Pyrrho

I have not read Against the Idols of the Age, so I have nothing to say about it.

However, it is interesting that you praise Daniel Dennett (in an earlier post above), yet condemn Stove so harshly. Here is what Dennett has said about Stove:

The above appears on the rear jacket of The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies by David Stove. The emphasis on "changed my opinion" is there, not something added by me.

Pyrrho

You appear to be misremembering what Hume stated in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section I (pages 6-7 of the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition):

At no point in the relevant paragraph does Hume call Locke a "poseur", nor the equivalent thereof. Nor can we say that Hume claims to know that "Addison would be famous long after that lame old poseur Locke was forgotten" (your words, of course, not Hume's). Hume explains why Addison might be remembered after Locke is forgotten.

Do you imagine that the "generality of mankind" enjoys reading abstruse philosophy, either now or ever? Or do you imagine that the arguments about metaphysical subjects, such as whether "free will" represents reality or not, have much bearing on how most of the opponents live their lives? Most people today have probably never read anything by either Locke or Addison. Even most who study philosophy spend little time with Locke, as Berkeley and Hume are generally claimed to have advanced the empirical tradition in which Locke is said to be a part, and therefore Hume, being the end, so to speak, of the Locke/Berkeley/Hume type empiricism, is more often read than either Locke or Berkeley.

mac_philo

I must disagree strongly with Pyrrho's take on the last two hundred years of philosophy. In that period we have:

Gottlob Frege (invented modern formal logic singlehandedly)
Bertrand Russell (enhanced Frege's system, provided a system for deriving almost all of mathematics from logic, began the 'linguistic turn' in Anglo-American thought)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (revolutionized epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language)
WVO Quine (enhanced Russell's logic, denied the analytic/synthetic distinction, proposed that reference and translation are indeterminate)
Lob/Tarski/Church (provided fundamental theorems in logic)
George Boolos (made advances in computation theory and provability logic)
Alfred Tarski (proposed the first respectable theory of truth)
Saul Kripke (provided a semantics for modal logic, showed that we must not equate apriori with necessity and a posteriori with contingency, invented the causal theory of reference, argued that all identity statements are necessary)

If you think the last 200 years hasn't produced anything with impact, you've been reading the wrong people.

Clutch

pyrrho,

I neither misremembered nor misrepresented Hume's remarks, though I am guilty of using a teaspoonful of irony. (I suppose irony is another one of those dreadful mistakes that academic philosophers make. If only they were more like that luminary, Burger!) Thank you for quoting the passage, however. It should be obvious how it makes the point I was making as well.

Pyrrho

It may be useful to consider exactly what I stated:

"Most of the good philosophers are dead, and the very best ones have been dead for over 200 years."

Regarding the past 200 years, I do NOT state that there have been no good philosophers; only that the very best precede that time period.

If we focus on just one of your examples, say Bertrand Russell, I completely agree that he is an example of a good philosopher. Were he alive today, I would have used him as an example for a reply to the original post. But he is not, in my opinion, in the same league as someone like David Hume (who, as a side note, Russell treats unfairly in his A History of Western Philosophy).

And, as another aside, I think your list includes some of the better philosophers of the past 200 years.

Pyrrho

I don't think that your "irony", as you call it, was at all clear.

I do, however, agree with you that it is difficult to know who will be regarded as important in the future. It is also difficult to know how often their popularity will wax and wane at different time periods in the future.

In keeping with the comments above about the last 200 years, if the original question did not require the person to be alive, I would have selected Clifford rather than Burger. I take it, from your apparent sarcasm, that you believe that the Clifford/Burger position is mistaken. Is it that you prefer something like James' position, so that you may feel comfortable believing things without bothering with evidence? Or do you suppose that it does not matter whether others bother with things like evidence? Clearly, James has enjoyed a greater popularity than Clifford.

Clutch

Good list, mac_philo. Pleased to see Lob get a look in!Just curious about this, though: in what respect would you say Quine enhanced Russell's logic?

Clutch

Well, if you're finished constructing and demolishing fantasies...?

What you may take from may apparent sarcasm is that I believe that AJ Burger is a highly idiosyncratic choice as the one person to mention as worthwhile, after issuing a broad denigration of the past 200 years of philosophy.

For what it's worth, though, I think Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" a very good piece of philosophy -- albeit one whose emphasis on the normative character of belief makes it not-very-distant kin of the sociology-of-knowledge crowd for whom you seem to have little use.

Pyrrho

First of all, you would do well to remember what I objected to in much current philosophy:

"Most "philosophers" today are not very respectable, in my opinion. Many write arcane garbage for the sole purpose of impressing others who imagine that complicated and/or unintelligible sentences that employ a gross misuse of words are a sign of intelligence rather than a sign of poor writing skills."

Burger, whatever else may be said about him or her, writes in a style very different from what I complained about. Burger writes in the tradition of "popular" essay writing, of which both the Clifford and James essays at the same site are also examples.

Second, it would be good to remember what I stated above to "mac_philo":

You may observe that this applies to Burger as well as anyone else from the past 200 years.

YourNeonGod

would chomsky be considered?