
Are History’s “Greatest Philosophers” All That Great? - diodorus
http://dailynous.com/2016/04/26/were-historys-so-called-greatest-philosophers-all-that-great/
======
andkon
Honestly, I don't think this is the right path for inquiry. Philosophy isn't
just the accumulation of arguments and scholarship; it's a discipline, and by
that measure, some folks are better or worse, absolutely.

When it comes to Plato specifically, I did a lot of pre-Socratic and later
Plato work in my philosophy degree, and you can basically watch Plato go from
reiterating Socrates to becoming a truly great philosopher in his own right.
He does it by learning, as we all must, to do good philosophy: to take
seriously his forebears on their own terms, and then communicate carefully and
thoroughly what's inadequate.

It's funny, because the tools he has are very weak. Logic isn't well
developed; they just started grappling with basic concepts like what-is and
what-is-not. But eventually, as any truly great philosopher must, Plato builds
out his own positive program. The Parmenides is a great example; he finds a
way to reconcile the paradoxes the pre-Socratics were obsessed with, and comes
out with a richer toolkit and a stronger ontology as a result. Oh, and it's
just as rigorous as any modern work of philosophy.

This article, though, seems kinda narrowly concerned about impact and exposure
and all that stuff. Like in tech, you don't get to decide your impact, but you
can become a really great philosopher by doing just what Plato did back then.

~~~
igravious
I both agree and disagree.

Philosophy _is_ a disciple, but it is an unusual one in that the answers to
philosophical questions contain the seeds of other disciplines. It is kind of
a meta-discipline.

Like any other human practice some are better at it and some are worse,
agreed.

Logic is no more central to philosophy than it is to any other human activity.
What is central to philosophy is _abstraction_. From that vantage point it
more closely resembles software engineering than any other human activity and,
I would argue, and this distinction is going to blur over time as the use of
computers becomes habitual, as it must, within the activity of philosophy.

I think the counter-argument to this article is -- these great philosophers
must be in our midst so why is it that we do not recognise them? That is the
question that should have been asked. But to finish with a bit of snark,
apologies in advance, the ability to ask that question takes a certain
philosophical mindset.

~~~
woodman
> Logic is no more central to philosophy than...

I filled my mandatory philosophy credit hours many years ago, so this might be
a very silly question: what happens when a product of philosophy can be
demonstrated to logically not follow? It was my impression that such a product
would be discarded, making logic extremely important in philosophy - unlike,
unfortunately, many other human endeavors.

~~~
Retric
Logic has little value in philosophy because the terms have no specific
inherent meaning. The solution seems to be to fix specific meaning to terms,
but your stuck using meaningless terms to do so. Queue a recursive waste of
time.

Though people are used to ambiguity and love extracting meaning from arbitrary
stories, so it's not all that obvious of an issue. At its core philosophy is
not about extracting meaning through analysis it's about conveying what
someone has already desided to be true.

~~~
jwatte
Why do you think logic is taught as part of the philosophy department in US
universities, not the math or comp sci department?

Personally, I think the means of abstraction and logical reasoning we take for
granted today are the direct result of thousands of years of philosophy!

~~~
Retric
A) Depends on the school. But, it is commonly set up this way so people can
satisfy general ED requirements without 'wasting' a class. If you read through
this list there are logic class from several departments. (Mathematics,
Computer Science, and Philosophy)
[http://logic.harvard.edu/courses.php](http://logic.harvard.edu/courses.php)

B) Randomly trying things for thousands of years is likely to produce some
interesting results. That does not mean doing so is a good idea.

------
c0ff
How many people alive today could come up with Dijkstra's shortest path
algorithm when faced with a problem that calls for it? Probably hundreds of
thousands, if not more. But, Dijkstra described the problem and its solution
at a time when computer science was an obscure field of study. His
contribution - among others - helped pave the way for the modern computerized
world.

If someone today solves an obscure problem of similar difficulty to Dijkstra's
graph search, they won't be called great anything. It is the impact that
matters, not the difficulty of the problem or the IQ of the inventor. Great
scientists, philosophers and artists had the foresight, luck, and ability to
develop something that subsequently had a massive impact on the world.

A point in the article that I agree with is that great philosophers shouldn't
be treated as flawless geniuses. Great people of the past made massively
impactful contributions, but that doesn't make them the ultimate authority on
their field. Answers to today's problems aren't going to be found by disecting
footnotes of Aristotle, Turing or Einstein, but in work of people who will
make contributions today that will shape the future.

