# Most important philosophers of the 20th century?



## RamistThomist (Jul 3, 2015)

I was listening to an Eastern European lecture on Marx, and he mentioned (in passing) that Jurgen Habermas was the most important philosopher of the 20th century. I wasn't familiar enough with Habermas to deal with that comment, but it did get me wondering who is the most important philosopher. So, who is the most important philosopher of the 20th century? Probably best to stick with secular philosophers to keep the discussion under control, otherwise it will likely turn into another Clark vs. Van Til thread.

I'll go with either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not that I like Russell. I think he was a vile human being, but his importance cannot be gainsaid.


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## Philip (Jul 3, 2015)

I would say Moore, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. 



ReformedReidian said:


> Not that I like Russell. I think he was a vile human being, but his importance cannot be gainsaid.



I actually wouldn't put Russell there because his philosophy hasn't had nearly the impact that the others have. He was an influential public intellectual, a mentor to a generation, and his biography is among the most interesting of the 20th century, but all the same he hasn't had the staying power of some others. Wittgenstein and Moore seem to have weathered better.

It's possible that Plantinga may be remembered for the revival of Christian philosophy at the end of the 20th century, but only time will tell.


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## RamistThomist (Jul 3, 2015)

Philip said:


> I would say Moore, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



How did I forget Heidegger? I had actually been on a Heidegger kick recently. Yeah, definitely Heidegger over Russell. I'm reading Moore at the moment and find him quite interesting.


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## Philip (Jul 3, 2015)

ReformedReidian said:


> I'm reading Moore at the moment and find him quite interesting.



Moore has a quality that is rare but which I enjoy everywhere I find it: he manages to be revolutionary in a very short space. Most of the works that he is known for (apart from his work on ethics) were journal articles.


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## yeutter (Jul 4, 2015)

Philip;1080855
It's possible that Plantinga may be remembered for the revival of Christian philosophy at the end of the 20th century said:


> Why would you put Plantinga ahead of Richard Swinburne?


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## jwright82 (Jul 4, 2015)

I agree with all the above. I would also add Herman Dooyeweerd to the list. Although obscure, I think his work is revolutionary like Plantinga. I also might add John Dewey for consideration. BTW there is some very small work out there comparing the American Pragmatists to German and French phenomenalogy, like Heiddeger. Food for thought.


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## Warren (Jul 4, 2015)

Eric Hoffer was the most important 20th century philosopher I've read. His "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront" and "The True Believer" accompanied my reading of "The Nobelist Triumph" and Igor Shafarevich's "The Socialist Phenomenon". 12 years of public education fell from my eyes.


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## Philip (Jul 5, 2015)

yeutter said:


> Why would you put Plantinga ahead of Richard Swinburne?



Because he founded _Faith and Philosophy_ and has written what will be seen as _the_ definitive work on Christian belief. Swinburne is certainly an interesting and influential thinker, but his work in the evidentialist tradition has not been nearly as innovative or revolutionary. Plantinga had the insight to call the emperor on his lack of sartorial achievement. "Advice to Christian Philosophers" alone would have made Plantinga a great Christian thinker.


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## Philip (Jul 5, 2015)

jwright82 said:


> I agree with all the above. I would also add Herman Dooyeweerd to the list. Although obscure, I think his work is revolutionary like Plantinga. I also might add John Dewey for consideration. BTW there is some very small work out there comparing the American Pragmatists to German and French phenomenalogy, like Heiddeger. Food for thought.



Yeah, Dewey is another one who was influential in his own time but hasn't weathered well. Really, pragmatism on the whole is not terribly influential anymore (and good riddance to it!).

As for Dooyeweerd, he's just so obscure that I hesitate to put him on the list. The same would go for Michael Polanyi and Jacques Ellul, brilliant and groundbreaking as they were. All of them were outsiders whose work has not seen the attention it deserves. I hope all three will be studied, but their iconoclastic stance toward a lot of the institutions of late modernity means that they will always be outside the mainstream.


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## yeutter (Jul 5, 2015)

I am not fan of Herman Dooyeweerd, and his school of thought; but I think him more influential then you give him credit for being. Besides Dooyeweerd, in the same tradition are Dirk Hendrik Theodore Vollenhvoen, Hendrik Stoker, Hans Rookmaaker, and Cornelius VanTil. The later two especially continue to influence Christian thinkers to this day.


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## RamistThomist (Jul 5, 2015)

yeutter said:


> I am not fan of Herman Dooyeweerd, and his school of thought; but I think him more influential then you give him credit for being. Besides Dooyeweerd, in the same tradition are Dirk Hendrik Theodore Vollenhvoen, Hendrik Stoker, Hans Rookmaaker, and Cornelius VanTil. The later two especially continue to influence Christian thinkers to this day.



There is a difference between being a great thinker--which Dooyeweerd surely is--and being influential. Few people outside the Dutch Reformed world really know who he is. Further, it's almost impossible to buy New Critique of Theoretical Thought for under $200.

