Fascinating list that I thought yall would enjoy! If you’re not yet aware, https://plato.stanford.edu is as close to “philosophical canon” as it gets in modern American academia.
Shoutout to Gödel and Neumann taking top spots despite not really being philosophers, at least in how they’re remembered. Comparatively, I’m honestly shocked that neither Bohr nor Heisenberg made the cut, even though there’s multiple articles on quantum physics… Turing also managed to sneak in under the wire, with 33 citations.
The bias inherent in the source is discussed in detail, and I would also love to hear HN ideas on how to improve this project, and how to visualize the results! I’m not the author, but this is right up my alley to say the least, and I’d love to take a crack at it.
There's bound to be something to be teased out from who referenced whom and when.
Eg: (random example) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest had a great many students from the 1980s onwards, coinciding with the rise of plato.stanford.edu personal computers and the internet.
He's come in at #51 or so likely on the back of a generation of philosophy students with technology crossover writing up early articles on plato and throwing in a citation to Priest.
I'm in no way implying this is undeserved, just as an example of some of the weighting bias coming from the era when many plato stub articles originated.
JSON-LD with https://schema.org/Person records with wikipedia/dbpedia RDF URIs would make it easy to query on whichever datasets can be joined on common RDFS properties like schema: :identifier and rdfs:subPropertyOf sub-properties, https://schema.org/url, :sameAs,
Today there are wikipedia URLs, DOI URN URIs, shorturls in QR codes, ORCID specifically to search published :ScholarlyArticle by optional :author, and now there are W3C DIDs Decentralized Identifiers for signing, identifying, and searching of unique :Thing and skos:Concept that can be generated offline and optionally registered centrally, or centrally generated and assigned like DOIs but they're signing keys.
Given uncertainty about time intervals, plot concepts over time with charts for showing graph growth over time. Maybe philosophy skos:Concept intervals (and relations, links) from human annotations thereof and/or from LLM parsing and search snippets of Wikipedia, dbpedia RDF, wikidata RDF, and ranked Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy terminological occurrence frequency.
Not sure the point of having a filter to select only authors born after 1900.
Does show the bias towards the American end of Anglo-American analytic philosophy though.
Quine is ponderous. No idea how David Lewis made it to the top of the list either.
Without Wittgenstein included, to me this list seems fairly pointless. Realise he might not be close to the top but without his work most of these American philosophers would be nowhere. Maybe I have a different idea as what counts as “contemporary”. Hume seems pretty contemporary to me. So does Nietzsche.
I think the point is to get a snapshot of contemporary working thinkers and not merely a list of the heavy hitters like Plato and Aristotle. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a ton of insight here.
This is what SEP is though. Its not meant to be canonical in anyway and aims to be a (maybe anglo/analytic-skewed) non-public wiki for philosophy. If you read any of the articles its easy understand this decision, which are more about communicating concepts than writing exegesis of primary source material.
This shows neither "modern philosophy" nor something more essential, its a particular snapshot of a particular facet of academic philosophy, that is all.
I have always felt Wittgenstein's work is a non-philosopher's (or a mediocre philosopher's) idea of outstanding philosophy. Wittgenstein wasn't universally inspirational.
I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages. Psychologically this is surprising. The earlier Wittgenstein, whom I knew intimately, was a man addicted to passionately intense thinking, profoundly aware of difficult problems of which I, like him, felt the importance, and possessed (or at least so I thought) of true philosophical genius. The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement. - Bertrand Russell
Another analogy, Wittgenstein is the equivalent of fast food in the philosophy world. Ubiquitous but not super rich in quality, whatever nourishment you can find there, you can find from other earlier philosophers if you look hard enough (notably Indian philosophers from millennia ago [1]).
Funnily, your criticism of not citing Wittgenstein also applies to Wittgenstein not citing Easter philosophers.
Your quote is Russell criticizing the later Wittgenstein work, while praising the earlier work. It is a known thing that his late work was something of a repudiation of his early work. And that’s not mentioning that Russell was literally the person that recognized Wittgenstein’s genius and brought him into academia.