~~~
dominotw
>Great people of the past made massively impactful contributions, but that
doesn't make them the ultimate authority on their field.

Asking out of ignorance. What tangible impact did Plato's work have on the
world?

I can list how all the ways people that you listed made an impact on the
world.

~~~
chadzawistowski
I think Plato's most significant work is his Theory of Forms -- he essentially
articulated the object-oriented approach of looking at the world. Plato's
abstract, idealistic "forms" are a lot like classes, whereas individual
"objects" instantiate those classes.

Aristotle took this framework and developed it further with the idea of
inheritance. He classified things into tree structures (with great success)
across many fields including biology, zoology, geology, psychology, politics,
physics, and so on.

~~~
val314159
Um, calling Shadows and Forms "a lot like" Object-Orientation in Computer
Science really belittles much of Information Theory developed in the last
hundred years.

If anything, I would consider it an early version of "Signs and Signifiers".

~~~
78666cdc
>Signs and Signifiers

Semiology is perhaps among the farthest removed from information theory, and
computer science in general.

------
lisper
This article is an elaborate dance around a very simple and obvious point: for
any given discovery, only one person can ever get the credit for discovering
it for the first time, which means there's a huge first-mover advantage at the
frontiers of knowledge. It's not at all surprising, therefore, that most of
the "great philosophers" are dead. (We're actually living at a rare moment in
history where many of the people at the forefront of a major technological
revolution are still alive.)

~~~
ma2rten
_We 're actually living at a rare moment in history where many of the people
at the forefront of a major technological revolution are still alive._

I don't understand this statement. Aren't the people at the forefront of a
technological revolution (or anything else) always alive (otherwise how can
they be at the forefront ?).

~~~
lisper
Major technological revolutions are not all that common. Fire, agriculture and
metallurgy is pretty much all there was until Newton. Then in the 18th century
you got chemistry and thermodynamics, which led to the industrial revolution.
In the 19th century you got Darwin and Pasteur which led to major advances in
biology and medicine. In the 20th century you got quantum mechanics and
relativity, which led to electronics and nuclear power, and then since WW2 or
so you have computers. That's basically it. Everything in the last few decades
and currently on the horizon is really just slicing-and-dicing those half
dozen or so fundamental developments in different ways. Advances of that
magnitude are rare, and it is not at all clear when the next one will come.

------
weinzierl
An interview with Scott Aaronson touches the some subject: "Scott Aaronson on
Philosophical Progress" [1]:

Luke (interviewer):

[...]

I’ve previously called philosophy a “diseased discipline[2],” for many
reasons. For one thing, people working in philosophy-the-field tend to know
strikingly little about the philosophical progress made in other fields, e.g.
computer science or cognitive neuroscience. For another, books on the history
of philosophy seem to be about the musings of old dead guys who were wrong
about almost everything because they didn’t have 20th century science or math,
rather than about actual philosophical progress, which is instead recounted in
books like The Information[3].

[...]

Scott:

[...]

You’re right that these “old dead guys” didn’t know all the math and science
we know today, but then again, neither did Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky! I mean,
sure, the central questions of philosophy have changed over time, and the
human condition has changed as well: we no longer get confused over Zeno’s
paradoxes or the divine right of kings, and we now have global
telecommunications and the Pill. I just don’t think either human nature or
human philosophical concerns have changed quickly enough for great literature
on them written centuries ago to have ceased being great.

[...]

[1]
[https://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/](https://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/)

[2]
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/4zs/philosophy_a_diseased_discipline...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/4zs/philosophy_a_diseased_discipline/)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood-
ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood-
ebook/dp/B004DEPHUC/)

~~~
takno
I think the question asked of Scott badly mischaracterizes Philosophy as I've
seen it taught and studied. Philosophers interested in mind and cognition tend
to take a great deal of interest in developments in CS and neuroscience.

