>
>
>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.
And worked for most of his career in England. Maybe I should have also claimed Marx and Engels for liberal democracy on the same grounds, so I will. They surea s hell couldn;t have done what they did on the contintent. That is why they were in England! Isaiah Berlin was "product" of Russia, and Karl Popper, Carnap, etc. were Viennese too. Does that mean that they didn't become English and American philosophers.
>
>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.
Matter of taste, I think Husserl's an utter bore. As you've gathered, I'm a neopragmatist analytical philosopher in the tradition of Quine, Rawls, and Sellars, wrote my diss with Gibbard and Railton at Michigan on on the materialism reduction of intentional mental states.
I can't imagine how you find JS Mill dull. I think he rocks. Russell's early philosophical work--not just the logic-is magnificent, but you have to be an analytical philosopher to get excited about Logical Atomism.
As for the list of the biggies, didn't Whitehead say we are all footnotes to Plato? You left Humes and Descartes off your list of biggies, as well as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Leibniz. JS Mill certainly belongs on that list. I would put Wittgenstein, Heidegger, a nd Dewey on it too.
jks
>
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