The question of who are the fifteen most influential philosophers of all time may not arise at every conversation down at the pub — not outside the circle of Open Culture readers, in any case. But even among non-specialists, it could spark a livelier debate than you might imagine. Names like Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, and Marx are known, after all, even among the general public who’ve never read a page of philosophical text. All of them appear in the million-viewed video from Jaydone History above, which takes its own crack at naming a top fifteen. Its 26 minutes also provide a brief biographical sketch of each one, informative if littered with odd mispronunciations, plus a capsulized sense of these philosophers’ lasting ideas.
In pursuit of truth, Socrates created the questioning method of dialogue that bears his name. Plato, Socrates’ student, advocated for rule by the enlightened and the pursuit of knowledge through the contemplation of pure forms. Rejecting Plato’s method, Aristotle dedicated himself to systematic empirical observation. On the other side of the world, Confucius spread teachings about the cultivation of moral virtue to maintain the social relationships he saw as the basic building blocks of civilizational order, which China eventually adopted as its state philosophy. Back in Europe, Augustine synthesized Christian theology and classical philosophy, laying the groundwork for medieval thought. Thomas Aquinas, too, dedicated himself to a combination of faith and reason, making a suite of oft-cited arguments for the existence of God.
Seeking a foundation of absolutely certain knowledge, René Descartes arrived at self-awareness, famously declaring, “I think, therefore I am” and articulating his eponymous dualistic worldview. Even apart from his work on the nature of knowledge, John Locke’s thoughts on social organization and government live on in Enlightenment-influenced modern democracies even today. David Hume mounted fundamental challenges to established ideas of empiricism, questioning our very notion that future events will mirror past experience. Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the conception of legitimate political authority as arising from the “general will,” a social agreement among free and equal individuals, which turned out to be central to the justifications of the French Revolution. Immanuel Kant worked to bridge the gap between rationalism and empiricism, reconciling the role of both experience and the mind’s physical structure to the formation of knowledge.
Among other concepts, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel defined that of dasein, which encapsulates the human mode of being (and which requires a lifetime spent with his writings to grasp, if even then). A professional journalist and historian, Karl Marx described human history through economic structures and class struggle, and his vision of a perfectly equal society ahead still remains compelling to many. Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” placing the burden of defining morality on man, and specifically a figure he called the Übermensch. Ludwig Wittgenstein took it upon himself to explain the relationship between language and reality with the highest rigor. In the comments, the video’s creator teases a part two, which makes one wonder which philosophers will be included: Spinoza? Heidegger? Sartre? The year and a half it’s taken so far is surely long enough for the narrator to have learned to pronounce them.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