On the other hand it is entirely typical of a subset of researchers in fields
like CS to think that 20th century science gives them all the answers and to
demean anybody who wants them to think about whether they are even asking the
right questions.

~~~
empath75
It's hard to argue that cutting edge CS like category theory and homotopy type
theory isn't philosophical in nature.

~~~
Xcelerate
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I actually agree with your
statement.

------
ktRolster
From the article:

 _First is low-hanging fruit. In fields like science and mathematics, one may
suggest it is easier to make earlier breakthroughs versus subsequent ones_

If it's low-hanging fruit, then _do_ it, pick some of that fruit, astound us
with your ideas, and we'll remember you as a genius who picked a lot of fruit,
instead of forgetting you as a lame blogger who can't even pick sour grapes.

Because to me it seems a lot easier to build on someone else's ideas than to
come up with something truly original.

------
coldtea
> _The world population at 500BCE is estimated to have been 100 million; in
> the year 2000, it was 6.1 billion, over sixty times greater. Thus if we
> randomly selected people from those born since the ‘start’ of western
> philosophy, they would generally be born close to the present day. Yet when
> it comes to ‘greatest philosophers’, they were generally born much further
> in the past than one would expect by chance._

That's why those older philosophers were great thinkers.

Because at those times, while they could be off in physical sciences (although
they made great headstarts into that too), at least they didn't trivialize
their thinking with such crude quantity based analysis...

He also says "it is difficult to think of many factors which favor Plato’s
time versus our own", when even in what he counts, the fact for example that
the quantity of the work might not merely a factor of population, but depend
on things such as a society (and an era) encouraging such inquiry from
individuals, or even giving them the necessary leisure to pursuit it, doesn't
seem to cross his mind.

Of course there are a lot more possible explanations (including the
combination of all of them) that the three lame ones given, starting with some
simple ones:

(1) The modern era has less individuals with the leisure time required for
philosophy.

(2) Even for those with leisure, there are too many distractions in the modern
era.

(3) Philosophy getting out of of favor in certain eras, including ours. Even
in a place such as France, it was much more favorable (in vogue) to being a
philosopher in the early-mid 20th century than it has been after the nineties.

(4) He conveniently forgets the whole backslash against philosophy in favor of
theology that last most of the 3 to 15th century.

(5) There's the "low hanging fruit" thing, in which, the most basic and core
inquiries are made by the first (or near) that examine a given field, and the
rest are just "footnotes to Plato" (as Whitehead IIRC put it). That's not 100%
accurate, of close, but it's close to what happened.

(6) Philosophy, like poetry, does not sell. And the modern era is all about
selling stuff and making a profession out of everything. Modern "philosophers"
are academic careerists with a degree in philosophy.

And lots of others beside.

~~~
mannykannot
The author does make the low hanging fruit point, and he does offer
justifications for his view of the opportunity issue that, FWIW, I find
plausible. I am inclined to believe that in the past, the distractions of
scratching a living diminished many peoples' time for musing, especially those
who were slaves. The two-day weekend is a modern development.

I don't think you are being entirely consistent when you say both that the
modern era has fewer individuals with the leisure time for philosophy, and
that modern philosophers are academic careerists: the modern opportunity
provided by academic careers seems to have benefitted science, for example, by
giving a lot of time to people who would otherwise never have the leisure for
it.

While enumerating those times when philosophy has been out of favor, the
execution of Socrates comes to mind, as do the events that forced Aristotle to
flee Athens.

I think your point 4 is insightful. From that era, only Aquinas makes the cut.
That time, however, belongs to the 'then', rather than the 'now' of vastly
larger population. Also, the theological backlash occurred primarily or only
in christian Europe and the Levant, which points to another bias in this
list...

