How many rights can one man have, before you call him a man?

ChrisD(RJ) chrisd at russiajournal.com
Fri Apr 5 00:14:58 PST 2002


Justin wrote, in response to my claim that I couldn't think of any "great philosophers" to have arisen under liberal democracy:

Pierce, James, Dewey, Quine, Rawls, Kuhn, Davidson, Wilfrid Sellars, Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault . . . .

OK? ----------- And I say:

Wittgenstein was a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Maybe this is just a matter of taste (I did my Ph.D. work on Heidegger and German Idealism, and on Hannah Arendt and Kierkegaard, and studied a lot of Aristotle, attending a Catholic university as I did), but, with the exception of Wittgenstein, I've never found any of these people terribly impressive, with the partial exception of Mill, who is generally insightful but dull as a rock. Russell was brilliant as a logician but not much else, Sartre is a footnote to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is mildly interesting, Derrida is yet another footnote to Heidegger, and Moore is just obnoxious. I generally have a gut-level hostility toward pragmatism, but that's possibly a matter of personality, though I did like The Varieties of Religious Experience.

In any case, none can hold a candle to Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Spinoza, Kant, or even Husserl, for that matter.

Chris Doss The Russia Journal



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