Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

So who were the greatest of the greats? A new poll is available, and its top thirty reads thus: 1. Aristotle 2. Plato 3. Kant 4. Hume 5. Descartes 6. Socrates 7. Locke 8. Wittgenstein 9. Aquinas 10. Leibniz 11. Hobbes 12. Marx 13. J.S. Mill 14. Spinoza 15. Augustine 16. Frege 17. Hegel 18. Nietzsche 19. B. Russell 20. Kierkegaard 21. Berkeley 22. Quine 23. Epicurus 24. Rousseau 25. Kripke 26 Rawls 27. Carnap 28. F. Bacon 29. Bentham 30. D.K. Lewis There were 87 names available to voters, and all 87 were ranked, although the supervisor of the poll, Brian Leiter, highlighted the top 30 I've provided here. A couple of quick points to start, though I'll say more about these results tomorrow. First, I am of course dismayed that William James didn't make the top 30. He came respectably close to making the cut (in the mid 30s out of the 87). But I certainly think he was deserving of higher placement than, say, Russell, Frege, Augustine, or Ba...

https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl That is the cliched "School of Athens" image for a discussion of philosophers, followed by a link to the complete set of questions and data of the survey I excerpted from yesterday. What strikes me is that there are some questions on which nothing remotely approaching consensus exists -- there are almost as many "nominalists" (or those leaning that way) as there are "Platonists," and a sizeable though smaller proportion of "other." Likewise on normative ethics "other" is dominant, yet even that catch-all category is a minority. The Big Two -- deontology and teleology -- are closely split for second/third. Personal identity, too, is a matter of very sharp split, and a matter where "other" wins. Fortunately, the results page (link above) lets one get more granular on "other" when one has a mind to. The most popular "other" answer for Personal Identity is ...