“He was perhaps the most perfect example I known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G.E.Moore.”
- Russell in his autobiography, about Wittgenstein
Your comment seems to not understand this distinction, which to me indicates that you aren’t actually familiar with Wittgenstein’s work at all.
Russell being used to criticize Wittgenstein also seems just bizarre when considering their relationship, and how Wittgenstein was plucked from obscurity specifically by Russell.
I think your argument is exactly backward, and cherry-picking a quote from Russell doesn't really buttress your argument if you know the full philosophical background of these two.
Russell saw Wittgenstein's brilliance early on and supported him in his work, but as he was near the end of his career and his mental faculties were on the decline, Russell found it increasingly difficult to understand Wittgenstein's philosophy.
Russell in hindsight was the lightweight next to Wittgenstein's brilliance.
If you want a non-philosopher's idea of outstanding philosophy, I would have pointed out Nietzsche instead.
Comparing Wittgenstein to fast food is a poor analogy. Wittgenstein is a complicated meal of mitteleuropa haute cuisine that will leave you with a headache and indigestion if you even attempt to finish it.
I'm not at all surprised by Quine, given that his impact in contemporary philosophy is immense. I'm more surprised by Carnap's non-appearance on this list, given that he was one of Quine's mentors, more influential, and his arguments have better withstood the test of time.
No kidding. I tried to learn predicate logic by reading his works (mainly Methods of Logic). I wanted to throw his books across the room. I made it, but comparing his treatment of the completeness and compactness theorems with Tao's treatment was enlightening (and infuriating).
It's as though Quine worked hard at being obscure.
I would agree on Wittgenstein, but the author clearly has a coder’s sensibility and wanted to stick to the rules. He didn’t really start to impact the broader field sustainably until the 40s and 50s, so I totally understand the urge to see him on the list. I think you might be putting your own goals onto this work, tho: you seem to be trying to think of the best philosophers, whereas this is a more narrow attempt to understand 2024 philosophy and its priorities.
Nietzsche is on the line for sure, but I’d say including classical thinkers (namely Hume, Kant, and Hegel) would be less interesting because their dominance is pretty stable at this point. I’m much more interested to see how the fight against Quineanism is going ;)
Either way thanks for the insightful comment; will be taking these thoughts into consideration as I try to improve on this. It’s good to see academic philosophy discussed meaningfully on HN!
I recall when this first appeared online and how a core "early gang" fleshed out a skeletal framework, eg: the first draft of the Sorites Paradox was belted out in 1997 by Dominic Hyde
and I can still see today the residual hand of he and his various peers that worked together to build an outline that represents the largely computer literal | math | logical philosphy student of the late 1980s|early 1990's PoV.
Yes thanks for doing it. It was interesting for me to see. There is a big gulf between analytic philosophy in UK and American universities which this list highlights - at no point did I read anything by Quine at university in England, nor did I need to, yet he’s used at length in the US. Hope the fight gets won.
It's odd that someone would be surprised David Lewis on the list. Lewis was the most important figure to the most important grad schools on the east coast for decades.
In the philosophy world, Modern Western Philosophy typically means circa 1500-1600-1700 or so and a class in the subject will include Hume, Locke, Descartes, etc.
In philosophy there's a well defined capital-M modernity, that breaks away from scholastic philosophy following the antique Aristotelian tradition, and attempts to re-invent philosophy starting in the late medieval period.
Modern philosophers are thus found from the renaissance up until the period that is referred by non-philosophers as modernity. This is because they themselves used the term modern.
Yes, I know what the word means in the standard sense. The point was that it doesn’t have a separate meaning in philosophy the way modern philosophy does.
Or in art, where modern art doesn’t mean “art of today” but instead “art of roughly 1880-1960.”
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979];
> Each author is only counted once per headline entry (subentries are excluded). In 2010, I found that this generated more plausible results than counting authors multiple times per entry.
