Question of the Day, October 2, 2010

[jp201]

no Democritus?

my vote is for him.

He was thought of as crazy as he came up with the theory that everything can be broken down into tiny pieces and would eventually not be able to be broken down anymore.

By the way he was from 460-370 BC and he called these tiny particles that could not be seen or broken down atoms.

Yeah the same atoms that were not discovered until late 1800's when scientists finally found evidence of their existence.

He had a theory that could not be proven for over 2200 years when they concluded he was correct.

 

[CitySquirrel]

Either C.S. Lewis or Søren Kierkegaard. John Gardner is also up there.

 

[Upbeat Zombie]

Can't say I know that many philosophers..

 

[Nailz]

My vote is for Henri Bergson.

Edit:

Ayn Rand.

Lao Tsu in close second.

Freud and Melanie Klein in there if you want to consider them such.

Lao Tsu and Ayn Rand are a kind of bizarre pairing, although the first would probably be tied with my original vote. If we're walking down that street I pick Jung as well.

snip

^ this was /thread for me.
Some serious cringing accompanied most of the posts I read that had more than a name, but not this. Beautiful post.


Most of this thread has been a neo-platonic circle jerk, I'm glad you called it.

 

[DojiStar]

Did you deliberately leave out ALL my favorite philosophers? I can see your rationalist bias (no Heraclitus, Pyrro, Hume -- well, ok, at least Aristotle and Locke made it). How can you leave out KANT? You must be frickin neo-Platonic rationalist intellectual circle-jerkers, lost in your pointless analytic a priori reasoning.

If I had to pick one, I'd either go with Thales, because he cornered the entire olive oil market by leveraging up with a small down payment on all the presses long before harvest season. Who says philosophy isn't practical?

Or William of Occam for kicking the whole "reason in service of faith" thing in teeth and then in the nads for good measure...

Or Zhuangzi (if he existed, I hope so) for being obnoxiously cryptic and steering everything into a perpendicular direction all the time...

Arrg, there are too many!

 

[Admiral Stukov]

Nietzsche, can't really explain why tho, I just like him.
Maybe because his mouth-foaming anti religion stuff is something I can relate to.

 

[DojiStar]

no Democritus?

my vote is for him.

He was thought of as crazy as he came up with the theory that everything can be broken down into tiny pieces and would eventually not be able to be broken down anymore.

By the way he was from 460-370 BC and he called these tiny particles that could not be seen or broken down atoms.

Yeah the same atoms that were not discovered until late 1800's when scientists finally found evidence of their existence.

He had a theory that could not be proven for over 2200 years when they concluded he was correct.

There's more (and less) to it than that. He wasn't really proposing a super advanced scientific theory for which there was no evidence at the time (although it turned out that way in retrospect). He was attempting to balance the two great opposing schools of Western philosophy: empiricism (what you see is what there is) and rationalism (only the pure reasoning of the mind is true).

The problem is, in a nutshell, that empiricists have a hard time creating universal rules or even talking about constants (if you can't step in the same river twice can we even call it the same river?). Rationalists, well, if you can't learn from observing, with what are you left?

Democritus compromised. There ARE things that are constant, indivisible, and unchanging - atoms - to appease our innate need for rationalism. They just rearrange themselves all the time to create our ever-changing material world to explain why we need empiricism. So I don't really give him scientific credit, per se (it's not like he was doing electron scattering and needed a theory to support the evidence)... But, even more significantly, I give him credit for coming up with the entire theoretical framework scientists and most people think about the material world: that on some level, we can come down to constants or rules that, through permutation, create the endless variety of our universe. Profound.

Speaking of which, many Greeks considered him their VERY BEST philosopher. The only writings that survive were the tiny bit on atoms, which is really clever and influential stuff. WHAT DID WE LOSE?!

 

[orangebandguy]

Aristotle is the easiest for my A Level Philosophy course so it has to be him.

 

[CosmicCommander]

I'm stuck between Nietzsche and... Erm... I daren't say... I don't want to die... Rand.