~~~
coldtea
Academic philosophy is more preoccupied with forwarding a career, and is tied
to too much peer-group-think, paper-publishing rituals and formalities to be
as potent as independent philosophy. It's not really the province of the
independent thinker -- which, historically, is what most major philosophers
have been.

For science, this scheme works, because science is a collaborative effort (so
more working on the same thing, the better), and it also has practical results
which are pursued and compensated because they can be worth millions and
billions.

Whereas a philosophical grant can be given equally well to a great pioneering
work or to some tired derivative mumbling, and it's even more convenient to
give grants to the latter, as those who write those works don't make waves and
keep everybody happy.

>* While enumerating those times when philosophy has been out of favor, the
execution of Socrates comes to mind, as do the events that forced Aristotle to
flee Athens.*

I'd say that those were rather philosophers that went out of favor (as opposed
to philosophy, which the polis valued still).

That is, it wasn't some widespread disinterest in philosophy, nor a widespread
persecution of philosophers -- numerous others carried over at the same time
Socrates was executed, including Socrates own student, Plato (and Xenophon),
and later Plato's students, including Aristotle.

------
Bluestrike2
Plato and Aristotle were early philosophers relative to us, but they were also
the product of a long oral tradition that Plato was able to take and transform
into what we now consider philosophy. We have fairly complete records of their
work, but only limited fragments and secondary references to those that came
before them in comparison. Even the catch-all term "pre-Socratics" highlights
this difference.

That alone would account for some portion of Plato's influence, but that does
a great disservice to his work. In every sense of the word, it was
revolutionary. The word "great" gets bandied around a lot, and this article
seems to struggle with it, but if you consider it in terms of influence, then
Plato's position/ranking is unassailable. Nearly every western philosopher
since has been influenced--directly or indirectly--by Plato's legacy. Just as
you can't read Plotinus without a thorough understanding of Plato, even today
there's an implicit assumption in philosophy that you have a pretty decent
familiarity with Platonism.

Plato's legacy isn't just one of ideas; it rightly includes the very field of
philosophy as we understand it today. For that reason alone, he is considered
a titan of the field.

~~~
empath75
I don't think the author would disagree with anything you just said. His point
was largely that he was a 'right-place-in-the-right-time' phenomenon. Plato is
a titan because he started the first schools, and he's responsible for some of
the earliest written record of philosophy in the west. It might be perhaps be
the case that his abilities as an administrator and teacher were more
important than his abilities as a philosopher. Imagine if he wasn't able to
raise the funds for his schools or attract students? Diogenes was probably as
able as Plato in a lot of ways -- but he didn't have institutional support.

------
StanislavPetrov
This article is flawed in many ways. Not once does he mention the problems
with modern "education" as it relates to churning out great philosophers.
Philosophy requires having an open mind in order to push the boundaries of
human understanding. Modern education, especially in industrialized countries,
does the opposite of nurturing free thought and critical thinking. In the
United States, children who express different ideas and ways of thinking at an
early age are much more likely to be dosed with psychotropic drugs to
"normalize" their behavior and thought patterns then to be cultivated as
future great thinkers.

------
simondedalus
this article commits the same error that much of analytic philosophy does: it
asks how something observable could be possible, and when it doesn't find a
good answer, it suggests that the thing to be explained actually is
impossible.

it's statistically unlikely that plato and aristotle were that good, ay? and
they simply picked off low hanging fruit? okay, show me 13 modern day publish-
or-perish professors whose thought and work are as sweeping, insightful, or
profound as plato or aristotle. show me the last person since wittgenstein or
frege or kant about whom we could write something like woodbridge's
"aristotle's vision of nature." they certainly write down as much as plato or
aristotle. show me the thinker with that much quality work.

the point here is that this is always how philosophy has been, and how it
always should be: yes, we need to question our assumptions; yes, we need to
listen to any voices that have been historically locked out of our discourse
for biased reasons... but if you want to do either of those, you show me the
damn proof of it, and you explain it really, really well.

edit: in other words, an explanation of why we just can't appreciate the
current 13 platos in athens is worth exactly nothing. show them to me, and
prove to me that they're as good as plato. that's how philosophy works. giving
an abstract argument trying to explain why you can't give me a good argument
just is giving me a shitty argument.

------
airesQ
I agree with the author, there are probably many philosophers with the same
level of ability as Plato/Socrates/Aristotle alive today, and I think this is
an important point to make.

As for the role that ancient philosophers still play, perhaps philosophy could
do a better job of separating people from their ideas.

Lets think of flight, the Wright Brothers where the first to get an heavier-
than-air machine to fly (fancy way of saying airplane). And yet aeronautics
students don't have courses on the Wright Brother's. Because aeronautics has
managed to separate the people from the ideas. Perhaps it would make some
sense for philosophy to do the same.

~~~
Bluestrike2
You can divorce the Wright Brothers from the principles of heaver-than-air
flight. You can't really divorce philosophical work from the philosopher,
particularly when dealing with the ancients. Throughout Plato's œuvre, there
are a myriad of references to pre-Socratics and other ideas that were largely
found only in an oral tradition with no surviving texts. Understanding his
work, then, requires you to look at the historical context. The same holds
true for a number of other philosophers: I can hand you a copy of Plotinus's
_Enneads_ , but unless you're familiar with Platonism, Epicureans, Gnostics,
Stoics, and a number of other schools of thought (some of which are quite
obscure), you're going to struggle to understand Plotinus's system.

The other reason is that many of the "great philosophers" wrote in systematic
form. Furthermore, many of their writings are collections--often compiled
after the fact--that pull together notes from lectures, debates, treatises,
etc. They cross-reference one another, and sometimes, they aren't
chronological. Plotinus's _Enneads_ are a good example of this in my opinion,
as you wind up bouncing around chronologically a lot because of how Porphyry
compiled them.

All of that makes it almost impossible to divorce specific ideas from the
writer or the writer's other ideas and works. Attempting to do so, rather than
simplifying study, only makes it more difficult.

The other thing is that oral tradition still held sway for centuries. Heck, it
still does in some ways. I remember a guest lecturer we had who talked about
an Iranian student of his. They were discussing Avicenna (a very well-known
and influential Islamic philosopher), and the student corrected him about
something. He wasn't sure where in Avicenna's writings he was referring to,
and when asked, the student said something pretty shocking. He wasn't
referring directly to his writings, but oral tradition passed on to him by his
professor in an unbroken chain dating back over a _thousand_ years to Avicenna
himself. I can only imagine how much was lost over time, and how things might
get distorted, but that story was pretty jaw-dropping.

My point is, history and the authors themselves are inextricably linked to
their work in philosophy. For both good and bad.

~~~
im3w1l
I am not sure that such a divorce would be a good thing, but if it were done
there is no reason we should read the Enneads, or indeed any of the classical
works.

Do away with history and authors both. Keep the ideas and arguments, but in
modern form, and on a modern foundation.

------
osullivj
Whitehead: Western philosophy is just 2000 years of foot notes on Plato.
Murray Gell-Mann: philosophy is the discipline whose adherents kick up a load
of dust and then complain they can't see.

------
nikdaheratik
I think one important point the article left out: time as a filter for how
good an idea or work is. There are a large number of mediocre or poor thinkers
that left ideas that didn't stand the test of time. Only a few have, and so
you're actually more likely to see a list that includes a large number of
philosophers from the past because generations of other philosophers have
thought about what they had to say and realize that it is still relevant.

There may be the equivalent of 13 Platos in Athens right now, but we won't
know whether they have anything worth adding until enough time has gone by to
show whether their ideas are worth anything or not.

I'm not the first person to realize this point, BTW.

------
nitwit005
When you teach philosophy you are, like many fields, effectively teaching the
history of philosophy.

If you want to condense 2000+ years of history down to something that fits in
an education, you're going to have to cut almost everything. What people
generally do is cover people or events that had great influence on what came
after.

You're not getting "greatest", "best", or even "most correct"; You're getting
people who stood out as having influence.

------
deepnet
I enjoy philosophy of mind like Dan Dennet's work, especially relevant to A.I.
is the question, what is human intelligence, mind, consciousnes, creativity.

John Searle's Chinese room has occupied my thoughts for years. Now
Convolutional Neural Net's that translate Chinese to English and answer
questions lead me to believe that the guy in the Searle's Chinese room is
redundant.

