My excuse for this mere assertion is my usual one: brevity is the soul of blog. But Joe Miller in a comment called me on it. So let me take his challenge as an opportunity to support my claim.
To answer the title question, we must first answer the logically prior question as to who the greatest philosophers were. But this presupposes an answer to the equally vexing question of who counts as a philosopher. Heidegger published two fat volumes on Nietzsche, but dismissed Kierkegaard as a mere "religious writer." Others will go him one better, dismissing both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — and Heidegger as well. In any case, here is my ranking of the philosophers that made it onto the BBC shortlist. The ranking is mine; the list is from the BBC.
1. Plato (c. 429-347 BC)
2. Aristotle (384-322 BC)
3. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)
4. René Descartes (1596-1650)
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
6. Socrates (c. 470-399 BC)
7. Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677)
8. David Hume (1711-1776)
9. Epicurus (341-270 BC)
10. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
11. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
12. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
13. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
15. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
16. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970)
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
18. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
19. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
20. Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)
Here are my criteria in order of importance:
1. Truth of the philosopher's conclusions
2. Belief in reason's power to discover some of the ultimate truth
3. Rigor of argumentation
4. Appreciation of the limits of reason
5. Depth and centrality of the problems addressed
6. Breadth and systematicity of vision
7. Originality
8. Long-term influence
The first seven philosophers on my list are great philosophers, the rest are important but not great. Kierkegaard, for example, though original and influential, falls short on the other criteria.
It goes without saying that my ordering of the philosophers, my criteria, and their ordering are highly subjective. They reflect my interests, my biases, and my own philosophical conclusions. For example, my primary interest in a philosopher is not in his literary merit. If that is your primary interest, then you will probably rank Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ahead of Kant. Indeed, if you do not, then you have very poor taste!
You will notice that I am biased toward the rationalists. Thus all the philosophers I call great are either rationalists, or like Aristotle and Kant, have a strong rationalist side to their thinking. And when I list truth as my numero uno criterion, it is clear that that is truth as I take it to be.
On the score of truth, Fritz Nietzsche really falls short. For not only is there little if any philosophical truth in his writings, the poor soul denies the very existence of truth.
When one studies the first seven on the list, one actually learns something about the world. But when one reads Nietzsche and (later) Wittgenstein, one learns highly original and fascinating opinions that have little or no chance of being true. One learns from them, and from some others on the list, how NOT to do philosophy. But that too is something worth knowing! So they have their place and their use.
Now to our question whether the greatest philosophers were theists or atheists. The greatest philosophers on my list are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Socrates, and Spinoza. All of these are theists "of one sort or another" as I said in my post. But even if Spinoza is excluded, that leaves six out of seven. And if you argue that Aristotle's Prime Mover is not God in any serious sense, then I've still got five out of seven.
If you say I rigged my list so that theists come out on top, I will deny the charge and argue that I used independent criteria (listed above). But if you disagree with my assessment, I will consider it par for the course.
1. I reject atheism and materialism.
2. I pick out the greatest philosophers by whether or not they espouse truth.
3. I define 'truth' as 'accords with what I believe'.
4. Thus, 'truth' entails a rejections of atheism and materialism.
5. Therefore, all the greatest philosophers reject atheism and materialism.
Now (5) certainly follows from (1)-(4). But doesn't it do so by essentially defining 'greatest philosophers' in terms of rejecting materialism and atheism?
All are theists.
Not sure whether you are correct, Socrates for example was killed for bucking the status quo. Locke was in exile for challenging the esthablishment and Ockham was considered a heretic.
One questions the place of Hume and Wittgenstein. Some believe that Hume was a theist, by the way.
&I question Kant's and Spinoza's place on any sort of list. Exactly why is Kant considered a great philosopher? He had enormous influence in the 19c, but on philosophers who are now considered entirely unimportant.
As a general rule I avoid any sort of rankings like this as it brings out all sorts passions and prejudices.
Best, Ocham/Ockham &c
As you know, Brentano took a dim view of Kant, and I know you have an interest in Brentano. Is that one of the sources of your low estimate of Kant?
Are you suggesting that Hegel is unimportant? On the score of influence, Hegel's importance was tremendous. Think of the development: Hegel-Marx-Lenin-Russian Revolution. DIAMAT, HISTOMAT, to understand that stuff you need to know your Hegelian dialectic, my boy! My use of 'stuff' signals my opinionof the quality of the ideas.
I seem to recall a book (What is Truth? perhaps?)by your teacher, C. J. F. Williams, in which he says in the preface something like this: I have never read Hegel, and I have absolutely no intention of every doing so.
I find an attitude like that incomprehensible (in the sense of unjustifiable). First, how can one know that Hegel is wall-to-wall rubbish without reading him, and second, how can one hope to understand the history of ideas without reading one of its major contributors?
