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Who's your favorite philosopher(s)?

post #1 of 483
12/26/09 at 9:01am
Thread Starter 
I wonder what the sophisticated people at Head-fi are reading.
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post #2 of 483
12/26/09 at 9:03am
Kant is my favourite, although I haven't read any philosophy for years.

I feel that since Kant all philosophers did was to refine and simplify his points, no challenge to his philosophy has arrived and I guess since science replaced philosophy, none may ever come.
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post #3 of 483
12/26/09 at 9:15am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by EddieE View Post
Kant is my favourite, although I haven't read any philosophy for years.

I feel that since Kant all philosophers did was to refine and simplify his points, no challenge to his philosophy has arrived and I guess since science replaced philosophy, none may ever come.
Call me crazy but I think that Hegel, Bauer, Brandom, Feuerbach, Marx, Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Küng, Kojève, Žižek, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, Popper and Russell had (among others) something to say about Kant's philosophy.
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post #4 of 483
12/26/09 at 9:31am
I only read Satre and Nietzsche from your list, and have also read Merleau Ponty who is post-Kantian, and sure enough both of these were sublimating Kant's philosophy. That was the point I was making, not that there was not great philosophy since Kant, but that he lay the foundations for all of it, and his base ideas are in every philosopher since.
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post #5 of 483
12/26/09 at 9:35am
Richard Fish
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post #6 of 483
12/26/09 at 10:01am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by EddieE View Post
I only read Satre and Nietzsche from your list, and have also read Merleau Ponty who is post-Kantian, and sure enough both of these were sublimating Kant's philosophy. That was the point I was making, not that there was not great philosophy since Kant, but that he lay the foundations for all of it, and his base ideas are in every philosopher since.
What kind of foundations?
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post #7 of 483
12/26/09 at 10:14am
On the most basic level, since Kant philosophy has been preoccupied with analysing how our mental faculties create experience for us from sense data, the manner in which we apply concepts to sense data to order reality has not been argued with since afaik... There is a direct route from Kant to Nietzsche to Freud which bought us psychology and psychoanalysis, which are the prominent philosophical beliefs of modern times.

Before Kant there was a rift between rational dualism and empiricism which Kant healed by saying: OK empiricism tells us to learn from observation, while rationalism says we cannot trust our senses and only really know our minds exist, therefore knowledge from observing the world our senses display for us is unsound. So let's use empirical method to analyse our minds, since we know they exist. Since then that has been the main focus of western thought.
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post #8 of 483
12/26/09 at 10:27am
I liked Schopenhauer best so far..
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post #9 of 483
12/26/09 at 10:45am
It was one of the neofauvist who said, "The rumbleseat was a guillotine on its back." He was my favorite.
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post #10 of 483
12/26/09 at 11:25am
As I am Greek and I am much more familiar with Greek philosophy, I love Epikouros and I greatly admire Heraclitus. From the contemporary ones , I have to admit I admire Nietzsche the most.
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post #11 of 483
12/26/09 at 11:28am
Marx.

I mean, Groucho Marx.
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post #12 of 483
12/26/09 at 11:38am
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Originally Posted by Landis View Post
Marx.

I mean, Groucho Marx.
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post #13 of 483
12/26/09 at 12:09pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by EddieE View Post
On the most basic level, since Kant philosophy has been preoccupied with analysing how our mental faculties create experience for us from sense data, the manner in which we apply concepts to sense data to order reality has not been argued with since afaik... There is a direct route from Kant to Nietzsche to Freud which bought us psychology and psychoanalysis, which are the prominent philosophical beliefs of modern times.

Before Kant there was a rift between rational dualism and empiricism which Kant healed by saying: OK empiricism tells us to learn from observation, while rationalism says we cannot trust our senses and only really know our minds exist, therefore knowledge from observing the world our senses display for us is unsound. So let's use empirical method to analyse our minds, since we know they exist. Since then that has been the main focus of western thought.
I'm not sure Kant's theory of knowledge is as uncontroversial as you make it out to be.
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Originally Posted by Quinto View Post
I liked Schopenhauer best so far..
Suits your avatar
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Originally Posted by ca95f View Post
As I am Greek and I am much more familiar with Greek philosophy, I love Epikouros and I greatly admire Heraclitus. From the contemporary ones , I have to admit I admire Nietzsche the most.
You have a pretty loose sense of contemporaneity! Nietzsche died 109 years ago!
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post #14 of 483
12/26/09 at 12:48pm
This thread is making me want to read philosophy again. Haven't hit those selections from my bookshelf since an actual engineering position has taken up most of my brainpower. I don't have the luxury of being a student with nothing to do all day anymore.

Nietzsche I enjoyed greatly, along with Russell. Kierkegaard also, but Kant was a little much. I don't think I have the philosophical foundations to go through Pure Reason and really digest what he had to say. I was never into the Greeks, Plato's Republic didn't do it for me. Thomas Paine was another good one, although not quite philosophy maybe applied philosophy?
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post #15 of 483
12/26/09 at 1:08pm
@jp zero,
I'm not suggesting Kant is perfect, or even right. I'm just saying that he set the ground work for everything that came after him. Everything I've read post-Kant is either discussing, amending, or sublimating on his ideas, and those ideas were the biggest shake-up of western thought since Plato.

The way my lecturer put it is in western thought you have pre-socratic/plantonic, post socratic/platonic and then post-Kantian as the three main segments of the history western philosophy. I don't propose to be an expert but nothing I've read has suggested otherwise.

But hey, there'd be no such thing as philosophy if everyone agreed right?
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