sweet effay

Glueboot directs our attention to Radio 4’s poll to determine the greatest philosopher. They really are scraping the bottom of the barrel for lists these days. Expect to see a poll for the world’s greatest left handed, mixed race, Fender Strat playing guitarist any time now.

Now I wouldn’t want to accuse the BBC of dumbing down, but check out the ‘philosopher timeline’, where you can pick somebody to vote for if you’re not sure which way to jump. Here’s the entry for Kant:

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) "Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law" (Kant's Categorical Imperative or moral law).

Is that it? Just as well I read that, or I might have voted for him.

So who’s going to win and does anybody care? Presumably the celebrities who nominate their favourite philosophers on the website do. What a shame that they don’t say why they have chosen the philosophers in question. Glueboot goes for a top 3 of Plato, Wittgenstein, and Russell but I think that she’s forgotten that Russell isn’t quite the crowd puller that he once was. I’d have to hedge my bets and say either Plato or Aristotle, Wittgenstein (because, outside of Heideggerians, Wittgenstinians are the biggest fan-boys I’ve ever met so they’ll mobilize on mass and, lets face it folks, that’s a pretty big mass), and either Hume or (God help us) Mill.

Obviously the whole thing is bloody ridiculous. Impossible to choose, etc. but you still want to know who I’d go for. Well, assuming by ‘greatest’ we’re talking about most influential without writing complete bollocks, I can get it down to four: Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant.