Interesting article, I like the idea but here are some issues I have with it:
1. Wikipedia articles of more recent figures are longer regardless of their academic relevance, because the details about their person are more available.
2. Wikipedia articles often become long because philosophers are more controversial. Maybe being a controversial philosopher is a sign of greatness, I don’t know.
3. Reddit is English-biased. International audiences, especially the Chinese, are probably underrepresented. This isn’t even mentioning the biased selection of English speakers on Reddit… They’re clearly a sort of clique, aren’t they? Of course they love Zizek because he is funny sniffling Eastern European meme man who is “left wing but vaguely non-woke”.
4. A lot of philosophers are not particularly original. The reason Aristotle is basically the GOAT is because Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna were all Aristotelians with a thin blanket of Abrahamic faith. Aristotle himself is regarded by a lot of classical philosophers as “exoteric version of Plato” until some people in the 19th century invented the term “Neoplatonism”.
5. Should linguists and psychologists like Chomsky and Freud even be on here? Likewise, how much of the craze around Leibniz, Mencius, and Descartes is due to their accomplishments in math?
Seems like Aristotle, Confucius, The Buddha, and Marx should dominate any list. Intuitively, these are the big four. It’s only these four who basically rose to the status of “the philosopher” to continent spanning institutions. Obviously not really empirically provable albeit
>The reason Aristotle is basically the GOAT is because Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna were all Aristotelians with a thin blanket of Abrahamic faith.
Wasnt it that a lot of these medieval writers (especially people like Avicenna) when considering the religion of ancient greek philosophers like Aristotle thought they were all "neo platonists", which didnt have much of a great relation to Aristotle. And for this reason many of the esoteric abrahamics who were influenced by neo platonism glorified aristotle as they thought he authored those beliefs and when they criticized those beliefs they criticized Aristotle, but unbeknownst to them, it was all Plotinus, no?
I'm excited to see a quantitative approach to ranking the importance of philosophers. But let's assume that Nietzsche was influenced by Plato -- this would make Nietzsche's philosophy a subset of Plato's thought, or a dependent branch off the evolutionary tree.
One way to adjust for this, quantitatively, would be with a chronological modifier — weigh older philosophers as more important, because the newer and more popular philosophers (like Chomsky and Nietzsche) stand on the shoulders of giants.
An even more advanced method would be to search the entire corpus of Nietzsche for direct references to Plato (although he often just says "the Greeks") or Schopenhauer and then create a genealogical "referenced in the text" modifier. Depending on the weight of such a modifier, you could argue that Heraclitus and Thales overshadow Chomsky and Marx. At the very least, your data makes a very good case that there is a large gap between "popular philosophy" and "foundational philosophy."
For a bonus: you could rank philosophers by the size of their corpus. It would be fun to see the ratio between words written and popularity, and compare that with their explicit references *among other philosophers.* Thales and Heraclitus would do well with their small fragments, while Sloterdijk, who is popular among some philosophers but unknown otherwise, would tend toward the bottom.
I would say it shouldn’t be considered influence if the newer philosophers are using older philosophers as a counterexample to themselves, like what Nietzsche does with Plato and… Actually, pretty much everyone who came before him except maybe Heraclitus.
I agree it would be cool to add corpus size into this
We need a "biggest troll" ranking system, where Socrates is at the top. #2 spot will be determined by number of negative mentions in total philosophical corpus.
Sorry but I have to go with Murray's list over yours. Things like subreddit size (!) privilege philosophers that are popular with Euro-American le redditors whereas Murray's loads on genuine academic prominence as gauged by size of entries in specialized encyclopedias. On a more subjective note, it is also far closer to how I would myself rate philosopher influence. I might have some quibbles with Murray's list (I'd argue that Spinoza - the guy who did for philosophy what Francis Bacon did for science; Hobbes as the OG political economist; and Rousseau, whose work and life are sordid but sadly very influential - should all be higher , while Schopenhauer and Russell should be lower. But having Nietzsche at #1 and Chomsky at #5 is just a very contemporary kind of schizophrenia.
Interesting article, I like the idea but here are some issues I have with it:
1. Wikipedia articles of more recent figures are longer regardless of their academic relevance, because the details about their person are more available.
