Who's your favorite philosopher/s?

[Original Poster]

Who is your favorite philosopher? Mine are David Hume, Alan Watts and Noam Chompsky. I was thinking of adding Denis Diderot to the list but then I may as well include a plethora from Nietzsche to Plato because I think every philosopher I've read has made some very compelling arguments (even Ayn Rand, though after you give it proper thought you realize she's too prickly). When I consider my favorite philosophers, I consider those that I already agreed with before I ever even read them. I consider philosophers who I've advocated long before I even heard of them, let alone read their works. I cannot read a sentence from Hume, Watts and Chompsky without getting excited at how eloquently they put concepts I would fail to describe in ten times the number of words. Honorable mentions include certain comedians that do extremely well at picking apart our conception of reality. Demetri Martin, Bill Hicks, Jim Gaffigan, Dave Chappelle, Katt Williams and Mitch Hedberg are all amazingly good at speaking the truth about life's inconsistencies. Furthermore, many writers that would also be deemed philosophers of a kind have said very profound things, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or post modernists like Faulkner, Emmerson, Thoreau and Whitman, and of course I can't exclude Oscar Wilde from the list. Nor Douglas Adams for that matter. And just to give a few more honorable mentions so no one feels like they have to exclude anyone they think of as a philosopher: Martin Luther King Jr, Sage Francis, Bob Dylan, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Manly P Hall, Karl Marx, Gautama Siddhartha, Jesus of Nazareth, His Holiness the Dalai Lama the 14th, Carl Jung, Quentin Tarantino, Alan Moore, fuck I could go on for ever. Shit I completely forgot Camus and Sartre

[mcwillis]

Yesterday I was watching some very interesting old film clips of interviews with Jiddu Krishnamurti, well known for speaking on philosophical and spiritual subjects.

[Seroquel]

Arthur Schopenhauer.

[IndieAnthias]

Alan Watts Noam Chomsky Daniel Quinn Those are my main 3 right now, and like you said bits and pieces, and entire chunks from lots of other people. You listed many of the same ones I would list (props for Mitch Hedberg!) Maybe I would add Lao Tzu, Terrence McKinna, Charles Darwin, Stephen Fry, E. O. Wilson. I like Wittgenstein on language, although I've only heard 2nd-hand explanations of his work.

[Xei]

Hume. For me you could almost say he started and finished philosophy. He's like the sole mountain in the steppe of its history. Most important were his insights into human cognition, but he was also bang on on religion (back when that was dangerous) and was even a really great person. I wouldn't call most of the people in this thread 'philosophers' in the first place, though. People like Schoepenhauer are artists.

[IndieAnthias]

I wouldn't call most of the people in this thread 'philosophers' in the first place, though. People like Schoepenhauer are artists. I take a "trunk of the tree" view of philosophy, so everything thought-related, be it science, art, whatever, is just a branch of philosophy. Historically, this is how science evolved. Not so much art, but you get my point.

[Xei]

Hm, well, I'd say discourse about science is certainly philosophy, and indeed science was developed as a conscious philosophical undertaking, but science itself, that is, the body of knowledge ascertained by the scientific method, isn't philosophy. For instance, the existence of Europa, or indeed the existence of London, are science, but I don't think many people would call them philosophy. What we mean by the existence of Europa, and how we know of its existence, are what philosophy concerns itself with.

[Wolfwood]

Though Xei may call them artists: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

[tropicalbreeze]

Socrates and Osho also known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

[Original Poster]

Hm, well, I'd say discourse about science is certainly philosophy, and indeed science was developed as a conscious philosophical undertaking, but science itself, that is, the body of knowledge ascertained by the scientific method, isn't philosophy. For instance, the existence of Europa, or indeed the existence of London, are science, but I don't think many people would call them philosophy. What we mean by the existence of Europa, and how we know of its existence, are what philosophy concerns itself with. All you have to do to understand they share a common ancestor is to look at the etymology. Philosophy means love of knowledge, it doesn't mean to toil in life's most basic paradoxes. That's simply the meaning that remained after every other subject branched into a different field. I like the show Magical Egypt (which you can find on youtube) about a symbologist's take on Egypt because he often goes back to a quote by Goethe. Paraphrased he said architecture is like frozen music. This is a philosophical statement, but it also looks at Ancient Egypt in new light because the show argues that Egyptians combined art, science, philosophy and religion all into one big study. This is distinct from the Catholic Church oppressing scientific discovery (though as the Egyptian society degraded it may have turned into that) because the scientists were the shot-callers and religion was like a way for the common man to understand the science symbolically. This is argued through the supremely unimaginable complexity and accuracy of the design of their architecture. It is argued, and I may be stepping into territory you find difficult to swallow, that the architecture of Egypt is a frozen song in a very literal sense. The structure of the shapes and their patterns often create harmonious vibrations through which people have found healing properties and positive vibes. This is from the series Magical Egypt and I recommend you see for yourself. Some concepts, I admit, are contrived but there's still something to take from it. Then, from the mouth of David Wilcock, which I admit is not the most trustworthy, there's this idea that the pyramid shape itself can be built in order to create harmonic functions equivalent to vibrational changes discussed in "What the Bleep do we know?" According to him, building a pyramid which is agreeable with pi and phi in the same way as the pyramids in Egypt, one can neutralize poison, along with a plethora of other transformations akin to healing and preserving life. I don't know if this is true, but I like to think the Egyptians had a completely different interpretation on reality as we did and that it's not necessarily incorrect. We haven't quite substantiated the power of harmonic frequencies yet, but that's not to say we never will. And perhaps something that slows us down is our attachment to the separateness of the buckets. A Behaviorist and a Molecular Geneticist both attempt to possess the truth of evolution while belittling the other. Same with psychologists and neuroscientists, and dozens of other studies. People get so wound up in their particular field, they attempt to filter every possible experience through their field without recognizing that there are so many thousands of different filters one can apply and not one is more true than another. If there is any truth, it is the aggregate. Orange is not more true than yellow, after all. To conclude, a quote by Goethe, also probably as paraphrased as the last "Science arose from peotry. When times change the two can meet on a higher plane as friends."

