(suggestions wanted)
[I]f we acknowledge that democracy is a failure, and all philosophers who attempted to justify democracy failures, and all philosophers who attempted to expand democracy into socialism and postmodernism failures, we are left with instrumentalists (empiricists) and reactionaries of various fields.
Philosophy as a discipline, must face the uncomfortable fact, that (a) the metaphysical program failed and was solved by cognitive science, and (b) the democratic program failed and was solved by economists (c) therefore the political program failed, and was solved by heterodox philosophers (d) the ethical problem failed and was solved by economists and heterodox philosophers. The reason for this is obvious: the incentives in Academia to attempt to replace the church’s mysticism with some sort of collectivist democratic rationalism, had it’s predictable influence.
Philosophers can produce good neutral and bad influences. Unfortunately, the greater body of philosophers that have been influential since the american revolution, have been more destructive than beneficial. We can never forgive Marx and Freud, any more than we can forgive Kant and Rousseau.
“Thou Shalt Not Harm” not only applies to doctors, but to philosophers, and to all of us.
I give great weight to computer science because unlike the logic of language and unlike abstract and mathematical logic, computer science does not drop the property of operationalism in real time from its reasoning. As such it has higher correspondence with actionable reality than mathematics, and farm more so than formal logic. And if we seek to make informal logic of any value we must learn from computer science and return the property of operationalism to philosophical discourse. Because without it, it certainly appears to consist almost entirely of nonsense built upon linguistic deception.
==
99. Aristotle
99. Niccolo Machiavelli
99. Adam Smith
99. Max Weber
99. Emile Durkheim
99. David Hume
99. John Locke
99. G.W.F. Hegel
99. Friedrich Nietzsche
(lesser candidates)
99. Robert Michels
99. Steven Pinker
99. Jonathan Haidt
==
99. Rene Descartes
99. Alan Turing
99. Karl Popper
99. Gottlob Frege
99. W.V.O. Quine
99. Saul Kripke
THE BAD PHILOSOPHERS
99. Immanuel Kant
99. Ludwig Wittgenstein
99. Karl Marx
99. Soren Kierkegaard
99. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
20. John Rawls
99. Martin Heidegger
99. Jacques Derrida
99. Michelle Foucault
99. Jean-François Lyotard
99. Jean Baudrillard
99. Murray Rothbard
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S BAD PHILOSOPHERS
Max Horkheimer
Theodor W. Adorno
Herbert Marcuse
Friedrich Pollock
Erich Fromm
Otto Kirchheimer
Leo Löwenthal
Franz Leopold Neumann
Siegfried Kracauer
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Walter Benjamin
Jürgen Habermas
Claus Offe
Axel Honneth
Oskar Negt
Alfred Schmidt
Albrecht Wellmer