20 most influential philosophers

Hippasus

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This is not my list, but just an article that popped up on my homepage. I guess it's World Philosophy Day. Article link below.

1. Socrates (proto-rationalism, individualism, ethics, dialectic)
2. Plato (realism, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, aesthetics, dialectic)
3. Aristotle (logic, empirical realism, metaphysics, ethics, science)
4. Confucius (Chinese ethics)
5. Immanuel Kant (transcendental idealism, ethics, aesthetics)
6. Friedrich Nietzsche (anti-theism, existentialism, aesthetics, Romanticism)
7. John Locke (modern political philosophy, empiricism)
8. Rene Descartes (rationalism, modern epistemology, analytic geometry, algebra)
9. David Hume (empiricism, skepticism)
10. Thomas Aquinas (medieval Aristotelianism, Christian philosophy)
11. Karl Marx (socialism, communism, dialectical materialism)
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Romanticism, political philosophy)
13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German idealism, dialectic)
14. John Stuart Mill (empiricism, political philosophy)
15. Simone de Beauvoir (feminism, existentialism, political philosophy)
16. Michel Foucault (structuralism, postmodernism)
17. Soren Kierkegaard (existentialism, Christian philosophy)
18. Martin Heidegger (phenomenology, ontology, existentialism)
19. Hannah Arendt (feminism, political philosophy)
20. Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophy of language, metaphilosophy)

I attempted to summarize their legacies, or schools of thought for which they are best known, in parentheses.

 
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Hippasus

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For me, from this list: Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Descartes, Heidegger, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Socrates, in order.

Off the top of my head, I would have liked to have seen:

Godel, Cantor (mathematics)
Frege (philosophy, mathematics)
Euclid (mathematics)
Schopenhauer (philosophy)
Hippasus (the real one--mathematics)
Schelling (philosophy)
Camus (existentialism)
Sartre (existentialism)
Russell/Whitehead (philosophy, mathematics)

But then I'm talking about influential for me. Regardless, they are all obviously influential in their own regards.
 
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JMCx4

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Sep 3, 2017
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I sort of agree, as many of its claims are debatably not falsifiable. Although historically philosophy was the umbrella term under which natural science, e.g. Galileo and Newton, fell. These days, philosophy is maybe between art and science.
I often waxed philosophical as I walked across campus from my Nude Portraiture class to my Astrophysics lecture. But I usually got over it by stopping at the dining hall for a dipped cone. 🍦
 
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