[Phion]

Whew, you've rattled off quite a few already. I'll throw Kant into the ring, he's one of my favorites.

[Wolfwood]

How about you put forward your favourite work[s] of your favourite philosopher[s]. It could make an interesting read for me and others. I'll start: The World as Will and Representation, A. Schopenhauer and The Myth of Sisyphus , A. Camus.

[Wolfwood]

Hm, well, I'd say discourse about science is certainly philosophy, and indeed science was developed as a conscious philosophical undertaking, but science itself, that is, the body of knowledge ascertained by the scientific method, isn't philosophy. For instance, the existence of Europa, or indeed the existence of London, are science, but I don't think many people would call them philosophy. What we mean by the existence of Europa, and how we know of its existence, are what philosophy concerns itself with. Yeah, I would consider the philosophy of any science (or pseudo-science) that which questions what we accept sort of 'a priori', or as a fundamental rule or method, for said science. Say, discussing the validity of the scientific method.... or the validity of basing nearly all of psychology on frequentist inference rather than, for instance, Bayesian inference.

[Phion]

Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant.

[Xei]

Why?

[Isadore]

David Hume's my favourite. I also like Descartes and Plato but not because I agree with their ideas. It's because their styles are interesting. Oh, and Bertrand Russell for his attitude.

[Abra]

I don't know much philosophy. I really wish my uni would offer 'contemporary philosophy,' instead of scattering them into their separate fields. But of the guys I do know, my favorite's Bertrand Russell. Camus is neat, too.

[Warheit]

Isn't it kind of weird to have favorites whose ideas are at odds with one another?

[Original Poster]

um... no? Truth is the gestalt and nothing less

[Warheit]

Really? Considering Gestalt Theory is descriptive rather than explanatory, I find that statement quite odd.

[Original Poster]

What's the difference between descriptive and explanatory?

[Wayfaerer]

Exercising my own reason and trusting it above all else.

[Warheit]

What's the difference between descriptive and explanatory? Speaking in generalities versus something definitive.

[Original Poster]

You mean like trends vs facts? Since you're not online right now and I don't feel patient enough to reach complete clarification before stepping forward, I'm just going to go ahead and make my claim ge·stalt 1. a configuration, pattern, or organized field having specific properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts; a unified whole. 2. an instance or example of such a unified whole. Generalities and Definitions also form a unified whole and do not represent the complete truth with out each other. A wave is not more true than a particle, and vice versa. In the most accurate sense of truth, no partitioned idea of truth is true. Only the complete unified whole of all ideas and perceptions can create anything remotely accurate to Truth with a capital T. To claim any specific philosopher or idea is more true than another is to claim that blue is more true than purple. Of course this isn't exactly practical, especially for decision making. When making decisions, you got to weigh your bet and play the odds, which means you have to utilize some amount of prejudice regarding your environment.

[Abra]

Isn't it kind of weird to have favorites whose ideas are at odds with one another? Things can be brilliant and at the same time incompatible. I admired Bertrand Russell's quest to capture mathematics formally and completely. I found it ironic and absurd that his own axioms could produce statements which referenced themselves, which if true held that there is no proof of themselves, or if false, implied there was a proof of the statement, leading to contradiction. Bertrand Russell made a system sufficiently powerful to show the incompleteness of math, though he had no idea something like that could happen. Camus, on the other hand showed the contradiction in living life, when death renders it meaningless to the individual. The contradiction is the absurd. We base our science on an incomplete foundation (rather than destroy it with inconsistency), and our very lives are contradictions. Both are true statements, and that's awesome.