favorite philosopher?

[Angrboda]

As a philosophy lover and one who avoids having favorites of anything, this may be difficult....

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Heraclitus. He said important things about the nature of process and change which the rest of philosophy has yet to catch up with. I just wish we had more of him.

Gottlob Frege. I don't know why. His work on logic of course, but it was his failed project on Arithmetic and his work on Sinn und Bedeutung of which I'm the most fond.

David Hume. One of the clearest thinking curmudgeons that the world has ever produced.

Zeno of Citium and the school of the Stoics (notably Cleanthes and Chrysippus). Where to begin? I love their work on virtue and ethics, but I also dig their ontology and epistemology. They are also, arguably, the world's first existentialists.

Zhuangzi, and to a lesser extent Lao Tzu. Obvious choices for a Taoist, but the order of preference is worthy of comment. Lao Tzu composed the basic melodies of Taoism, but Zhuangzi wrote symphonies.

Nagarjuna. I have very fundamental differences with the Buddha and Buddhism, but Nagarjuna was to Buddhism what Zhuangzi was to Taoism, he took the rough cut and produced a stunning diamond.


Okay. That's enough.

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Other favorites: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Daniel Dennett, Democritus, and Nietzsche.

Also, though not strictly philosophers, their work has had such enormous philosophical import that I would have to mention Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, and David Hilbert in the same breath.