Getting back to Kant, you also ignore his influence on 20th cent philosophy. There is P. F. Strawson of course. (Bounds of Sense, Individuals) Kant and Kantian themes also played a role in the transition from Brentano's descrpt psych to Husserl's transc phenomenology. Let's also not forget the tremendous influence of Kant on Heidegger. And then there is all the conceptual idealism in 20th cent phil staring with C I Lewis and reaching though Nelson Goodman and beyond. None of that is conceivable without Kant.
You also have to consider that there have always been materialists at the times when there were theists. That may knock some of the wind out of your sociology of knowledge thesis.
A separate question concerns the greatest philosophers of the 20th cent. Since I think the 20th was a lousy century for philosophy, the greatest of the 20th do not make it to the top of my list. But I of course admit the significance of the four you mention.
There are those who deny that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are philosophers. But is Carnap a philosopher? His self-refuting Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance is simply the enshrining of an anti-philosophical attitude. Or so I would argue.
Obviously, discussions like this are very inconclusive -- to put it mildly -- since the nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical problem.
Note that Logical Positivist attempts to get rid of metaphysical mishmash and set philosophy on the path toward incontrovertible 'results' are themselves just more philosophy!
I should point out that the above post was pasted together from a post from months ago when the BBC was conducting their poll. So almost all of what was written above was not written to respond to your challenge.
I do not define 'great philosopher' in terms of 'theist or anti-materialist.' (By the way, one can be an anti-materialist without being a theist as witness the case of McTaggart.) My point is that in terms of criteria independent of theism/materialism, the theists have been the greater philosphers.
But I wouldn't dream of trying to convince you of this because it would involve protracted metaphilosophical discussion of the criteria.
My only point is that the assertion made in my fisking of Dennett was not gratuitous -- it had a lot of thought behind it. In other words, it is a reasonable position to take. But reasonable is not the same as true. And a reasonable case for a thesis is not the same as a compelling case. One may doubt whether there are any compelling cases of substantive theses in philosophy.
Thanks for the comment.
I'm not sure I understand the force of your reply. I suppose it is true that philosophers have been willing to be ostracized for their beliefs, but Socrates, Locke, and Ockham were all in line enough with the law and/or cultural dogma to at least be heard, or to engage with their intellectual community, esp. with respect to the issue of theism.
Bill,
Point taken from the first paragraph.
As for the Verifiability Criterion, I don't think we have time to really debate that right now, although it would fit in with your recent posts on nonsense. Still, I think three points are in order: (1) the VC could be read as an analytic truth about the logical structure of the language of unified science, which was the early positivists' main concern; (2) alternatively, it could be read as an empirical statement - albeit a false one - about something more psychological than formational grammar, viz. how words come to be intelligible; and (3) Carnap gave up the VC rather early on in his intellectual development, although he took to the grave the belief that "cognitively significant" discourse can be demarcated by clear, universally-binding criteria, which I find rather plausible. In light of (3), I see the VC as somewhat like Aristotelian physics - utterly false, but a good first step.
I don't think I get your last paragraph. Do you mean to point out the irony that every attempt at sweeping away the history of philosophy is itself eventually swept away? Or are you suggesting that the positivists didn't think they were doing philosophy?
On Williams, it is indeed true you find this dismissive approach in his writing (not just the place you mention). Also in his classes. I mentioned once I was reading Heidegger and he laughed in a way that was meaningful.
Williams learned from Geach, who on p.85 of Mental Acts writes 'Suppose an Existentialist utters in a tone of conviction sounds transcribable as 'Nothing noths', then I could not 'He judged that Nothing nothed' as a report of what he judged; for neither ... is a bit of genuine English. I ought rather to say: 'He uttered sounds transcribable as 'Nothing noths', under the impression they mean something that is true'.
Note that no argument has been given that 'Nothing noths' is nonsense: that is simply understood. This attitude was, probably is, very common in the English school of philosophy.
Unlike Williams, I have read most of the existentialist &continental philosophers. On Kant, I only studied him as an undergraduate, but under Stephan Korner, who was one of the foremost Kantian scholars in England at the time. On his influence, of course I was being provocative. Though I think his connection with Strawson is over-played. Strawson belongs to a very English school of logico-linguistic analysis whose style &method owes nothing to Kant.
Some more thoughts on your list. I see Ockham comes out very poorly against Aquinas (in that the latter comes out third, the former is not even on the list).
The quality &rigour of Ockham's argument is superior to Aquinas. Note by the way that Aquinas wrote little or nothing on logic. Modern scholarship shows that the texts commonly attributed to him are by other writers. On the truth of the conclusions, Aquinas' views on hell and paradise do not bear serious consideration. On influence: I would attribute most of Aquinas modern influence to neo-scholasticism. But Ockham was in fact much more influential because of his connection with Reformation thought, and because of his systematic presentation of nominalism - or rather conceptualism, which you can provably connect with early modern theory of 'ideas', and hence most of modern philosophy. But Ockham does not get the credit for this, because the early modern philosophers do not give sources for their ideas.
Also interested you put Marx (and yet not Hegel??). If you regard Marx one idea as the theory of surplus value, which even at the time was known to be suspect, he does not score highly on your 'truth' criterion. One of course cannot deny the influence.
"children of the enlightenment or children of the age of science...They seemed to believe that everything was explicable in the light of reason, that rational inquiry would eventually make all desirable discoveries...My problem was that their own positive beliefs seemed to me manifestly untenable...They seemed to think that the world was an intelligible place, and I did not see how in the light of a moment's thought this belief could be entertained. Their faith in the power of reason seemed to me to be almost unbelievably unreflecting and misplaced in view of the fact that it was the application of reason that perpetually gave rise to insoluble problems, problems that were brought into existence by thinking but could not be removed by it...It was self-evident to them that this world of experience is all there is, and anything we do not as yet understand we can reasonably hope to discover in the course of time. All meaning and all purpose inhabit this world: value and morality are created by human beings, which in practice means that value and morality are created socially and historically. Any suggestion that reality was hidden was to them unintelligible, and therefore the suggestion that the significance of our experience might lie outside the range of our understanding a kind of gobbledygook - and again, crypto-religious. What cut me off most deeply from this attitude, and what I also found hardest to understand about it, was its lack of any sense of the amazingness of our experience - the sheer miraculousness of everything."
Thanks for the Magee quotation. Magee also wrote on Schopenhauer, and I would suggest that the irrationalism you mention comes from him and not from Kant. Kant held that the world in itself, the world as noumenon, is unknowable but not that it is unintelligible or irrational. I suggest that as a theist he could not have held that.
It is the case that metaphysics-- with some qualifications -- is "crypto-religious" and this of course is part of the reason why thre log positivists opposed it.
And Magee is right that these people had no sense of wonder, or at least could not credit such a sense as being anything more than a private emotional response. Thus they would have to dismiss Heidegger as hogwash.
Wittgenstein is a strange case: he has a mystical side and also a religious side as I could document quite easily from Culture and Value and other sources. But he is a philosopher of the Cave -- the Cave is all there is.
I did not omit Hegel from the list. I was working from a list supplied by the BBC. I merely ranked their choices in my way. If I made up my own list, others would be on it and Marx would probably have been omitted.
Forgive me for this sweeping observation, but there may be something about English people that unfits them for appreciating Heidegger and Nietzsche and Co. You have to be a bit of a romantic, a bit of a poet, you have to be willing to grant a pinch of salt. The English are too prosaic. So they think that Heidegger's Das Nichts nichtet is just nonsense. It's not. (As I might attempt to explain on some later occasion.)
People like Williams see no depth, no mysteriousness in Being. His whole crusade, as you know, was to replace the philosophy of Being and existence, whether Thomistic, Heideggerian, or of any sort, with the philosophy of someness. He puts it that way himself, I think, near the beginning of What is Existence?. Like Russell, he though that all talk of existence, as of something ontological rather than merely logical, is "rubbish" to use Russell's word.
A discussion of the VC belongs in a separate post.
When I wrote:
I meant that the LPs were not doing logic, or mathematics, or physical science; they were articulating and defending a philosophical position on what counts as knowledge, how it is related to meaning and verification and truth, etc. They were doing something just as contentious and just as controvertible as what their opponents were doing. They had their own dogmas, as Quine later tried to argue in his famous "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
How could I have forgotten Wilfrid Sellars? His Science and Metaphysics bears the subtitle: Variations on Kantian Themes. Sellars may be the foremost counterexample to 'Ockham''s claim that the influence of Kant does not extend beyond the 19th cent.
Ockham,
Thanks for the very interesting Peirce quotation. Seems right to me.
Dave,
Thanks for the comment.
It might indeed be a disservice, if not a curse, for men such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to be called philosophers at all, not because the title is to be lamented nor still because they are particularly undeserving of it, but rather because many a man thereafter tends to judge the works of these thinkers not so much by their own merits than by a standard for which he takes true philosophy to be.
Thanks for the comment, and welcome to the discussion.
I agree that Nietzsche provides insights into modern life. He has great cultural significance, and ought to be studied for that reason alone.
And you may be right that it is unfair to judge N &K by the standards of traditional philosophy. But that will take some arguing.
I don't know much about this thing called "greatness," but I do know that we all need the shoulders of giants if we are to see a way forward.
One mark of greatness is influence, and the influence of Kant cannot be denied, pace 'Ochkham.' And this despite the exasperating obscurity of some of his arguments, e.g. the transc. deduction of the categories in the CPR.
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4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.