Mind you, I like Dooyew. But he isn't easy to understand and insanely expensive, which means he likely isn't that influential.


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## Philip (Jul 5, 2015)

yeutter said:


> am not fan of Herman Dooyeweerd, and his school of thought; but I think him more influential then you give him credit for being. Besides Dooyeweerd, in the same tradition are Dirk Hendrik Theodore Vollenhvoen, Hendrik Stoker, Hans Rookmaaker, and Cornelius VanTil. The later two especially continue to influence Christian thinkers to this day.



Again, the comparison with Jacques Ellul is apt: Ellul has a good deal of staying power and definitely deserves to be read, given just how prophetic his description of post-industrial society has turned out to be, but I can't call him one of the most important figures of the 20th century because he isn't read widely enough. That's not to say there might not be a revival of Ellul or Dooyeweerd (there was for Kierkegaard after all) but that right now I can't call them very important.


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## MW (Jul 5, 2015)

The category of "secular" is dubious, but from a Christian point of view the choice of Russell seems right. He somehow made it intellectually viable to be an atheistic agnostic at a time when it was considered immoral. Through his efforts people like Dawkins and co. can now roam abroad with a sense that morality is on their side. Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered!


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## Philip (Jul 5, 2015)

MW said:


> The category of "secular" is dubious, but from a Christian point of view the choice of Russell seems right. He somehow made it intellectually viable to be an atheistic agnostic at a time when it was considered immoral.



Again, that's less of a philosophical impact and more of a pop-cultural impact. If you're reading Russell for his influence in 20th century philosophy, you'll usually end up reading some rather lifeless empiricistic platonism which turned out to be obsolete once logical positivism hit the scene.


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## MW (Jul 6, 2015)

Philip said:


> Again, that's less of a philosophical impact and more of a pop-cultural impact.



The OP didn't make these terms of reference.


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## RamistThomist (Jul 6, 2015)

I would say Russell was very influential in terms of globalist liberal politics and perhaps mathematics and set theory. In terms of philosophy, I don't see him as having broken new ground like Plantinga and Heidegger.


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## Gforce9 (Jul 6, 2015)

Jacob,
I know you're looking for something much more intellectual, but I can't get past the influence of those like our dear Oprah. Folks like her have had unimaginable (horrible) influence on all manner of folks......


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## Philip (Jul 6, 2015)

MW said:


> Philip said:
> 
> 
> > Again, that's less of a philosophical impact and more of a pop-cultural impact.
> ...



Even so, Russell was far from the first public intellectual atheist to achieve respectibility. Before him there were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and various others.


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## Semper Fidelis (Jul 6, 2015)

I would tend to agree with Matthew and want to find the philosopher who most influenced the general spirit of the age rather than simply achieved staying power among professional philosophers. Though they're not careful philosophers I would add people such as:

Walter Rauschenbusch
Dale Carnegie

I found this interview with Joseph Bottum fascinating: http://www.albertmohler.com/?p=34287

I think one of the most profound "sea changes" in the 20th Century was mainline thinking in the direction of the "social Gospel." For a mostly "Christian" nation, I think this sea change plays one of the most pivotal roles as to where we find ourselves today.

I like this portion in particular (speaking of Rauschenbusch): "By the end of research this and thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that he was the most consequential public intellectual we’ve had in the last 150 years. He just dominates that stage. Now, I will say that he’s an inferior thinker. He’s a B-class thinker. William James is the genius in that generation, not Rauschenbusch. Yet, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the great Victorian historian, has this line in which she says, “If you want to understand an age, you should always go to its second-tier thinkers. It’s first tier thinkers see the problems before they arrive, and they sidestep in ways that you don’t appreciate. Its second-tier thinkers don’t see the problems of the age until they bop them in the nose.” It’s a brilliant line. Rauschenbusch is a second-tier thinker. He’s a great rhetorician. I’ve fallen in love with his prose, but he’s not William James. He’s not the genius of the age. He’s not William James in the United States. He’s not Nietzsche in Europe. He doesn’t stand at that level of thinker. Yet, he’s a great rhetorician and he feels the age."


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## RamistThomist (Jul 6, 2015)

Semper Fidelis said:


> I would tend to agree with Matthew and want to find the philosopher who most influenced the general spirit of the age rather than simply achieved staying power among professional philosophers. Though they're not careful philosophers I would add people such as:
> 
> Walter Rauschenbusch
> Dale Carnegie
> ...



I hadn't thought about Rauschenbush since my liberal baptist college days. Yeah, we take the Social Gospel for granted, but I wonder how much of it would have gotten off the ground if not for him.


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## Philip (Jul 6, 2015)

Semper Fidelis said:


> Walter Rauschenbusch



Rauschenbusch is certainly a pivotal figure in the history of theology, but if we're going to include theologians, we have to include Bavinck, Barth, Pannenberg, and Moltmann.



