There’s a joke about a degree in philosophy where the people majoring in it get asked
“would you like fries with that?”
Getting a degree in philosophy is supposed to be such a waste of time and money because
philosophy ostensibly does not provide a utilitarian skill set.
This claim was compellingly countered by Atlantic magazine in 2015 which found they had an average
mid-career income of $82,000.
It indicates that while philosophers can seem like marginal people if not frivolous, they
can make their contributions felt even while we mock them.
This list be focusing on philosophers from the previous century.
Philosophers from two or three centuries seem to get all the attention, not to mention all
the philosophers from about two millennia ago.
Some of these names will be familiar, but as we’ve learned time and again at Toptenz,
cultural osmosis isn’t very reliable.
10.
Ludwig Wittgenstein Born in Vienna, Austria in 1889 to a wealthy
family of musicians, in his youth the strongest desire of Wittgenstein’s heart was to work
in engineering, specifically as it related to the infant technology of motorized flight.
Wittgenstein happened to get hung up on pure mathematics and went to Cambridge to be taught
by Bertrand Russell himself.
It would be during a 1908 retreat in Norway in a cabin he built that Wittgenstein would
have the inspiration for the “Picture Theory of Meaning” that would make him famous after
he fought in World War I and got a job as an elementary school teacher for six years
in 1920 because he’d divested himself of his inheritance in 1919.
Wittgenstein laid out the Picture Theory of Meaning in his 1921 book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
which in brief said that unless a statement could be translated from an abstraction into
an “arrangement of objects” then it had no meaning.
It was a literalism that could be expected of a philosophically-minded engineer and which
he also applied to the classroom, having students perform such hands on learning as constructing
models and dissecting animals (and applying corporal punishment to a degree that compelled
him to lie about it and quit his job.)
Wittgenstein reinforced the point of applied philosophy with his other book of philosophy
that’s held up as a classic, Philosophical Investigations from 1953.
Wittgenstein claimed that ethics and logic are inextricably linked, and that actions
were the only way that a person could follow their ethics was to act on them.
In his own words, “It is not possible to obey a rule 'privately': otherwise thinking
one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.”
It’s a harsh rebuke for people who claim to be above others by not participating in
the World around them, or who convince themselves that what matters is who they are “on the
inside.”
9.
Hiratsuka Raichō For this philosopher born in 1886, her feminist
beliefs that would one day change the face of Japan were initially born more of religion
than pure humanism.
She had been taught that the Buddha claimed all people were equal, and naturally that
meant all the women must be equal to the men despite lacking a key civil rights.
It wasn’t until she read the work of Ellen Key that she began to think of women as deserving
equal rights for purposes of autonomy and individualism.
As she wrote in her autobiography, women had been “the sun” but society had reduced
them to “ ...a wan and sickly moon, dependent on another, reflecting another’s brilliance.”
The single most significant action Raichō undertook was founding and editing Seitō,
a literary magazine, that ran from 1911 to 1916.
She continued campaigning after seeing the appalling conditions of textile factories
which tended to employee primarily female crews.
In 1920 she founded the New Woman’s Association.
They were able to almost pass women’s suffrage in 1921, and in 1922 successfully pressured
the government to amend the Public Order and Police Law.
Although her goal of suffrage wasn’t achieved until 1945, her efforts still got her elected
president of the Women’s Federation in 1953.
All of this was achieved with an attitude that was surprisingly carefree about public
attitude.
In 1908, she scandalously accompanied her (platonic) best friend to a mountain for a
ritual suicide with an attitude of curiosity about what it was like to die and because
she suspected her partner would lose his willingness to kill himself when push came to shove.
It was the sort of combination of deep conviction and apathy to social pressure that is often
significant to bringing about change.
8.
Noam Chomsky There are two movies about long-term Massachusetts
Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky that between them encapsulate his two main
areas of interest: Manufacturing Consent from 1992, an analysis of the profit-driven and
narrative-driven media and U.S. foreign policy, and Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? from 2013,
a collection of interviews Michel Gondry wherein Chomsky’s answers or asks philosophical
questions about how language shapes thoughts and memories practically since his birth in
1929, all of which are illustrated/animated in Gondry’s intentionally rough and child-like
style.
Chomsky’s core beliefs relate to how controlling media (news coverage, commonly employed phrases
and the words that back them, etc.) can be used to create public approval of what by
basic human nature would not be acceptable.
Back in 1968 in a televised debate with William Buckley (who Toptenz readers will remember
threatened Gore Vidal on air) he argued how the US government arguing the military was
occupying South Vietnam for the good of the Vietnamese was an excuse used since Ancient
Roman conquests.
Manufacturing Consent also devoted much of its run time to how the media would withhold
coverage of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor because it served elite interests to
ignore it.
One of the core values of Chomsky’s political commentary and his stated views on language
is to always question the narrative being provided.
He goes so far as to say that in his childhood during the 1930s he went to a school that
was well-suited for him before he went to high school because he was given freedom in
classes to question instead of going through a highly regimented curriculum.
7.
Jacques Derrida Lately you hear the word “deconstruction”
thrown around a lot in regards to media with some form of metacommentary (e.g., a superhero
movie where the filmmakers have the characters comment on the supposedly fascistic power
fantasy nature of superhero narratives within the movie’s dialogue.)
We can attribute the popularity of that phrase to a man born in French-Algeria in 1930 for
that, a man who flunked his own exams to become a licensed Parisian philosopher in 1952.
Badly flunked too: A score of five out of twenty and he choked disastrously on the written
portion.
He would need three attempts to pass in 1956, and after some time in the military he spent
decades teaching.
It was while working in education that he would write the essays that made him famous
with the English-speaking world.
If Derrida’s philosophical insight that made him so influential were to be reduced
to a logline, and bear in mind that this is someone who wrote seventy books and countless
essays, it would be to critique other writers who claimed they were being objective.
Derrida said that was functionally impossible, as the education any analyst had received
would introduce biases that would impact their views one way or another.
That claim is a rebuke every school of thought, even Chomsky’s “question everything”
philosophy.
It argues there are limited a very limited number of questions a person will ask and
narrow-minded ways they will be asked, the limitations being set by the person’s upbringing.
Derrida’s seemingly detached central tenet didn’t mean he avoided controversial opinions,
since he was an admirer of Karl Marx and Nazi Party member Martin Heidegger.
6.
Judith Jarvis Thomson Whatever your views on the abortion debate,
there’s no denying Thomson’s influence over the issue in the United States of America.
Born in 1929, by 1969 she was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
In 1971 she wrote “A Defense of Abortion” and went a long way to reframing the debate
in a manner which put the feminist movement behind the landmark 1973 Roe V. Wade ruling.
Its influence and controversy has led to her essay being dubbed “the most widely reprinted
essay in all of contemporary philosophy.”
The most momentous passage of Thomson’s essay is a metaphor.
Thomson asks the reader to imagine they woke up on life support, the reader’s kidneys
being used to support the life of a violinist in a coma, and the reader is being used for
this process because they’re the only matching blood type.
While the violinist certainly has the right to life, Thomson asserts that the reader would
also have a right to their own body and potentially their own life.
In so doing she reframed the debate from focusing on the rights of the fetus to those of the
parent.
This is hardly her sole contribution to the philosophical landscape, such as her redesign
of the famous Trolley Problem (i.e. the moral quandary about whether it’s inherently better
to take action to kill one person and save five) but the 1971 essay remains her most
momentous piece of writing.
5.
Jean-Paul Sartre Born in Paris in 1905, his body of work would,
by the time of his death in 1980, includes books and plays such as Being and Nothingness
and The Flies which were key to spreading existential philosophy around the world.
His most famous play, No Exit, coined the popular expression “hell is other people.”
Sartre rejected the label of existentialist for a time, and in 1964 he rejected the Nobel
Prize in literature, criticizing its eurocentrism (he came to regret this latter rejection in
particular, saying he could have donated the prize money to an anti-apartheid committee
in London.)
Also in 1964 he renounced all literature as a substitute for taking meaningful action
in the world.
Sartre was a nihilist when it came to human nature, as he outlined in Existentialism is
Humanism.
He argued that human beings, as autonomous and sentient entities, have to define themselves
as they live, and they do so through their actions (as Wittgenstein did.)
Sartre was not positive about this state being, calling it “anguish.”
Little wonder he felt Hell is other people.
4.
Giovanni Gentile The inclusion of any figure on this list is
not an endorsement of their views.
Toptenz wants to be made especially clear in this case, as in 1932 this Italian philosopher
born in 1886 was literally a coauthor for The Doctrine of Fascism with Benito Mussolini.
