5 ms·
Odd, interesting, and surprising ranking to me. Note that this is a ranking of “authors” and not of “philosophers”. However fewer than 20 would likely have been
by robwwilliams 2y ago
Odd, interesting, and surprising ranking to me. Note that this is a ranking of “authors” and not of “philosophers”. However fewer than 20 would likely have been uncomfortable with the tag of philosopher.
I just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to rank philosophers;
Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
Here's a revised list of 100 philosophers born after 1899, ranked approximately by their impact on philosophy and related fields. I've ensured they primarily considered themselves philosophers or worked in closely related fields:
1. Michel Foucault (1926)
2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905)
3. Simone de Beauvoir (1908)
4. Jacques Derrida (1930)
5. Jürgen Habermas (1929)
6. Noam Chomsky (1928)
7. Hannah Arendt (1906)
8. John Rawls (1921)
9. Judith Butler (1956)
10. Thomas Kuhn (1922)
11. Karl Popper (1902)
12. Theodor Adorno (1903)
13. Gilles Deleuze (1925)
14. Frantz Fanon (1925)
15. Simone Weil (1909)
16. Albert Camus (1913)
17. Emmanuel Levinas (1906)
18. Martha Nussbaum (1947)
19. Richard Rorty (1931)
20. Peter Singer (1946)
21. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954)
22. Julia Kristeva (1941)
23. Roland Barthes (1915)
24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942)
25. Edward Said (1935)
26. Slavoj Žižek (1949)
27. Hilary Putnam (1926)
28. Daniel Dennett (1942)
29. Iris Murdoch (1919)
30. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929)
31. Paul Ricoeur (1913)
32. Charles Taylor (1931)
33. Cornel West (1953)
34. bell hooks (1952)
35. Donna Haraway (1944)
36. Luce Irigaray (1930)
37. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919)
38. Donald Davidson (1917)
39. W.V.O. Quine (1908)
40. Saul Kripke (1940)
41. Bernard Williams (1929)
42. Alvin Plantinga (1932)
43. Patricia Churchland (1943)
44. Robert Nozick (1938)
45. Derek Parfit (1942)
46. Thomas Nagel (1937)
47. Philippa Foot (1920)
48. Susan Haack (1945)
49. Alain Badiou (1937)
50. Jacques Lacan (1901)
51. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929)
52. John McDowell (1942)
53. Onora O'Neill (1941)
54. David Chalmers (1966)
55. Bruno Latour (1947)
56. Michael Walzer (1935)
57. Christine Korsgaard (1952)
58. Giorgio Agamben (1942)
59. Charles Mills (1951)
60. Hubert Dreyfus (1929)
61. Seyla Benhabib (1950)
62. Jerry Fodor (1935)
63. Patricia Hill Collins (1948)
64. David Lewis (1941)
65. Catharine MacKinnon (1946)
66. Michael Sandel (1953)
67. Ernesto Laclau (1935)
68. Peter Sloterdijk (1947)
69. Carol Gilligan (1936)
70. Hélène Cixous (1937)
71. Sally Haslanger (1955)
72. Ernest Gellner (1925)
73. Marilyn Frye (1941)
74. Kwame Gyekye (1939)
75. Chantal Mouffe (1943)
76. Ian Hacking (1936)
77. Eva Feder Kittay (1946)
78. Enrique Dussel (1934)
79. Iris Marion Young (1949)
80. Simon Critchley (1960)
81. Rosi Braidotti (1954)
82. Axel Honneth (1949)
83. Linda Alcoff (1955)
84. Robert Brandom (1950)
85. Uma Narayan (1948)
86. Elizabeth Anderson (1959)
87. Paulin J. Hountondji (1942)
88. Nancy Fraser (1947)
89. Jürgen Moltmann (1926)
90. Ruth Millikan (1933)
91. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929)
92. Harry Frankfurt (1929)
93. Stanley Cavell (1926)
94. Jurgen Mittelstrass (1936)
95. Cora Diamond (1937)
96. Charles Larmore (1950)
97. Bas van Fraassen (1941)
98. Susan Neiman (1955)
99. Kwasi Wiredu (1931)
100. John Searle (1932)
This list includes philosophers from various traditions and geographical regions, focusing on those who have had significant impact on philosophical discourse in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The ranking is subjective and based on perceived influence in academic philosophy and broader intellectual impact.
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I love Rorty’s clarity and humor and general ironic and deflationary approach to philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty
- Der_Einzige 2y agoThe fact that post-modernist/post-structuralists dominate the top spots says something about philosophy in general. A lot of those names thought that the age of consent in France was way too high - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_of_consent_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_o...
- gizajob 2y agoYour point being? Waving the makings of an ad hominem in their direction doesn’t discount their entire philosophies. Postmodernists and post-structuralists are used and cited all across the Arts outside of philosophy, particularly in literary theory.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoA significant portion of the humanities is literally poisoned by Postmodernism/Post-structuralism/Critical Theory. Yes. We call a lot of these fields "Grievance Studies". They're all bunk in the same way that Chiropractors are - despite many "authoritative" insurance companies buying into the scam. Let's open up a random quote from one of the champions of the Pomo movement, Deleuze and Guattari, in their famous work "Anti-oedipus": "we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors." You might respond with "Oh this quote is out of context, they're satirizing freud and Freud's reading of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge, trying to go beyond him" except that their initial OG champion, Freud, was literally 100% wrong to the point that no one can find ANY experimental evidence for the actual existence of the Oedipus[1] OR Electra[2] Complex or any of the rest of the nonsense that Freud, Jung, Lacan, or any of their disciples peddled through the academy. French post-modernism/post-strcturalism is so incoherent that trying to argue against it is a category error as it makes no claim to exist the same realm as reason (a hegemonic concept ignored by them), rather, it is poetry by another name - and it's particularly poor poetry. The academy would be better off disavowing it, as it's produced nothing of value except an army of unemployable ivory tower elitist "revolutionaries". [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex