Douglas Browning: Rankings: Philosophy

The two greatest philosophers
 
1. Aristotle
2. John Dewey
 
Two philosophers almost as great
 
1. Friedrich Nietzsche
2. Alfred North Whitehead
 
Several contenders
 
1. Leibniz
2. Plato
3. Kant
4. Hegel
5. Descartes
6. Socrates
7. Locke
8. Berkeley
9. James
10. Brentano
 
Some other philosophers whom I admire greatly
 
1. Jose Ortega y Gasset
2. Martin Buber
3. Ernst Cassirer
4. Anaximander
5. Heraclitus
6. Bergson
 
The nine most overrated philosophers in history (to qualify the philosopher must be held in very high regard by a significantly large number of philosophers today)
 
1. Plato (a great philosopher, no doubt, but not that great!)
2. Wittgenstein
3. Heidegger
4. Spinoza
5. Aquinas
6. Parmenides
7. Russell
8. Hume
9. Kant (ditto above remark on Plato)
 
Some of the most underrated philosophers of great merit in history (to qualifty the philosopher must be held in low regard by a significantly large number of philosophers today)
 
1. Dewey (he might no longer be eligible; attitudes are changing)
2. Samuel Clarke
3. Charles Hartshorne
4. Meinong
5. Ortega y Gasset
6. Whitehead
8. Henri Bergson
 
Some of the most overlooked philosophers of merit in history (for a philosopher to qualify a suggestion of his or her merit will evoke the response, "Who's she?" or "Do you really consider him a philosopher?")
 
1. Martin Buber
2. John Balguy
3. Richard Price
4. George Herbert Mead
5. Bernard Bosanquet
6. Everett W. Hall
7. Ralph Cudworth
8. Joseph Butler
 
Six philosophers whose compositional style in English I admire
 
1. Hobbes
2. H. A. Prichard
3. A. J. Ayer
4. Peter Strawson
5. William James
6. Berkeley
 
Six philosophical writers in English whose compositional expression leaves a lot to be desired
 
1. Simon Blackburn
2. Nelson Goodman
3. Richard Rorty
4. John McDowell
5. Hume
6. David Wiggins

Recently the Baruch College Philosophy Department asked me and an untold number of philosophers across the country to participate in the Baruch College Poll of great philosophy in the twentieth century.  Each of us were asked to list what he or she judged to be the five most important books and the five most important articles in philosophy in the century.  These instructions were included:  "We are interested in your judgment of what are the best philosophical books and articles, not your estimate of what you consider the most influential."  I listed the following books, ranked in the order indicated:

1.  John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry  (1938)
2.  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality  (1929)
3.  John Dewey, Experience and Nature  (1925)T
    4.  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms  (in three volumes, 1923-1929)
5.  Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations of Quixote  (1914)
     
Four others which I considered very carefully were:
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
 
I must say that I was not shocked when I was informed on July 13, 1999 of the five winners of the Baruch Poll of Great Philosophy Books of the Twentieth Century.  They were:
1.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
2.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
3.  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
4.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5.  Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
 
To be as charitable as I can, I would suggest that many voters did not take the instructions seriously.  Influential as these books may be now and for some years to come perhaps, the point was to list the best books.  My cynicism deepens.

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