~~~
78666cdc
It sounds like you haven't actually understood that argument. "The guy in the
room" has always been a minor detail. Furthermore, machine translation has
existed since before convolutional neural nets, so your whole point falls
under the "not even wrong" category.

~~~
deepnet
Your categorisation of my speculation assumes too much.

------
100110010100101
The greatest philosopher who ever existed: Johann Schmidt. (seriously). Why?
His principle of ownness.

My musical tribute:
[http://www.upload.ee/files/5775110/allthingsarenothing.mp3.h...](http://www.upload.ee/files/5775110/allthingsarenothing.mp3.html)

------
gyeonggi
These philosophers are great because we have built on their thoughts and
ideas. Whatever exists now exists because these philosophers' works have been
studied.

------
fleitz
Yes anyone alive today could discover Newtonian physics, however Newton is
famous because he was the first.

There probably are 13 platos in Attica, they aren't famous because they
weren't the first to say what Plato did.

~~~
vixen99
Maybe, provided we don't have the situation akin to that in which a friend of
the writer Charles Lamb was explaining how "I could write like Shakespeare if
I'd a mind to . . ." to which Lamb responded as quickly as his stammer would
allow: 'Y Y Y Yes, only the mind is lacking'.

------
joesmo
Using a poll to determine history's greatest philosophers leads me to believe
that the author knows little to nothing about philoshopy. Also, it's simply an
assumption to say that most great philosophers are ancient. Further, the
reason why the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle are studied so
much and may be considered so great in many philosophic circles is simply
because many of the ideas they came up with are original to us--that is, we do
not know of any older philosophers who had similar ideas and/or do not have
those texts. Many of the philosophers that came after built upon those ideas.
You'd be hard pressed to find many ideas in philosophy even in the last
century that don't build on the ancients, many of them coming directly out of
Aristotle for example and certainly not limited to Aristotelian logic and
ethics.

It's not about who is the greatest thinker or who has more raw brainpower.
It's certainly not just about learning the history of philosophy. How can you
understand any modern philosopher without understanding what context they are
writing in and what arguments they are critiquing, without understanding the
world they lived in and the world they were responding to (of which history is
a big part but certainly not all)? Why would we have philosophers now that
just rehash old ideas? Unlike in science, it would only make those ideas less
clear, not more. Reading a modern synopsis of ancient philosophers will help
with the history part but I doubt it would spark much interest in students or
ideas and discussion. It'd probably confuse people unnecessarily as many
ancient ideas have no place in modernity. Not to mention robbing them of the
pleasure of reading original philosophy and understanding it.

All that just to get a muddied, unclear version that misses a lot of the
subtleties that make those philosophies great. No one would be able to build
on ancient philosophers anymore because now we'd be interpreting a limited
interpretation of the original texts that captured a fraction of the original
meaning, not the original texts. We'd be unable to find new meanings in those
original texts. This last part would indeed be a crime against philosophers--
true lovers of knowledge--everywhere. What the author suggests that we do is
indeed, truly monstrous and incredibly stupid:

"we should expect the scholarship of Plato or Aristotle (or any ‘great
philosopher’) to improve our understanding into the history of ideas, but not
to excavate some hidden philosophical insight relevant to modern discussions"

Thankfully Nietzche, Derrida, and [insert your favorite non-ancient
philosopher here] did not subscribe to this stupidity and small-mindedness or
they probably would never have written anything.

