyfailure]

More of a psychologist and academic than a philosopher, but I love Vygotsky:

Lev Vygotsky

Some good links down at the bottom of the page

[Radegast]

Aristotle is tops, Epictetus is up there, and Locke and several other Empiricists. It is very hard to choose just one, as different folks excel in different areas.

[The_Second_Stone]

H.S. Thompson:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Barring that as an allowed choice, I’ve gotta choose Aristotle because he thought that observing the real world was more important than making shit up about how you can’t know anything and abandoning Platonism, which is also important as an infinite generator of footnotes about things that don’t exist except as concepts. Concepts are important too, but practicality even more-so.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

Jesus
Confucius
Aristotle
Plato
Thomas Aquinas

[Spice_Weasel]

@pedescribe

You’re a Nietzschian?! I never would have guessed.

I’m so hard-core Nietzsche I have read all but two of his books (The Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science, which I keep starting but then, you know, the abyss starts staring back…)

And I have this t-shirt in two colors. It is my favorite piece of clothing.

And I’m guessing if that surprises you, the second person I listed in this thread will blow your mind. People probably notice that I’m all touchy-feely on these boards quite often, but what many don’t realize is that I’m perfectly aware how fucked up the world is, probably more aware than the average person considering the complete shitstorm the first 23 years of my life were. As I like to say, ‘‘Don’t mistake my compassion for weakness.’’

[Lakai]

@MrDibble

Nietzsche, Sartre and most especially Daniel Dennet.

I am also fond of the works of Shan Yu. Are you familiar with them?

I’m only familiar with Sartre’s No Exit and The Wall. Nietzche seems to be the rave of this thread, so I’ll check him out as soon I get some free time.

I am more familiar with government philosophers than others, e.i., Marx, Hobbes, Locke, Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, James Madison, Machiavelli, etc.

[panache45]

@Quasimodem

“I 'yam what I 'yam!”

That’s very close to “A=A.” Hmmmmmm.

[dragoncat]

Heidegger … but only because

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could drink you under the table

[Quasimodem]

"Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar

Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume

Wilhelm Friedeidrich (S)hlegel (correction of i before e, by me!:))

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine

Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel."

- YouTube

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/

Jesus, do I have to do ALL the research for mah kiddos???

I’ve only got 15 more good (well, you know…) years ahead, and I was just kidding about the above!

It makes me happy to remember stuff, and The Pythons rock just like The Beatles do!

Thanks!

Quasi