Why there are not great philosophers like Aristotle or Plato anymore?

Because we live in a world that doesn't value understanding nature and aiming to be a virtuous person. They certainly exist, but they are harder to find just due to how base a lot of peoples' interests are really.

Cemetery Support said:
They were the guys working from scratch. Everything nowadays is either built on their shoulders, or seeks to undo what they have constructed.
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Actually, a lot of their works were based off Socrates and the Presocratics, but they did come up with very original ideas not seen before in the Western canon.
 
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Great Philosophers are almost universally self-important fags who are declared Great by the sycophants of their time and/or idiots who discovered them centuries after their death. a philosopher is just an Ideas Guy. a Great Philosopher is an Ideas Guy with a cult of ball washers. today's Great Philosophers are shitheads like Hasan Piker, or Destiny, or Milo Yiannopoulos, or Jordan Peterson. almost none of them have any redeeming features whatsoever. Aristotle and Plato are similar, except in their time it was (arguably) more about the love of learning rather than soliciting asspats, and there was more room for Ideas Guys to postulate since the Established Science of the day was far less broad and rigorous. so, looking back with the condescension of the modern age, they seem to be less self-serving and more impressive relative to the assumed intelligence of their contemporaries. read their works for yourself, they are not so profound. classical metaphysics, for one, is so far up its own ass as to be nearly incomprehensible.
 
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I'm Retarded? said:
today's Great Philosophers are shitheads like Hasan Piker, or Destiny, or Milo Yiannopoulos, or Jordan Peterson. almost none of them have any redeeming features whatsoever. Aristotle and Plato are similar, except in their time it was (arguably) more about the love of learning rather than soliciting asspats, and there was more room for Ideas Guys to postulate since the Established Science of the day was far less broad and rigorous
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If your post proves anything, it's that there are no "new" philosophers because most people wouldn't understand the ideas expressed.
 
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I'm Retarded? said:
Great Philosophers are almost universally self-important fags who are declared Great by the sycophants of their time and/or idiots who discovered them centuries after their death. a philosopher is just an Ideas Guy. a Great Philosopher is an Ideas Guy with a cult of ball washers.
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This is just false. Most of the great philosophers were not just "idea guys", and to say so just says more about ignorance on your part. Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian Wars, Descartes was a mercenary in the 30 Years War, Wittgenstein fought in the trenches of WW1. Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius were all important political figures. They busied themselves with all sorts of enterprises.
 
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To be a philosopher, you have to think. Society has deemed thinkers dangerous and does all it can from preschool to make sure no one thinks. People who can still think after the gauntlet of the education system, bombardment of media glorifying stupidity, and workplace policy protecting it tend to build cabins and the woods and write manifestos. Those are your modern Platos and Aristotles.
 
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Waifu Denier said:
This is just false. Most of the great philosophers were not just "idea guys", and to say so just says more about ignorance on your part. Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian Wars, Descartes was a mercenary in the 30 Years War, Wittgenstein fought in the trenches of WW1. Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius were all important political figures. They busied themselves with all sorts of enterprises.
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k. I never said they didn't live life. and while their life experiences are part of their ideas, sure, it's ultimately irrelevant to the nature of their legacy as philosophers, which largely consists of attempts to turn their own thoughts into some generalized framework for knowledge, by trying to explain general phenomena or formalize methods of thought. whatever acts they accomplished in life are dust; their ideas are what remain, albeit filtered through the lens of historical interpretation.
 
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As others ITT have expressed, this is kinda like asking why there's no great explorers like Columbus or Marco Polo anymore. The groundbreaking shit they're known for is already done.
People with the same level of insight and drive absolutely do still exist. It's just a lot less interesting to hear about some guy dredging through dense rainforests than it is to hear about the guy who discovered the entire continent that rainforest is on. You care a lot less to listen to some guy who wrote a book detailing his profound new way of seeing the world than you are the people who's work he was building on.
Both are largely relegated to niche interest.
 
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They weren't that great (says someone on the Internet), but they were the first (or one of the first, by common standards) "popular" philosophers introducing """new""" ideas that have had the luck to go down in history.

Throughout millennia, more and more topics have been discussed & analyzed, so the curve of "new interesting unpopular concepts" introduced for humanity to see, has had a tendency of slowing down and peaking.

If you go to some Discord server focused on philosophy, you'll see that a lot is discussed there, there's a lot of opinions, points of views, and applied to a wide range of other fields/disciplines. One of those people in there could be a "great philosopher", but they'll never have the attention Plato has, but to be fair, most ideas now have been dissected to a great extent (unlike thousands of years ago).
 
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Brightstar777 said:
Why there are not great philosophers like Aristotle or Plato anymore?
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They exist, but they're not taught about nor as well known. Hell for all we know, the next great philosopher could be just some guy with a screen name. With that said, I would like to give my opinion. Aristotle is objectively superior to Plato, and the world of forms is by far the most damaging metaphysical idea to ever be comprehended in the history of man.
 
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