Your Favorite Philosopher

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I've always loved Camus and Nietzsche. The Plague is easily my favorite novel. I just started reading Kierkegaard and absolutely hate that it took me this long to pick him up.

Ayn Rand's works are a pretty good read if you can look past all that Atlas Shrugged/Fountainhead trash.

On a side note, one of my favorite parts about Nietzsche is watching slapfights over how "wrong" Kaufmann translations supposedly are.
 
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Torn between Schopenhauer and Locke. And I'd never admit to it in public, but some of what Oswald Spengler has to say resonates with me. Once you work through the rambling nonsense.

If I had to pick one, I suppose Schopenhauer would be it. He wins simply by virtue of the fact that he has yet to be discovered this century by a cringelord like Sargon of Akkad, nor used by Nazis and neo-Nutzis the way Spengler has.
 
GreenJacket said:
Max Stirner:
Created an ideology based on selfishness and got a-logged by Marx.
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The philosophy of selfishness was already developed by the Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu in 400BC. He was also some kind of proto-Libertarian and hence was completely at odds with the Confucian tradition with its emphasis on discipline and hierarchy. Mencius called him an animal. Very little of his writings survived, yet he was reputed to have a lot of followers in his heyday.
 
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Chanakya is pretty underrated, mostly because his works were only rediscovered just over 100 years ago. Think an Indian Aristotle, with a hint of well-intentioned Machiavellian thinking, and you have a decent picture.
 
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Epictetus, whose thought was not entirely original, but had been reflected from those before him (as Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus), then carried, and left as discourses. The style of delivery has affected me like nothing else in that school, and the Enchiridion was the text that convinced me that I could devote myself to studying anything in the first place.
 
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Arctic said:
Hot take: Existentialism is trash. Can anyone tell me how Nietzsche's ideas are any different from blind power-worship?
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Nietzsche is about coming to terms with life.

Ideally, you would live your life so that, if you had to live if over and over again, Groundhog Day style, you would be perfectly happy.

Acquiring power for its own sake is a fools errand. Using what power you possess to make yourself content, really content, rather than coming up with a lot of bull shit excuses (I'm too fat, no one likes me, the church won't let me...) or projecting your happiness onto other things (I'd be happy if I owned an x-box, if that girl loved me, if I was the president...), is hard as fuck.

There's more to it than that, but that's the cigarette break phone posting version.
 
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In the past century: Nelson Goodman (for the New Riddle of Induction), Trenton Merricks (for formulating a viable eliminativist mereology), Jonathan Haidt (debatable as to whether it's philosophy, but I consider moral foundations theory to be truly a game-changer), and Peter Gärdenfors (barely anybody knows about him, but his theory of 'conceptual space' as the representationalist medium is a powerful tool that's allowed me to integrate the findings of the other three into a holistic theory).

My favourite of all time: Hobbes (for Leviathan), with the next-favourite being Plato (for breadth of work combined with a strong literary component).

Diogenes is an inspiration, but since he left no coherent body of work I always saw him more as a performance artist (Sam Hyde is a proto Diogenes).
 
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Wallace said:
Any love for Voltaire?
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Very fun writer and commentator, but I don't think he can be considered a philosopher in the way you can consider Locke, Hobbes, or Rousseau to be philosophers. He doesn't leave behind a corpus of work aside from some of his letters where he makes a concerted epistemological, metaphysical, political, or moral argument.
 
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