Semper Fidelis said:


> Dale Carnegie



Not really sure he's a philosopher so much as a pop psychologist and self-help speaker.


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## Semper Fidelis (Jul 7, 2015)

Philip,

While I realize you are a student and lover of philosophy, I think you have a fairly parochial view of what constitutes a "philosopher". I understand that there are professional philosophers but, taken more broadly, I think that anyone who has a profound effect on the thinking of a culture is much more of an important "philosopher" than someone who formally participates in an academic discipline.

It rather reminds me of a government official I once spoke to when I spoke of the "Solutions Architects" that our company employs who do some high-end Cloud work. He replied that they weren't really "architects" because, in his mind, an architect was one who was involved in Enterprise Architecture. Never mind that most of the Enterprise Architecture know very little about the technical discipline they supposedly "architect".

I understand why folks who spend the time in academic study and become professional philosophers might not want to say that others are "philosophers" but the fact of the matter is that everyone does philosophy and it's a matter of whether they do it well or poorly. Oprah may not know 1/10th of what you know about philosophy but she's a far more important philosopher than you or any of your professors are in today's culture.


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## RamistThomist (Jul 7, 2015)

My initial assumption defined philosopher as someone along the lines of Russell, Wittgenstein, or Plantinga. The more professional types. I do not deny that cultural forces probably do more for determining plausibility structures than anything else. 

So, to clarify:

I would say the most important official philosophers would be either Heidegger or Wittgenstein. The most important cultural philosophers are the Beatles and Oprah, in which case Western society is deservedly doomed.


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## Semper Fidelis (Jul 7, 2015)

So, history of philosophy question, is Heidegger generally credited with what we call "post modernism"? He seems to have influenced Derrida so that's why I ask.


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## Philip (Jul 7, 2015)

Semper Fidelis said:


> Oprah may not know 1/10th of what you know about philosophy but she's a far more important philosopher than you or any of your professors are in today's culture.



I guess even there, though, I wouldn't count her because she's not presenting anything really original in terms of ideas.

EDIT: I also very much doubt that anyone will be reading Oprah in a hundred years.



Semper Fidelis said:


> So, history of philosophy question, is Heidegger generally credited with what we call "post modernism"? He seems to have influenced Derrida so that's why I ask.



Heidegger is usually considered the founder of 20th century existentialism (though Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Dostoevsky sometimes get included retroactively). Nearly everyone in the generation after Heidegger in continental philosophy was influenced by him.

Post-modernism in philosophy is usually a form of deconstructionism, which has its roots in Marxist critical theory (Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul) and in post-Freudian thought (including feminism). Heidegger thought these streams irrelevant and likewise most in these traditions found him irrelevant. Derrida took up the interpretation of Heidegger in Hermaneutics (Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer) and synthesized it with the deconstructive techniques of Michel Foucault.


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## RamistThomist (Jul 7, 2015)

Semper Fidelis said:


> So, history of philosophy question, is Heidegger generally credited with what we call "post modernism"? He seems to have influenced Derrida so that's why I ask.



Tracing a genealogy of postmodernism (which is what Postmoderns love to do) is notoriously difficult. I would say Heidegger amps up Hegel's phenomenology, which I think contains within itself some seeds of later deconstruction.

To the degree that Hegel says everything contains within it its own contradiction, we can see similar echoes in Freud and Derrida that deconstruction always happens in the middle voice.

Of course, Hegel isn't a postmodernist, at least not in the sense that Evangelicals think they understand the term. Hegel believed in a rational world order, namely that of his own constructing. 

Jamie Smith pointed out that Heidegger's Being and Time came from his lectures on Augustine's Confessions. Now there is a genealogical project for you!


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## jwithnell (Jul 7, 2015)

While he's associated with the 19th century and science, you'd have to list Darwin as a critical post in 20th century thought and history. Marx and Nietzche are logical extensions. People like Hitler, Margaret Sanger/eugenics/planned parenthood etc. have led to millions of deaths on philosophical grounds. That's pretty influential in my book.


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## Philip (Jul 7, 2015)

Actually, it has been argued that the history of the 20th Century has been an outworking of three different versions of social Darwinism, namely Communism, Nationalism/Fascism, and Capitalism.


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## Grafted In (Jul 7, 2015)

How about Sartre, who, perhaps, more than anyone else, popularized the Existential ontology that "existence precedes essence" by taking it out of the academy and injecting it into popular culture through his plays and novels? 

In my mind, this idea is foundational to much of the chaos and confusion we see unfolding in the culture, including arguments for progressivism of every kind, abortion, sexual liberation, and self-selection of sexual, gender, and racial identity.


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## Rich Koster (Jul 7, 2015)

Yogi Berra


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## RamistThomist (Jul 7, 2015)

Philip said:


> and Capitalism.



Bourgeoisie swine!


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