Topics Philosophers

Question In the past in places such as Greece, there were philosophers and scholars like Socrates, Plato, etc. Do we have any modern-day philosophers whose works are as highly regarded as the ancient ones? And were the works of the ancient philosophers, when they were alive, not regarded as highly as they are now?

Accepted:
October 16, 2005

Comments

This is a fun parlor game. I've often played it with friends andcolleagues. "Which philosophers active in the latter half of thetwentieth century will have their work read two hundred years fromnow?" The question can mean different things, and it's obviouslyimpossible to know. Our present sense of what was important in the workof the last sixty years or so may turn out to have been distorted byour own current interests. And things change. I've been told that ahundred years ago, Berkeley wasn't taken at all seriously. But he'sbeen a minor member of the canon for a while now. And people who doserious history of philosophy often read the work of many figures theywould themselves regard as "minor", because it helps them to understandthe environment in which philosophy was then being done. But it's clearenough what the intention of the question is: Are there philosophersaround now who have some claim to be members of the pantheon, up therewith Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant?

With all ofthose caveats in place, there is one philosopher from the last sixtyyears in the "Anglo-American" or "Analytic" tradition I think we canpretty safely say will be taken seriously in two hundred years: JohnRawls. Rawls's work is of enormous importance, in so far as it offers asweeping conception of political justification that fully withstandscomparision with the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, who are themost visible contractarians that preceded Rawls.

I don't knowof anyone else on whom I'd be confident betting, though I think I wouldbet that there will be other people from this period whose work isstill taken seriously in 2205. If we held a vote, I think Willard VanOrman Quine would get some votes, as would Noam Chomsky (and here Ihave in mind Chomsky's philosophical reflections on mind and languagerather than his political writings). Another person who has had enormous influence, and not just in philosophy, is Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic in several different fields. But Kuhn's philosophical vision was not broad enough to make him comparable to the members of the canon.

Regarding your lastquestion, I don't know the answer. But there are examples of peoplewhose work was not highly regarded in their own lifetimes and now is.One would be Gottlob Frege. Frege's work was largely ignored by hisGerman colleagues, and it certainly was not regarded as having anythinglike the importance it is nowadays ascribed. Interest in Frege was keptalive, for a long time, by a small but important group of people whoknew it well: Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and others. But it wasreally only as translations of Frege's work into English started tobecome available in the 1950s and 1960s that his work became knownwidely, and many philosophers nowadays would happily install a bust ofFrege alongside those of the other Dead White Men mentioned above.