2. Wikipedia articles often become long because philosophers are more controversial. Maybe being a controversial philosopher is a sign of greatness, I don’t know.
3. Reddit is English-biased. International audiences, especially the Chinese, are probably underrepresented. This isn’t even mentioning the biased selection of English speakers on Reddit… They’re clearly a sort of clique, aren’t they? Of course they love Zizek because he is funny sniffling Eastern European meme man who is “left wing but vaguely non-woke”.
4. A lot of philosophers are not particularly original. The reason Aristotle is basically the GOAT is because Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna were all Aristotelians with a thin blanket of Abrahamic faith. Aristotle himself is regarded by a lot of classical philosophers as “exoteric version of Plato” until some people in the 19th century invented the term “Neoplatonism”.
5. Should linguists and psychologists like Chomsky and Freud even be on here? Likewise, how much of the craze around Leibniz, Mencius, and Descartes is due to their accomplishments in math?
Seems like Aristotle, Confucius, The Buddha, and Marx should dominate any list. Intuitively, these are the big four. It’s only these four who basically rose to the status of “the philosopher” to continent spanning institutions. Obviously not really empirically provable albeit
>The reason Aristotle is basically the GOAT is because Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna were all Aristotelians with a thin blanket of Abrahamic faith.
Wasnt it that a lot of these medieval writers (especially people like Avicenna) when considering the religion of ancient greek philosophers like Aristotle thought they were all "neo platonists", which didnt have much of a great relation to Aristotle. And for this reason many of the esoteric abrahamics who were influenced by neo platonism glorified aristotle as they thought he authored those beliefs and when they criticized those beliefs they criticized Aristotle, but unbeknownst to them, it was all Plotinus, no?
I'm excited to see a quantitative approach to ranking the importance of philosophers. But let's assume that Nietzsche was influenced by Plato -- this would make Nietzsche's philosophy a subset of Plato's thought, or a dependent branch off the evolutionary tree.
One way to adjust for this, quantitatively, would be with a chronological modifier — weigh older philosophers as more important, because the newer and more popular philosophers (like Chomsky and Nietzsche) stand on the shoulders of giants.
An even more advanced method would be to search the entire corpus of Nietzsche for direct references to Plato (although he often just says "the Greeks") or Schopenhauer and then create a genealogical "referenced in the text" modifier. Depending on the weight of such a modifier, you could argue that Heraclitus and Thales overshadow Chomsky and Marx. At the very least, your data makes a very good case that there is a large gap between "popular philosophy" and "foundational philosophy."
For a bonus: you could rank philosophers by the size of their corpus. It would be fun to see the ratio between words written and popularity, and compare that with their explicit references *among other philosophers.* Thales and Heraclitus would do well with their small fragments, while Sloterdijk, who is popular among some philosophers but unknown otherwise, would tend toward the bottom.
I would say it shouldn’t be considered influence if the newer philosophers are using older philosophers as a counterexample to themselves, like what Nietzsche does with Plato and… Actually, pretty much everyone who came before him except maybe Heraclitus.
I agree it would be cool to add corpus size into this
We need a "biggest troll" ranking system, where Socrates is at the top. #2 spot will be determined by number of negative mentions in total philosophical corpus.
Sorry but I have to go with Murray's list over yours. Things like subreddit size (!) privilege philosophers that are popular with Euro-American le redditors whereas Murray's loads on genuine academic prominence as gauged by size of entries in specialized encyclopedias. On a more subjective note, it is also far closer to how I would myself rate philosopher influence. I might have some quibbles with Murray's list (I'd argue that Spinoza - the guy who did for philosophy what Francis Bacon did for science; Hobbes as the OG political economist; and Rousseau, whose work and life are sordid but sadly very influential - should all be higher , while Schopenhauer and Russell should be lower. But having Nietzsche at #1 and Chomsky at #5 is just a very contemporary kind of schizophrenia.
I’m curious to know why Buddha made the list, but Jesus didn’t?
I'm wondering why many on twitter and here disagree with the methology here, it seems pretty comprehensive.
If Redditors and Wikipedia editors like your favorite philosopher, you should be worried.