Top 20 most notable philosophers ever

Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment ranked significant figures in the arts and sciences by combining various sources that ranked the various greatest figures in each field. He found that the rank order between the lists correlated fairly highly, and one could make a composite rank that was highly reliable.

Take, for example, the Western philosophy list:

Not a bad list, by any means. It does suffer from the fact that lists overrate thinkers who made valuable contributions to the progression of philosophy, but are less relevant now and are rarely read or discussed. To make a more reliable rank, I then complied data on three objective indicators:

1. The frequency at which their surname appears in the English corpus: a decent indicator, but unfortunately, some surnames like Rand and Berkeley are inside the corpus for reasons besides their work in philosophy; Rand is a common surname and Berkeley is a famous college.

2. The size of their subreddit: shouldn’t a great philosopher have a fan club?

3. The length of their wikipedia article: theoretically, if you are well-known and have a large impact of philosophy, then people should write a long wikipedia article for you. It does not seem to be that predictive, as Wittgenstein’s article is 21,261 words long, while Plato’s is only 7,081 words long.

In addition to the top 15 entires in Western philosophy, I added the top 5 Chinese philosophers from Murray’s list, the top 4 Indian philosophers from that list, and 18 others who did not qualify (Heidegger, Foucault, Freud, Jung, Simone du Beauvoir, Rousseau, Voltaire, Wittgenstein, Zizek, Chomsky, Evola, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Diogenes, Habermas, Adorno, and Marx), but I thought were notable enough to include. Philosophers who were primarily known for their work in a field separate from philosophy (e.g. von Mises, Pareto, Adam Smith, Freud, Jung) were excluded from consideration.

The results were rather disappointing. The index scores did not correlate at all with the objective metrics, though the objective metrics did correlate moderately with each other.

*** → p < .001, ** → p < .01, * → p < .05 used for the entire article

I tried testing if the issue was combining the index scores for the Western/Indian/Chinese inventories, and only included philosophers who had a rank of above 0 on the index score. The results were not much better.

I don’t think Murray’s index scores are useless, per say, just that within the restricted range of the greatest philosophers, they do not predict other objective measurements of notability.

I then created a composite score by averaging the results of two methods:

1. One that assigns equal weights to all predictors.

2. One that assigns weights based on principal component loadings.

The rationale behind averaging both methods is that weights are hard to estimate with small sizes, leading to imprecisely estimated composite scores. Using equal weights avoids this problem, although it has the disadvantage of overweighing poor indicators of the latent variable. I then normalized the final composite to have a maximum of 100 and minimum of 0, as Murray did.

These are the final results:

Appendix

Eminence, judged by 12 different sources gathered by Charles Murray:

1. Aristotle: index score of 100

2. Confucius: 100 (Chinese philosophy)

3. Shankara: 100 (Indian philosophy)

4. Plato: 87

5. Kant: 74

6. Laozi: 69 (Chinese philosophy)

7. Nagarjuna: 56 (Indian philosophy)

8. Ramanuja: 55 (Indian philosophy)

9. Descartes: 51

10. Zhuxi: 51 (Chinese philosophy)

11. Rousseau: 48

12. Buddha: 47 (Indian philosophy)

13. Hegel: 46

14. Mencius: 40 (Chinese philosophy)

15. Thomas Aquinas: 39

16. Zhuangzi: 39 (Chinese philosophy)

17. John Locke: 37

18. David Hume: 36

19. St. Augustine: 30

20. Gottfried Leibniz: 27

21. Spinoza: 27

22. Socrates: 26

23. Arthur Schopenhauer: 24

24. George Berkeley: 21

25. Frederich Nietzsche: 20

26. Thomas Hobbes: 19

27. Machiavelli: 16

28. Wittgenstein: 13

29. Heidegger: 12

30. Voltaire: 9

31. Diogenes of Sinope: 2

32. Karl Marx: 0 (not on list)

33. Ayn Rand: 0 (not on list)

34. Julius Evola: 0 (not on list)

35. Simone du Beauvoir: 0 (not on list)

36. Adorno: 0 (not on list)

37. Habermas: NA (born too late — anything after 1920 qualifies)

38. Zizek: NA (born too late)

39. Chomsky: NA (born too late)

40. Foucault NA (born too late)

Subreddit Size (as of 28/08/2024):

