Michael Knowles RANKS The Greatest Philosophers
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Summary
Everyone knows that the purpose of reading philosophy is to make yourself seem smart at parties. The problem that people have is that they haven t actually read philosophy. So in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and his team has assembled the philosophers. They will present the philosophers to me, and I will place them where they deserve in the hierarchy.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Everyone knows that the purpose of reading philosophy is to make yourself seem smart at parties.
00:00:06.540
The problem that people have is they haven't actually read philosophy.
00:00:13.100
Not a lot, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
00:00:15.920
So my team has asked me to provide the definitive ranking of philosophers.
00:00:24.000
They will present the philosophers to me, and I will place them where they deserve in the hierarchy.
00:00:42.920
A tier just below means there could and maybe should be a college course dedicated to that person.
00:00:53.400
Productive use of your precious moments on Earth.
00:00:59.960
These are the gurus that the big brains on Reddit really like.
00:01:07.760
You're at the philosophers where you have to just tear rips from a bong before you're like,
00:01:13.980
Hey, man, you know, you ever, but actually, man, I got a quote for you.
00:01:17.700
Ever heard about, you know, that's the lowest tier.
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Socrates is the beginning of Western philosophy.
00:01:34.380
So we know Socrates through the writings of his student, Plato, and then down through his student,
00:01:51.980
Nietzsche was intelligent, at least, and he was wrong about everything, but he was wrong
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He's known for hits such as the claim that God is dead for the notion of the will to power
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His philosophy was important to the rise of Nazism, not to have guilt by association for the philosophers,
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I'm not going to say that you have to be totally right to be an important philosopher or that one
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could be edified by reading, even if it's to figure out where not to go wrong.
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So I put him at, I'm putting him at C tier, actually.
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I was going to maybe give him B tier, but I'm giving him C tier.
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He was, he's so wrong that the good that you'll get out of reading him doesn't, it doesn't push
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You know, it's just, you should read him as a bit of a warning.
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And because he's a, he's a good observer of the times in which he lived, but he's just,
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He, Mill gets, gets better grades than Nietzsche.
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John Stuart Mill is a big promoter of utilitarianism.
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He's the author of On Liberty is probably his most famous work.
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Utilitarianism is usually summarized as, as promoting the greatest good and happiness
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He's wrong, but he's wrong in a really instructive way.
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Cause it shows, he starts to show you where our whole civilization really started to go off
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So don't buy into him, but he's an amiable reader who will give you a lot to consider.
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Edmund Burke, one of my favorite philosophers, considered one of the founders of modern conservatism.
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Edmund Burke said that John Locke's second treatise on government was one of the worst
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However, John Locke does in fact contribute something to good philosophy in as much as
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he contributed a fair bit to Catholic social teaching.
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Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, one of the great encyclicals, which he outlines Catholic social
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So he really does make a contribution to serious things.
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The libs and the libertarians want to give him A tier or S tier.
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Like he's not a total joke in his personal life.
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He kind of was because he was just a disreputable man, physically filthy, just disgusting, unhygienic,
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a total mooch off his buddy Angles for his whole life and just his family killed themselves
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and I suspect having something to do with the general aura around this man.
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He, he also wrote poetry about demons and stuff.
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He makes some valid critiques of, of politics, but he's, he's totally wrong about like everything.
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I want to, I'm tempted to put him a little bit below Nietzsche because Nietzsche, Nietzsche
00:05:19.980
was probably smarter or at least funnier to read.
00:05:23.440
But no, he gets, he's a Reddit, he's a Reddit tier guru and people on Reddit love Karl Marx.
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Michael, you're putting Ayn Rand, an erstwhile hero of the American right below.
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Karl Marx, what's the matter with you, Michael?
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And look, there are plenty of people who are not serious thinkers.
00:06:01.700
And she wasted so much of my time when I was forced under duress to read Atlas Shrugged and
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Fountainhead was better than Atlas Shrugged, but it's just, it's just not serious.
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She too, like Karl Marx, makes some valid critiques of her time period, but that does
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And for the, for the so-called conservatives who really just love Ayn Rand, just are totally
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But, you know, she is a modernist, atheist, radical individualist.
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I get that some of her, some of her writings get a little saucy, you know, that's kind of
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It's also funny that the plot lines of all of her books are that super hot, rich, successful
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Giga Chads all just really, really want to sleep with Ayn Rand.
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My friend Spencer Clavin pointed that out one time to me and he sort of says like, okay,
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I spent hours of my life that I will never get back reading those books.
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00:08:21.460
Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers ever to live, write about pretty much everything.
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If you can only read five books in your life, the Nicomachean Ethics must be among
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I think, forget about even ethics, politics, maybe physics too.
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He's just, I'm not even joking, increasingly, I think physics is vindicating Aristotle over
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He's sometimes, there's this phrase that is often attributed to him.
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I do not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to your death the right to say it.
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There's no evidence that he actually ever said that.
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My version of it is, I might not agree with what you say, and I will kill you for saying
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You know, those, Christopher Hitchens loved to quote this one line from Voltaire.
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Those who will make you believe absurdities will also inflict upon you terrible cruelties
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The more I talk about him, the more certain I am that he's in the bong ripper tier of
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I've said so far with Socrates, Aristotle, these guys are right about basically everything.
00:10:06.460
In fact, his most famous work is the Summa Theologica.