Meaning of course that he indirectly helped write the blueprints for much more destructive
German fascism.
He created a philosophical movement of his own known initially as “actual idealism”
which was shortened to “actualism.”
It was largely an extension of the work of nineteenth century philosopher Georg Hegel.
Gentile argued that objective reality was unknowable and that individual identities
were an illusion, which in turn he argued meant that the only way to find value was
to bind oneself into a larger group.
In a sense it’s a form of nihilism since everything outside the group is unquantifiable
and thus can’t have a value, giving people within the group tacit approval to subjugate
any outsiders however they please.
3.
Ayn Rand Few people are as well known for their contradictions
as this bestselling author born in Russia in 1905 who created the Objectivist movement.
She is highly lauded in right wing circles despite being aggressively pro-choice.
She believed only in wealth redistribution through private charity but is very often
mocked for accepting social security near the time of her passing in 1982.
Her books The Fountainhead, We the Living, Anthem, and Atlas Shrugged are all endlessly
derided and bought.
Despite how far out of fashion her writing style and subject matter have fallen she remains
popular enough that blockbuster director Zack Snyder plans to make a film adaptation of
The Fountainhead.
It is often asserted that the Soviet government’s seizure of her father’s pharmacy while she
was a child inspired her to design a philosophical framework of her own which is often referred
to as Randianism but which she called Objectivism.
Objectivism argues that the best way for humanity to proceed is for everyone to act in their
rational self-interest.
People will act ethically because it is in the best interest of capitalism for them to
treat everyone ethically, so that others will treat them ethically.
Morality cannot be forced on anyone, and to use the threat of physical violence to compel
people to act morally (e.g. to use the threat of arrest to coerce citizens to give tax money
that would be used to help the needy) is itself amoral.
2.
Leo Strauss Leo Strauss has not become a household name
since his death in 1973.
Even among the circle that knew him at the time he was more polarizing than most.
Strauss is more influential because he was read by a few at the top than by many at the
bottom or in the middle.
From Gerald Ford to the Bushes, his work was taught and discussed in the White House itself
every time there was a Republican in office.
Even William Gaston, a domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton for two years, was a student
of him.
Strauss believed that human beings do not have natural rights, and are inherently unequal
and thus shouldn’t be treated as if they are.
He argued that society needed to have its “noble lies,” which was what Strauss considered
religion, so that the lower classes would remain productive.
He said science and philosophy must be the “preserve of a small minority” because
science and philosophy are attempts to replace opinion, and opinion is “the element in
which society breathes.”
1.
Albert Camus Like Derrida he was born in Algeria, though
in Camus’s case in 1913.
He also shared with Derrida a soft spot for communism, though that was out of his system
by the time he was in France and made his name.
Derrida is said to be the father of deconstruction, Camus is credited with being one of the fathers
of absurdism as a philosophical movement, even if he rejected “armchair philosophy”
in favor of going out and living life to the fullest.
Camus’s first published book is 1942’s The Stranger, a novel about a sociopathic
man who neither cares at his mother’s death nor understands why everyone else does.
Accused of premeditated murder, what actually gets him sentenced to death is his apathy
and atheism.
Before his execution he tears into the priest sent to receive his confession, and manages
to find peace in accepting the meaninglessness of life.
His most famous book, and his winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is 1947’s The
Plague.
A story of a bubonic plague epidemic in Oran, Algeria (based on a cholera epidemic that
hit the town in 1849 and metaphorical for the presence of the Third Reich in France)
it’s the story of how society is broken down so that people isolate themselves in
the hopes of riding the plague out and others fight against it.
Even though Camus treats the struggle against the plague as absurd, it’s clear that the
resisting characters have his sympathies.
Camus’s other work of nonfiction is The Myth of Sisyphus, a 130 page essay published
in 1942 about the character from Greek mythology who is condemned to forever push a boulder
up a mountain, a task impossible because in some versions it will always roll back down
or just can’t be moved in the first place.
Camus argued that this was a perfect symbol for the human condition: Forever pointlessly
struggling since the inevitability of oblivion hangs over everyone and everything at all
times.
So why not commit suicide instead?
Rather than reaching a dour, nihilistic conclusion from that, Camus said “one must imagine
Sisyphus happy.”
After all, he does have an eternal sense of purpose.
In its way, Camus’s absurdist philosophy is a optimistic and accepting form
of nihilism.