In my subjective experience, a philosophical text will deal with a specific topic and name it in the title and less often the author. Papers with an author's name in the title often deal with the entire work or a phase of creation. Author names also often appear together with other names "Kant and Hume on Morality"[1].
So the list is for sure not about "… Most-Cited … Authors …".
A neat list, but there is a bias toward authors who published one controversial (and not necessarily good) argument that got a ton of rebuttals. Williamson is the worst offender.
Philosophy basically forked after Kant pointed out that the human brain does a sort of computation on sensory data.
Kant basically handed it off to the scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists except for a lot of fiddly bits around justifications and foundations. This is essentially the analytic school.
The other school jumped the shark and aligned with the Romantics and produced Hegel and Fichte and their descendants. This group tends to be opposed to the idea that truth exits and politically has a reactionary longing toward an imagined primitive past. And that longing combined with the belief in the inevitability of history and the valuelessness of human life has led to immense amounts of destruction. For the most part there just isn't anything to cite there that counts as philosophy in the sense it was understood since ancient times.
I don't see why "European" philosophy (I assume you mean continental) is any more global than analytic philosophy. Both originate from what is only a small sliver of humanity. In fact continental philosophy with its heavy French and German focus, comes from an even smaller demographic base than Anglo world, which at the very least includes the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Continental Philosophy is basically useless. Critical Theory is usually fashionable nonsense, and the best continentals are the most fashionable and the most nonsensical.
You know it's bad when one of the champions of the Continentals, Zizek, is at his most coherent in a decade when he's talking about how he received the "N word pass" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvw6BUgU0I
I think of Slavoj Zizek similarly to a comedian. If you judge him on those terms someone like Norm McDonald had better and more influential lines, but he's okay.
I don't think Nietzche is useless, but I'd trade a #251 on the list, Judea Pearl for him every time. And he's probably the most useful in your "continental" list, thinking a bit about replaceability.
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.
—————
I love Rorty’s clarity and humor and general ironic and deflationary approach to philosophy.
Hmm, I just asked Claude how Hans-Georg Gamader got dropped.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
I apologize for the oversight in not including Hans-Georg Gadamer. You're absolutely right to point this out, and he certainly deserves a place on this list. Gadamer was a highly influential philosopher, particularly in the field of hermeneutics, and his work has had a significant impact on philosophy, literary theory, and the humanities in general.
Given his importance, Gadamer should definitely be included in the top 100 list. Here's where I would place him, considering his influence:
[Insert after #11 and before #12, shifting the rest down]
11. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900)
Gadamer's major work, "Truth and Method" (1960), is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. His contributions to hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation and understanding, have been hugely influential across many disciplines.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It's a good reminder of how important it is to carefully consider all significant figures when compiling such lists, especially those right at the century's turn who had long, influential careers throughout the 20th century.
LLMs are professional bullshitters which need constant supervision and expert human knowledge to guide and refine. They are useful but only in the hands of someone who can see right through their omissions and often, lies.
> LLMs are professional bullshitters which need constant supervision and expert human knowledge to guide and refine. They are useful but only in the hands of someone who can see right through their omissions and often, lies.
So what you're saying is that academic philosophy is the perfect application for LLMs. All is clear.
Here is Claude’s apology for you. Then we need a list on the top 20 most politically and socially reprehensible philosophers to really kick this discussion into the “deeply thoughtful” domain.
Claude 3.5 responds:
You're right to ask about John Searle. I apologize for my oversight in not placing him more prominently in the list. Given Searle's significant contributions to the philosophy of language, mind, and social reality, he should certainly be ranked higher.
Considering Searle's influence, I would insert him into the list as follows:
[Insert after #27 and before #28, shifting the rest down]
28. John Searle (1932)
Searle's work on speech act theory, intentionality, artificial intelligence (including his famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment), and the philosophy of society and institutions has been highly influential. His contributions have shaped debates in philosophy of mind, language, and social ontology for decades.
