A Philosophy Professor’s Final Class

Post by lapcat » Sun, Jan 08, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #26

lapcat wrote: post #11

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> 50 Most Influential Living Philosophers (August 12, 2022) Bit of a strange list. Chomsky is an influential linguist and political activist, but he's not an influential philosopher. Edmund Gettier is not living, having died in 2021. Questionable to call him influential in any case. He had one very short influential paper, that's it.

Gettier’s influence is in the Gettier Problem, not the fact that he was or wasn’t a voluminous writer. That alone made him an extremely important and influential epistemologist (and ensured a long academic career, in which he was also influential.) (FWIW, from my academic experience, the list is largely correct — Korsgaard and McDowell, for example.)

Post by hnfong » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 4:16 AM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #25

heywhatupboys wrote: post #23

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> 50 Most Influential Living Philosophers (August 12, 2022) 90 % are from/studied in England or the USA. This is classic Anglo propaganda, and anyone taking these English-biased lists at face value is bound to be such an Anglo-centered, nationalistic person as we see too often happening. You are not that important, English speakers. It is a real problem. Same for the "top universities" lists.

Have you read Bernstein's work? Or even, dare I ask, read the article and garnered some understanding of his World view through that? He comes across to me as a pluralist who in many ways would have agreed with you that people can become transfixed by a specific school of philosophy: he didn't have a fixed single view of philosophy which he believed conquered all other philosophies, but rather he enjoyed the ideas an…

Post by PaulRobinson » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 8:38 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30

PaulRobinson wrote: post #29

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Firstly, don't take listicles too seriously. But more importantly, how is the ability to hold a note before needing to breathe a useful and objective measure how "most influential" a philosopher is?

It's like you didn't even read my comment. The ability to hold a note is just as useful a measure of how influential a philosopher is as citations in academic journals is. That's what I just said, right above you.