Most Influential Philosopher
Most influential Philosopher
I will restrict this question to recent philosophers. It not an easy question, because influence is hard to measure or estimate; and it varies over time, sometimes quite dramatically. It is certainly not me, not by a long chalk. There are the usual suspects, whom I do not need to mention. After giving it some thought, I am going to nominate Jerry Fodor. I think he overturned Wittgensteinian orthodoxy, or what remained of it. He destroyed behaviorism (preceded by Chomsky). For my money, Saul Kripke comes second: his influence was no doubt massive, but he didn’t destroy a whole school of thought—and Fodor kept at it, relentlessly. He also changed the way philosophers write (not always for the best). David Lewis had some influence, but it wasn’t so widespread. So did John Rawls, but it was limited to political philosophy. Thomas Nagel re-introduced depth to philosophy, and a concern with traditional problems. All these people had have had undeniable influence, but I think Fodor stands out, if not by a wide margin. I wonder what other people think.
The entry on Fodor in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://iep.utm.edu/fodor/ — speaks of his “enormous influence on virtually all parts of the literature in the philosophy of mind since 1960, Fodor’s work had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences. In the 1960s, along with Hilary Putnam, Noam Chomsky, and others, Fodor presented influential criticisms of the behaviorism.” Part of this is quoted in the second sentence of the Wikipedia entry on Fodor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor#CITEREFIEP_Fodor
He is hard to beat.
As you say, influence is not always for the better. It seems like a question that might get the person most responsible for the formation of the conventional view, and some might think that’s a dubious honor. As for Fodor, I’m in no position to judge whether that assessment is true, but he always struck me as somebody who, if he were trying to be a poet, he would be called a poetaster; I don’t know if there’s a corresponding term for philosophers. Could there have been some “sociological” influence involved? You get a better question when you turn to Nagel, about getting people on the right track. As an example of influence, I might offer Michael Friedman in philosophy of science, but that’s just a narrow area, not overall.
I see there is such a word as “philosophaster”, a “pretender or dabbler in philosophy”. This raises the question os to whether we are all philophasters to some degree (some more than others).
IMHO Kripke, Nagel, Searle, Putnam, Quine were the most influential among recent English speaking analytic philosophers (Influential good!). Fodor was also influential but he empirically lost, together with Chomsky, to the associationist/connectionist camp (the representatives of this camp were disdainfully called Auntie and at times Grandma and sometimes Psmith).
Current natural language processing LLMs are modelled on earlier neural networks that both Fodor and Chomsky argued just could not do the language processing job. Fodor, like D Lewis, was presupposing the truth of materialism and never bothered to argue for it. Not a philosophical attitude…
Somehow the auto-correct has omitted the unequal sign I placed between Influential and Good trying to emphasize the difference between the two…
Would you care to rank your chosen few?
My ranking of their influence on philosophers would be:
1 Kripke 2 Quine 3 Nagel 4 Searle 5 Putnam. I’d also mention Nozick but like Rawls his influence was limited to political philosophy.
Influence outside philosophy would be ranked differently with Searle a clear number 1 for his impact on behavioural and social sciences. The others don’t come close and Nozick would become number 2 for his big influence on the libertarian movement especially in the US.
I rather agree, though Quine’s influence has waned considerably. I think Searle was the biggest name outside of philosophy (he was relatively easy for non-philosophers to understand).
It’s funny (i.e., strange). Given the wider interest, somebody ought to do a historical critique of, for example, Speech Acts, bringing out, on the one hand, what Searle was actually trying to accomplish there, and the interesting potential, still unrealized, for lines of inquiry (including a whole field of a “pragmatics that could be”), and on the other hand the reasons Searle failed to achieve those aims. The expression was clear, but the thinking was muddled. The popular reception mainly took up the idea of illocutionary acts, but the part of his aim that had originality and some potential had to do with what he called the “propositional act” and what he thought of as “reference”. But he utterly failed to identify what a proposition is, what reference is, or how they are possible under his approach. Again, the first sentence in his book is, “How do words relate to the world?” He didn’t get anywhere toward an answer to that question. But still, the book raised interesting questions.
Quine’s influence is indeed passe. There are many reasons for that besides the usual change of guard. I think his ideological preference of standard first order logic over other approaches, his acceptance of physics as queen of sciences (plus some math), his behaviourism and austere “desert landscape” personal preferences are not exactly a lasting philosophical magnet.
I quite agree: a lot of his philosophy is based on personal preferences.
For those of us with a [narrow?] interest in the semantics of reference, Kripke.
Maybe David Kaplan as sidekick (also Keith Donnellan).
@Ed Buckner:
Just out of curiosity, since you say you have a narrow interest in it, when you use the term ‘reference’ in the phrase “semantics of reference”, what exactly are you talking about? I’m interested in the phenomenon of reference, but I never found Kripke to have much useful to say about it. A little bit, but not a lot. (This relates to admin’s earlier post, “A new theory of knowledge”.)
Specifically, the semantics of proper names. Kripke established (decisively in my view) that proper names cannot be disguised descriptions.
I hate to burst your bubble but behaviorism is alive and well, if not in letter then certainly in spirit. Pick a philosophical theory (any theory), dig a bit, and you’ll find a black box at the center. Alas, Fodor’s only lasting contribution will be the death of the aggressive Q&A.
This is rubbish: clearly behaviorism is no longer the orthodox view in psychology and philosophy, though some residue remains in some quarters (and it isn’t completely misguided). Your comment about Fodor is ridiculous.
It’s no longer the orthodox view *by the letter*. But by the spirit of behaviorism — reductionism, naive simplicity, and comfort with black boxes — it’s never been more influential.
That’s not behaviorism in letter or spirit: behaviorism is about behavior not reductionism or oversimplification or even black boxes (there is something in them).
I may be myopic, but I’d say William Lane Craig. The revitalization of philosophy of religion was begun just before him, but because of his contributions it has reached a massive scale in scholarly and popular terms.
It just shows how little influence equals merit.
While judging “most influential philosopher” of the 20th century is hazardous and somewhat subjective, I believe I’d still hold out for Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein loomed like a shadow over three movements without really being a “member” of any of them: the logical positivist one, the natural (“ordinary”) language one, and the historicist movement in history and philosophy of science.
I never got around to studying Jerry Fodor, though, so I missed whatever critique he made, probably other recent things (too busy trying to survive, for one thing).
He was influential in the twentieth century but not now. No one is much influenced by him these days.
Nagel stands out as the most influential because he makes intelligibility fundamental. We cannot understand a world that gives rise to consciousness, reason, and objective thought if we see these as just accidental byproducts of an indifferent reality. If reason genuinely belongs in the world, then the world must be structured so that reason’s place is not a coincidence. The point generalizes: modality, objectivity, normativity, and manifestation all require a basis that allows for intelligibility from within. The real choice is between seeing intelligibility as a lucky accident or as something made possible by the world’s own order.
This is more of an argument for Nagel’s importance not his influence. Influence is a sociological matter, and this view of Nagel’s isn’t widely adopted. His influence is more due to his work in ethics and philosophy of mind.