In a comment on the last post, MP asks:
Okay, so who are your all time, desert-island, top 5 philosophers? I'll go first.
1) Marcus Aurelius
2) Alain de Botton
3) Ludwig Wittgenstein
4) A. A. Milne
5) Robert HeinleinCheers,
-MP
By "desert island", I'm assuming that he means ones that you can read and re-read, not necessarily the philosophers that made the greatest impact, or the ones that you'd want to organize your desert island society around. On that score I'd go for Marcus Aurelius, too, even though I think Epicurus had much more influence on my thinking. But when mostly fragments and restatements survive, you want more to keep you busy on a desert island. For the same reason, I think most of the analytic philosophers fall by the wayside. Do I really want to keep rereading Wittgenstein or Searle? For me I think it's probably
1) Nietszche
2) Isaiah Berlin
3) David Hume
4) Marcus Aurelius
5) Plato
But, as usual with such lists, I reserve my right to change my mind at any time. At any time, I tell you!
Posted by joshua at March 3, 2005 09:51 PMJust thought I'd link back here mentioning I've decided to mirror the post. Let's see how many other philosophy blogs we can get to cross-link to the "top 5 meme". Only if you want to, of course. If you have a top 5 list, pop it in your blog and let us know?
My Top 5: http://melbournephilosopher.blogspot.com/2005/03/all-time-top-5.html
Cheers,
-MP
just stumbled upon your blog and thought i'd comment on the top 5 philosophers.... honestly, i didnt know a lot of the guys you mentioned in there, but here are mine. i'm just an amateur philosophy buff, anyways:
(1) Plato
(2) Kant
(3) Mill
(4) Descartes
(5) Rand
I'll second the notion that they've got to be readable, and that this disqualifies most of the analytics. I'll go with:
Goethe
Isaiah Berlin
Walter Kaufman
Philip K. Dick
Robert Anton Wilson
Top Five of which I wish I had read more:
Frege
Wittgenstein
Heidegger
Carnap
Godel