What philosopher do you most identify with?
October 31, 2010 at 4:56 pm
(This post was last modified: October 31, 2010 at 5:12 pm by The Skeptic.)
Which of these do you most identify with? Here's a quick rundown of their views and interests :
Personally, I identify with Paine a lot, so I voted for him, but Nietzsche, Dennett, and Hobbes are also of interest.
Don't complain about Rand being on there either, I included her as an opposite to Marx. I know she is loathed. But hey, she was an atheist.
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Aristotle - Believed in a creator god ( you could say he was a deist ), had a strong interest in observation of the natural world and taxonomy. He also was interested in astronomy, physics, and metaphysics.
Plato - Believed in a higher realm of things, the realm of the forms ( this is what happens when you use ontological argument style thinking )
Immanuel Kant - Claimed that we cannot know the external world directly, and that things are seperated between the nomenal world ( things in themselves ) and the phenomenal world. Was religions, but in a moral sense more than anything else. He destroyed the ontological argument despise being religious himself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Believed philosophy was reducible to language games, and that metaphysics was invalid.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Despised Judaism and Christianity, and western values for that matter. Declared god to be dead, for morals to be relative, and that the will to power drives all thing. He had a bit of a social darwinist streak in him.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Believed the world was represented to us by our will. He improved on Kant's theories and foreshadowed Freud, Jung, and Nietzschean ideas. He was very pessimistic and a misogynist.
Ayn Rand - She was an atheist, hated Kant with a passion, and promoted completely lasseiz-faire capitalism. Somewhat of a moral fanatic in that she claimed that serving your own rational interests was an objective moral, and because of that, that pure capitalism ( not even the mixed economy of the USA) was the only moral society to live in.
Karl Marx - Founder of modern communist thought, and an atheist.
Daniel Dennett - One of the four horsemen of atheism, famous for his books Consciousness explained, Breaking the Spell, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
Lao Tzu -- founder of Taoism, a stoic system of eastern thought and the alleged author of the Tao Te Ching.
Thomas Hobbes - a possible atheist ( definitely a materialist ) famous for his pessimistic view of human nature and believed in an absolute monarch.
John Locke - one of the founders of liberalism and highly influential on the founding of America. He promoted democracy, human rights, and religious tolerance ( despise writing some nasty thing about atheists himself. He was a believer. )
David Hume - A skeptic and an agnostic/atheist. Famous for naturalizing things, such as morality, and made arguments that preceded those of Darwin. He also believed that we cannot know the external world for sure because while our senses perceive things, our mind constructs the world out of those perceptions, such as cause and effect. He influenced Kant greatly.
Rene Descartes - A Skeptic that relied on A Priori arguments to prove god's existence. He was also a mathematician who invented the cartesian plane.
Thomas Paine - A Deist thinker famous for writing the pamphlet common sense that sparked the revolutionary war, promoted liberalism in his book The Rights of Man ( particularly, ideas that fly in the face of people like Glenn Beck that claim to love him so much ) and was a staunch critic of religion, authoring the Age of Reason and Examination of the Prophecies, which were two of the first books on Biblical Criticism.
Personally, I identify with Paine a lot, so I voted for him, but Nietzsche, Dennett, and Hobbes are also of interest.
Don't complain about Rand being on there either, I included her as an opposite to Marx. I know she is loathed. But hey, she was an atheist.
____
Aristotle - Believed in a creator god ( you could say he was a deist ), had a strong interest in observation of the natural world and taxonomy. He also was interested in astronomy, physics, and metaphysics.
Plato - Believed in a higher realm of things, the realm of the forms ( this is what happens when you use ontological argument style thinking )
Immanuel Kant - Claimed that we cannot know the external world directly, and that things are seperated between the nomenal world ( things in themselves ) and the phenomenal world. Was religions, but in a moral sense more than anything else. He destroyed the ontological argument despise being religious himself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Believed philosophy was reducible to language games, and that metaphysics was invalid.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Despised Judaism and Christianity, and western values for that matter. Declared god to be dead, for morals to be relative, and that the will to power drives all thing. He had a bit of a social darwinist streak in him.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Believed the world was represented to us by our will. He improved on Kant's theories and foreshadowed Freud, Jung, and Nietzschean ideas. He was very pessimistic and a misogynist.
Ayn Rand - She was an atheist, hated Kant with a passion, and promoted completely lasseiz-faire capitalism. Somewhat of a moral fanatic in that she claimed that serving your own rational interests was an objective moral, and because of that, that pure capitalism ( not even the mixed economy of the USA) was the only moral society to live in.
Karl Marx - Founder of modern communist thought, and an atheist.
Daniel Dennett - One of the four horsemen of atheism, famous for his books Consciousness explained, Breaking the Spell, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
Lao Tzu -- founder of Taoism, a stoic system of eastern thought and the alleged author of the Tao Te Ching.
Thomas Hobbes - a possible atheist ( definitely a materialist ) famous for his pessimistic view of human nature and believed in an absolute monarch.
John Locke - one of the founders of liberalism and highly influential on the founding of America. He promoted democracy, human rights, and religious tolerance ( despise writing some nasty thing about atheists himself. He was a believer. )
David Hume - A skeptic and an agnostic/atheist. Famous for naturalizing things, such as morality, and made arguments that preceded those of Darwin. He also believed that we cannot know the external world for sure because while our senses perceive things, our mind constructs the world out of those perceptions, such as cause and effect. He influenced Kant greatly.
Rene Descartes - A Skeptic that relied on A Priori arguments to prove god's existence. He was also a mathematician who invented the cartesian plane.
Thomas Paine - A Deist thinker famous for writing the pamphlet common sense that sparked the revolutionary war, promoted liberalism in his book The Rights of Man ( particularly, ideas that fly in the face of people like Glenn Beck that claim to love him so much ) and was a staunch critic of religion, authoring the Age of Reason and Examination of the Prophecies, which were two of the first books on Biblical Criticism.