00:10:11.460
Traditionally said, it's really the Summa Theologiae, but we're being pedantic.
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Like, in any case, there's a legend that he would write three books at a time.
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Voltaire, Thomas Aquinas, the great scholar Andrew Tate.
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He wouldn't call himself a philosopher, to be fair to Andrew Tate.
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I don't think he would call himself a philosopher, so I don't want to knock the guy.
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I mean, you know, he does leave himself open to some criticism on account of, you know, all the things he's done and said.
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But I don't blame him for being included in this list.
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He wouldn't call, but he, I would say he's not a philosopher.
00:11:01.680
Not exactly a systematic thinker, so he would have to go with the bong rippers.
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Not quite my man, but he's a cool founder of stoicism.
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It was big, what, in the 80s and 90s with Wall Street types.
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Well, look, if we're going to put John Stuart Mill in B tier.
00:11:44.180
What other philosophers could we rank Harry Sisson in with?
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But his work on Eros, on the relation between men and women, which has been recently been published, is actually more impressive.
00:12:03.760
Even when you want to get it out of your mind, it just stays in your mind.
00:12:05.860
You want to spoon out your mind's eye because you actually read those texts.
00:12:09.220
Anyway, if we're going to be fair to Andrew Tate and Ayn Rand, I think we have to put, we can't put Sisson above them.
00:12:21.640
But with his new work on romantic love, maybe he's a young man, maybe he has the potential to rise up.
00:12:31.400
Also, to be fair to Martin Luther, I don't know that he would call himself a philosopher, and he really wasn't, not just with prejudice because of my mackerel-snapping papism.
00:12:41.500
But he's not really a philosopher of Protestantism.
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There are many other more serious thinkers in Protestantism.
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In fact, Hilaire Belloc pointed out, for Martin Luther, Martin Luther was more a political figure.
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You know, the splitting away of the early days of the Protestant Reformation, which is better understood as a revolution, really is Martin Luther gaining favor with German princes.
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German princes cynically maybe using Martin Luther as an excuse to wrest more political power from the Catholic Church.
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So I don't see a lot of systematic thought in Martin Luther.
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Martin Luther contradicts himself throughout his career, and it's not really, Hilaire Belloc makes the point, the real genius thinker of Protestantism is John Calvin.
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So Calvin might, even though I think Calvin's wrong, he might get a higher ranking.
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But in terms of philosophy, not political impact, but philosophy, I'm going to have to say C or F.
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And really, I would say, really, I would have to say F.
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Okay, Plato's back at, I guess we have to put him in S tier.
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Socrates, even though he's not as good as Aristotle.
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But I put Socrates in S tier, and we only really know, we have a sense of Socrates from Plato.
00:14:00.340
So it would seem wrong to put Plato in A tier and Socrates in S tier.
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So Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all get S tier.
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But make no mistake, Aristotle is the best of them.
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So Epicurus, I would be very tempted by Epicureanism if I were not Christian.
00:14:19.860
Epicurus believed that the highest good to be sought in life was pleasure.
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Not merely, Aristotle would say that man seeks happiness.
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And happiness he defines as excellent rational activity done in accordance with virtue.
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That's how he defines it in the Nicomachean Ethics.
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Xeno and Stoicism would say that the highest good to be sought is virtue, which is a little different.
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And Epicurus would say that the highest good to be sought is pleasure.
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So not merely happiness, which results in pleasure, but pleasure itself.
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So the maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
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And so one can imagine this as a kind of degraded hedonism where you're just doing a bunch of drugs and sleeping with hookers and, I don't know, like riding roller coasters for your, just kind of stuffing your face with pizza.
00:15:13.300
But there's a higher-minded Epicureanism, which is that, oh, we're going to listen to the best music, look at the best art, consider the best philosophy.
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That's putting the cart before the horse, I guess.
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It's better, definitely better than some of the other guys, but he's just kind of, kind of goes off.
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And in some ways, maybe I should put him lower because Epicureanism is so tempting.
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Now we're moving back up to, ooh, do we go S-tier?
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Do we go all the, Alistair McIntyre, he's still alive, I think.
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Contemporary philosopher who revived virtue ethics.
00:16:03.360
Is he S-tier or is he, I mean, he's not, he's not himself Aristotle.
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You know, he's really, really good and important.
00:16:18.700
There's a joke I used to know about a horse in a bar and the, the punchline is Descartes before the horse.
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I said it in an interview though, some years ago.
00:16:40.440
That also mistakes how human nature works in the relation of the body to the mind or the soul.
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So, body and soul are inextricably linked here on Earth.
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And Descartes is responsible for a lot of modern philosophical errors.
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So, let's just get that on the table to begin with.
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Though he eventually fell out of favor, I think, with the Nazis.
00:17:24.440
You know, there were a lot of, there were plenty of thinkers who were Nazis.
00:17:32.200
But he made important contributions to political philosophy, to political theology.
00:17:36.960
He's probably most famous for the friend-enemy distinction.
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The politics ultimately comes down to friend and enemy.
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The notion that the sovereign is he who makes the exception.
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So, he's a, anyway, all I'm saying is he, like, look, man, Hitler drank water.
00:17:59.620
So, can we, it's not an indictment of watercolor painters and dog owners.
00:18:03.340
So, let's just, he's at least good airplane duty.
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Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and above them even, St. Thomas Aquinas.
00:18:32.020
This is not man bites dog stuff, but I think it turned out all right.
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