Please, don't philosophically gang-bang me, Escapist.

 

[Aptspire]

Socrates, for basic logic

 

[rddj623]

Pascal

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I prefer Plato for his strict logical method... Discard falsehoods, take whatever can be proven to be absolutely true and then add to it, one block at a time until you tower of absolutely true (and often trivial) information has gotten you somewhere surprising.

Such a method should be basically impossible to fail and yet it does so often (Don't believe me, read the discussion Socrates has with his comrades as he prepares to be executed. It's so elegant yet falls completely flat on it's metaphorical face because an early "absolute truth" isn't as absolute-y as assumed. Even if this method fails you learn something interesting about the assumptions you or your friends make)

I just wonder, how many people that chose Plato, believe in some kind of afterlife or something beyond what we are living now, something divine.

In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, he shows his view of how everything we see before us isn't actual reality or real. The keyboard that I am typing on now, isn't real, it is just a shadow of actual reality. This is the whole reason that Plato didn't care for the Arts and artists. He felt that what artist do is pointless. Plato is referring to how artists think that what they draw or paint is a perfect capturing of a real object, that it can achieve greater status and have more worth than the actual object. He would tell them that the object they painted, is just a shadow of what reality, the divine is. So in a sense the artist has created a shadow of a shadow, the artist made something that is now twice removed, being further from the divine than the actual object painted.

Yea! My Philosophy and Rhetoric classes pay off for once.

Edit: Oh yeah, I chose Aristotle. He thought that not just book learning was important, but going out and experiencing things has an important impact on how people learn.

 

[laststandman]

Aristotle. As a devout historian, I love how his philosophy is indicative of ancient Greek society.
Edit: But Sartre was a runner up. I love his quote "Hell is other people."

 

[deth2munkies]

I enjoy Locke and Nozick particularly, in great part because they are easier to read.

I've also been taking an ethics course and been introduced to Parfit, who is quite interesting as well.

I would have to say my favorite is Descartes though, because it takes real balls to say that everything that exists is because of a demon torturing a brain in a vat.*

Spoiler

*I'm well aware this is a vast oversimplification and not precisely accurate, but it's meant to be funny

 

[Elesar]

Carl Jung

 

[Spacelord]

Epicurus.

Flamewar ahoy!

I'm going for Baruch Spinoza. Dude had balls.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I am amazed by the feedback this poll caused. I happen to study philosophy for several years now and always was under the impression that most of my fellow students didn't even bother to read the philosophers original texts but settled with secondary literature, wikipedia even, at worst.

May I ask who, if any, of you have actually read anything from their favorite philosopher?

Especially Nietzsche strikes me as an odd candidate. German is my native language and I will be damed before I can safely say that I can take more than an accurate guess at what Nietzsches texts are about, because his language is so overloaded with symbolism and metaphors.

So I wonder how you non-german folk happen to develop such a liking for Nietzsche? Is that actually thougt in school, is it based on pop-culture ideas about his philosophy or is the average person on the internet just way more literate than anybody in real life? ^^

I've had to read Nietzsche for a Philosophy class, and I believe a Rhetoric class, these were college classes.

I would bet here, that a large amount of people here are talking from what they read in college class, though I have known people that read philosophical works because they want to, though I'm not one of them.

Philosophy is a required elective in college, in that a person either has to take Philosophy or Ethics. I chose Philosophy, then I found out that Ethics wasn't a boring class and was actually fun, wish I had taken it instead.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

May I ask who, if any, of you have actually read anything from their favorite philosopher?

Especially Nietzsche strikes me as an odd candidate.

I've read a lot of Nietzche's work, and also some of the more esoteric tellings of what his work entailed - especially thanks to the "re-writes" of his sister.

Stunningly good re-telling of Nietzche heading to the West towards the end of his life to a little town called Tombstone. Really mixes with the cant of his work.

 

[theshadavid]

Where is Ghandi?