[lbo-talk] Intellectuals: The Leo-conservatives -

[Jon Johanning]

As a one-time philosophy student, I would say that the logical 
positivists did in fact have much more influence on *professional 
philosophers* than either Marcuse or Strauss, but not much in the 
general public, except indirectly via their notion of scientific method, 
as Andie pointed out. OTOH, said professional philosophers eventually 
discarded their concept of scientific method as way too unsophisticated 
to account even for the physical sciences. If the social scientists 
adopted positivist ideas and stuck with them, it was only because they 
weren't very philosophically sophisticated.

If you are talking about influence in the general public, I agree that 
Marcuse beat all of them (in the '60s and '70s, anyway), but M. Scott 
Peck swamped him, I'm sure. And the authors of that "Left Behind" series 
(what were their names?) are still the champs, by far. :-)

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
_____________________________
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too 
dark to read. - Groucho Marx