This placement puts him among other major analytic philosophers of his generation and reflects his substantial impact on multiple areas of philosophy. Thank you for prompting me to reconsider his position. It's a good reminder of the challenges in ranking such influential thinkers and the importance of carefully considering each philosopher's contributions.
More realistically, a lot of those names got drunk in cafes and signed anything put in front of them:
Philippe Sollers later stated in 2001 that "there were so many manifestos, we signed them almost automatically"
which has a ring of truth and marks them down as a bit stupid in their youth but not all supporters of removing the age of consent. Sure, some would have but it's not as clear cut as you imply.
This stuff almost literally destroyed the french government, they claim so close that Charles de Gualle fled paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68
Uniquely evil people that almost destroyed Charles de Gaulle who definitely did no wrong and absolutely didn't deserve that?
Or, a group of people that reflected parts of the zeitgeist that organically arose in a post war France over run by nazi's, collaboraters, struggle for existence and first hand witnessnes to horror?
The first entry is fascinating but not toxic. The concept of living in an artificial spectacle resonates with me after 10 days of Olympics and what seems like a lifetime of pseudo-news.
A 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".
Yeah, my first reaction is that this list is more-or-less the philosophy an American lit. scholar would be expected to know. Heavy on continental philosophy, hermeneutics, recastings of traditional metaphysics, neo-Marxism . . . way less Anglo-American analytical stuff, but some.
I love textual analysis of this sort, and have done some vaguely similar analysis of HN front page activity[1], which includes some by-submitter and by-site breakdowns.
About a decade back I'd used a somewhat similar listing of "top global thinkers", compiled from Foreign Policy magazine, to come up with a proxy for substantiveness / quality ratings of various websites / domains / TLDs. I've wanted to follow that up with something based on philosophers, on the general assumption that such references tend to be more-than-topical, especially after one gets beyond the most popular / well-known names. In particular I'd found that there were disproportionately many references to the current/previous Popes (largely in highly populist publications), to Noam Chomsky (largely in leftist ones such as AlterNet), and Paul Krugman (a columnist at the NY Times whose name often appears on pages as part of the Times's teasers, in addition to his own columns and mentions in other articles). But I'd found the results overall to be informative. In particular I'm somewhat chuffed at my creation of the PF-KK ratio, which measures the prevalence of the list versus an arbitrarily-selected alternative search string to try to assess overall site substantiveness.[2]
I've long wanted to do a repeat / more in-depth similar study, though there've been a few key challenges. One is coming up with a broader or more diverse list, of which TFA would be an excellent source. Another is that Google have made it far more difficult to conduct automated Web queries. My initial study required about 10,000 queries, which had to be spaced out by a minute or more if memory serves, and took over a week to run. Expanding either the domain or search lists vastly increases the number of queries required. I believe there are now some web query (as opposed to search) databases, though access to those remains challenging. Given the rise of AI and the ability to generate content based on numerous criteria, I'm not sure that such methods would be particularly useful, the Dead Internet may well be upon us.
I'd also love to see the methodology of the Plato collection extended to earlier authors and philosophers, though I can see where that can be problematic, given variances in names (e.g., "Avicenna" or "Ibn Sina"?), distinguishing authors or philosophers from translators or editors, the problem of commentaries (credit to the original, the commentator, both?), etc., etc. Kudos to Eric Schwitzgebel for his work.
It's easy to become number 2 when you reference yourself /s
(For reference, a Quine is a type of computer program that takes no input and only reproduces it's source code, so basically self replicating. This is based on Quine's research into the logic of recursion and replication [0])
Shoutout to Gödel and Neumann taking top spots despite not really being philosophers, at least in how they’re remembered. Comparatively, I’m honestly shocked that neither Bohr nor Heisenberg made the cut, even though there’s multiple articles on quantum physics… Turing also managed to sneak in under the wire, with 33 citations.
The bias inherent in the source is discussed in detail, and I would also love to hear HN ideas on how to improve this project, and how to visualize the results! I’m not the author, but this is right up my alley to say the least, and I’d love to take a crack at it.