[lit-ideas] Philosophical League Tables
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2012 11:25:35 +0900
On the *Savage Minds *blog, Matt Thompson has discovered something he finds
interesting.
The other day I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Wittgenstein when I came
> across a claim that piqued my curiosity, “In 1999 his posthumously
> published Philosophical Investigations (1953) was ranked as the most
> important book of 20th Century philosophy.” The embedded citation led me to
> this–
> Lackey, Douglas P. 1999. “What Are the Modern Classics? The Baruch Poll of
> Great Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.” The Philosophical Forum. 30 (4).
> Lo and behold, it’s a journal article. In Wikipedia! It just so happens
> that my library has access to The Philosophical Forum, so I got the pdf to
> check it out. Call it productive procrastination, but I love digression.
> I’m like a kid pulling a thread out of the sand. Where does this lead?
> It was Y2K and Lackey had read a bunch of Best of the Century-type lists
> and had the idea to do one for philosophers. So he emailed 4,000 philosophy
> professors and received 414 replies to his survey. The article includes
> separate rankings for most important book and most important article, with
> light commentary on each entry. It’s quite an enjoyable article, worthy of
> an extended coffee break or unwinding at the end of the day.
> He describes the survey methodology:
> We asked respondents to name the five most important books in philosophy
> in the twentieth century, and also the five most important articles. Giving
> five choices permits discretion, but five is a small enough number to force
> voters to choose their selections carefully. Since we were interested in
> judgments of quality, we instructed respondents to make their choices on
> the basis of intrinsic merit, not on the basis of causal influence. (By the
> causal influence standard, Mein Kampf might be the most important book of
> the twentieth century.)
> …
> We asked respondents to list their choices in order of preference. On this
> score we had little compliance… We decided not to use any point system for
> weighting the results according to preference. We did keep track, however
> of which book was listed first on each ballot, and used that indication to
> break ties.
> Lackey notes that only twenty five books got eleven votes or more, which
> if he took in more than 400 survey responses means many, many books only
> got a few votes at most. In other words, there’s a long tail on this not
> represented in the rankings below. The survey results, Lackey’s top
> twenty-five:
> Total votes/ Total ranked 1st…..Author, Title
>
> 179/ 68….. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
> 134/ 51….. Heidegger, Being and Time
> 131/ 21….. Rawls, Theory of Justice
> 77/ 24….. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
> 64/ 27….. Russell & Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
> 63/ 7….. Quine, Word and Object
> 56/ 5….. Kripke, Naming and Necessity
> 51/ 3….. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions
> 38/ 4….. Sartre, Being and Nothingness
> 34/ 16….. Whitehead, Process and Reality
> 30/ 4….. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic
> 25/ 5….. Dewey, Experience and Nature
> 23/ 0….. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
> 19/ 0….. Moore, Principia Ethica
> 18/ 1….. James, Pragmatism tied with MacIntyre, After Virtue
> 17/ 9….. Husserl, Logical Investigations
> 17/ 5….. Husserl, Ideas
> 17/ 2….. de Beauvoir, Second Sex
> 14/ 2….. Hart, Concept of Law
> 14/ 0….. Ryle, Concept of Mind
> 13/ 1….. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast
> 12/ 3….. Gadamer, Truth and Method
> 12/ 2….. Parfit, Reasons and Persons
> 11/ 5….. Russell, Problems of Philosophy tied with Quine, From a Logical
> Point of View and Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery
Thinking of favorite topics of conversation on Lit-Ideas, I note
1. that we seem to agree with the general consensus that Wittgenstein is
very, very important
2. that we are constantly discussing only a very small subset of the
authors listed here
3. that Popper barely makes the cut, in a tie for 24th place, and Grice
does not appear at all
I also find myself wondering if there has been anything written since 1999,
the year when this survey was conducted, that would find its way into a
top-25 that included the first decade of the new millennium—or even be a
possible entry for a similar survey done, in say, 2049.
Comments?
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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