shortlist

ignore.

terminal programs

miami
indiana-boomington
umass-amherst
cuny
yale
usc
st andrews
cornell
brown
unc-chapel hill
ucla
mit
pittsburgh
princeton
cambridge (mlitt/phd)
rutgers

non-terminal programs

houston
tufts
oxford (bphil)

re: top ten philosophers of all time

found through old wizard is this list of the top ten philosophers of all time. *drumroll please*

10. Rousseau
9. Hume
8. Hegel
7. Heidegger
6. Kierkegaard
5. Kant
4. Descartes
3. Nietzsche
2. Husserl
1. Plato/Socrates

is it just me, or is this list heavily biased towards the continent? it's not that the continental tradition hasn't added somethin to philosophy, but there are some names in there that, although somewhat important, have had their thoughts culminated in the philosophies of others on the list. Say kierkegaard, his thoughts could be expressed mostly by heidegger. same for husserl. Roussaeu was barely a philosopher, more of a political-and-economical theorist in the style of marx. i imagine hegel to be important, so i'd keep him in. nietzsche, on the other hand, was also culminated in heiddeger. and nietzsche was more of a self-help writer anyway. so i'd strike out Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Hursserl, and Nietzsche.

in their places, which would i put in? i'd definitely include wittgenstein, for one. also aristotle. those two for sure. but who else? i'd be inclined to include peirce, probably as a result of my heavy bias in favor of him. but i figure russell might deserve to be in there, also kripke, or even quine, or locke. possibly hobbes or marx. rawls. even sartre. maybe frege, or even foucault. anyway, here's my list.

15. Chomsky

a little out of left field, i know, but his philosophical underpinnings for his linguistics work, combined with his political commentary based in philosophical justifications for a communist anarchism, make him the most cited person alive. he will be read for a long time.

14. Quine

scientistic through and through. his radical empiricism reminds one of hume, but his logical tools and his subject choice of language distinguish him and establish his importance. tried to dissolve the analytic/synthetic distinction.

13. Kripke

an essentialist in the spirit of aristotle, he provided much of the logical structure of modal talk, and his kripke semantics for modal semantics, combined with his influential view of proper names, make him among the best.

12. Peirce

charles peirce, modicum of clear thought, founder of the american school of pragmatism. along with frege invented mathematical logic as we know it today, along with the logic of relations.

11. Russell

wanted to establish the logical basis of mathematics but filed. nevertheless, his political philosophy, his philoophy of language, and his philosophy of mathematics make him virtually unavoidable in philosophy.

10. Sartre

one of the major thinkers in the existentialist schoo l yet wrote a bit more clearly than the rest of them. his interestes were wide and influential, including "meaning", "existence", and various issues in the mind.

9. Frege

revolutionized basic deductive logic and ultimately began the analytic tradition, the "linguistic turn".

8. Hegel

idealist extraordinaire, pretty much started the continental tradition. notorious for being very difficult to read. ontology reserved for ideas.

7. Wittgenstein

i'm pretty sure i should have included wittgenstein twice here, once for the tractatus and once for the investigations. either way, both times he set out to prove that he didn't solve philosophy, he dissolved philosophy. the first, by saying that all philosophical pseudo-problems could be gotten ride of by rigorous logical analysis. the other time by realizing that there are no essences behind words, just uses. very, very influential.

6. Heidegger

extremely rigorous analysis of ontology. i couldn't read him when i tried. but he took ideas from nietzsche, schopenhaur, etc.

5. Kant

one of the first to synthesize the rationalist and empiricist schools. made epistemology respectable. ethics were also highly influential.

4. Hume

very precise philosopher, for the most part. also one of the last great and true skeptics. empiricist to the extreme, made us question our own rationality.

3. Aristotle

hugely influential on all respects. his theory of predicates took the idea from his famous teacher, but made it less creepy. anyway, there are threads of this guy in every other philosopher (except #1 maybe)

2. Descartes

cogito ergo sum

1. Plato/Socrates

the guys who really started it all. forms, justice, love, examined lives, and all that. no need to justify this one, really.

whaatchathiink?

note:

I am neither addressing absolute skeptics, nor men in any state of fictitious doubt.

CSP, CP 5.319

courses

Philosophy 101 - Intro (Figdor)

Philosophy 210 - Symbolic Logic (Morris)

Philosophy 272- Modern Philosophy (Rabinsky)

Philosophy 331 - Social & Political Philosophy (Rabinsky)

Philosophy 341 - Philosophy of Language (Evnine)

Philosophy 345 - Metaphysics (Figdor)

Philosophy 343 - Philosophy of Science (Seigel)

Philosophy 391 - Philosophy of Journalism (Figdor)

Philosophy 495 - Senior Thesis (Haack)

Philosophy 510 - Formal Logic (Hilpinen) - Proof Theory, Completeness, Modality

Philosophy 540 - Epistemology (Haack) - Justification Theories, Applied Epistemology

Philosophy 541 - Mind and Language (McGinn) - Naming and Necessity, WRPL, Mindsight

Philosophy 560 - History of Logic (Hilpinen) - Aristotle, Frege, Peirce, Kripke

Philosophy 581 - Pragmatism (Haack) - Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty

Philosophy 644 - Seminar in Mind (McGinn / Rowlands) - Perception, Consciousness

________________

Psychology 207 - Cognitive Psychology (Choer)

Mathematics 506 - Mathematical Logic (Dvorsky) - Proof, Godel, Sets

Haack on Roll-Hansen on Haack on Feminism

In her newest book, responding to Roll-Hansen (who critiques her stern stance against feminist epistemology), Susan Haack writes:

I admit that I was tempted to write, "the appropriate response to such silly gender-feminist propaganda...," so perhaps I should comment briefly on Roll-Hansen's criticism that my tone may be "too sharp." Having no taste for the chewy blandness of much contemporary academic prose, I do my best to be as forthright and plain-spoken as possible; and perhaps, to ears accustomed to the shameless mutual flattery in which members of this or that academic clique now routinely indulge, the forthright and plain-spoken sounds "too sharp." It's ironic, really, given that irresponsibly exaggerated denigration of truly remarkable minds is apparently regarded as perfectly OK: as with Sandra Harding's suggestion that Newton's Principa could be properly described as a "rape manual," or Richard Rorty's dismissal of Peirce as a "whacked-out triadomaniac." In any case, I suspect that what most enrages some people is less my tone than my annoying habit of quoting what they actually said and then trying to clear up any convenient ambiguities--and, no doubt, my constitutional inability to take the more grotesque recent forms of academic pretentiousness as seriously as their proponents think they deserve. But I won't apologize for my sense of humor, since without it I would surely have given up long ago!

("Scrutinizing Science Studies" 2007. A Lady of Distinctions: Susan Haack Responds to her Critics. Cornelis de Waal (Ed.) Amherst: Prometheus Books.)

Haack inherited more from Peirce than philosophical notions. =D