1. Chomsky: 90.6k subs

2. Nietzsche: 60.1k subs

3. Zizek: 40.2k subs

4. Shankara (AdvaitaVedanta): 12.8k subs

5. Hegel: 7.6k subs

6. Plato: 6.8k subs

7. Schopenhauer: 4.6k subs

8. Foucault: 4.2k subs

9. Buddha: 3.6k subs

10. Aristotle: 3.5k subs

11. Heidegger: 2.8k subs

12. Wittgenstein: 2k subs

13. Evola: 1.8k subs

14. Kant: 1.7k subs

15. Marx: 0.7k subs

16. Rand: 0.68k subs

17. Confucius: 0.52k subs

18. Habermas: 0.3k subs

19. Socrates: 0.25k subs

20. Machiavelli: 0.2k subs

21. John Locke: 0.097k subs

22. David Hume: 0.074k subs

23. Spinoza: 0.019k subs

24. Nagarjuna: 0.001k subs

25. Leibniz: banned (NA)

26. Descartes: banned (NA)

27. Laozi: banned (NA)

28. Hobbes: banned (NA)

29. Adorno: banned (NA)

30. St. Augustine: no subreddit (0k subs)

31. Zhuangzi: no subreddit (0k subs)

32. Diogenes: no subreddit (0k subs)

33. Rousseau: no subreddit (0k subs)

34. Berkeley: no subreddit (0k subs)

35. Voltaire: no subreddit (0k subs)

36. Zhuxi: no subreddit (0k subs)

37. Mencius: no subreddit (0k subs)

38. Ramanjua: no subreddit (0k subs)

39. Thomas Aquinas: no subreddit (0k subs)

40. Simone du Beauvoir: no subreddit (0k subs)

Ngram viewer rank (2022):

1. Aristotle: 0.0013

2. Marx: 0.00125

3. Kant: 0.0012

4. Plato: 0.0011

5. Berkeley: 0.0011

6. Augustine: 0.00088

7. Buddha: 0.00084

8. Foucault: 0.00069

9. Hegel: 0.00068

10. Socrates: 0.00064

11. Nietzsche: 0.00063

12. Heidegger: 0.00059

13. Locke: 0.00050

14. Hume: 0.00050

15. Aquinas: 0.00042

16. Rousseau: 0.00038

17. Descartes: 0.00038

18. Wittgenstein: 0.00033

19. Hobbes: 0.00031

20. Spinoza: 0.00028

21. Rand: 0.00025

22. Habermas: 0.00024

23. Adorno: 0.00024

24. Leibniz: 0.00024

25. Confucius: 0.00022

26. Schopenhauer: 0.00022

27. Chomsky: 0.00016

28. Machiavelli: 0.00016

29. Voltaire: 0.00016

30. Beauvoir: 0.000087

31. Diogenes: 0.000079

32. Mencius: 0.000070

33. Zhuangzi: 0.000050

34. Laozi: 0.000037

35. Shankara: 0.000013

36. Nagarjuna: 0.000013

37. Zizek: 0.000011

38. Evola: 0.0000091

39. Zhuxi: 0.0000015

40. Ramanuja: 0.00000013

Wikipedia article length rank (as of 28/08/2024, first word to references):

1. Buddha: 27179

2. Nietzsche: 22585

3. Wittgenstein: 21261

4. David Hume: 20004

5. Marx: 20671

6. Schopenhauer: 19517

7. Leibniz: 19047

8. Hegel: 18729

9. Kant: 18998

10. Chomsky: 18431

11. Foucault: 18051

12. Voltaire: 17505

13. Aquinas: 17319

14. St. Augustine: 17037

15. Aristotle: 14526

16. Descartes: 15323

17. Shankara: 15176

18. Evola: 14400

19. Rousseau: 14033

20. Adorno: 13198

21. Heidegger: 13033

22. Socrates: 11996

23. Confucius: 11627

24. Spinoza: 11439

25. Rand: 11183

26. Berkeley: 10986

27. Machiavelli: 10061

28. Locke: 9229

29. Zizek: 9023

30. Habermas: 7706

31. Hobbes: 7652

32. Beauvoir: 7053

33. Plato: 7018

34. Ramanuja: 6802

35. Nagarjuna: 5563

36. Laozi: 4519

37. Diogenes: 3741

38. Zhuxi: 3527

39. Mencius: 2858

40. Zhuangzi: 1260

Full list:

   notability  Philosopher
1   51.838265      Leibniz
2   32.618709      Spinoza
3   47.132777     Socrates
4   51.181940 Schopenhauer
5   60.285505     Berkeley
6  100.000000    Nietzsche
7   25.000138       Hobbes
8   21.999783  Machiavelli
9   55.185284 Wittgenstein
10  45.247242    Heidegger
11  37.833051     Voltaire
12   0.000000     Diogenes
13  83.710773         Marx
14  23.944538         Rand
15  23.272794        Evola
16   7.685129     Beauvoir
17  30.561955       Adorno
18  24.769355     Habermas
19  39.110568        Zizek
20  91.998812      Chomsky
21  68.124869     Foucault
22  99.182559    Aristotle
23  50.764955    Confucius
24  57.646050     Shankara
25  71.925828        Plato
26  98.288422         Kant
27  20.861388        Laozi
28  16.468555    Nagarjuna
29  18.687522     Ramanuja
30  54.578236    Descartes
31  12.321162        Zhuxi
32  48.182047     Rousseau
33  98.195201       Buddha
34  73.744361        Hegel
35   7.793210      Mencius
36  55.104047      Aquinas
37   2.957789     Zhuangzi
38  38.212042        Locke
39  63.722652         Hume
40  69.044686    Augustine