John McCreery wrote
On the /Savage Minds /blog, Matt Thompson has discovered something he finds interesting.
Thompson says this.
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.
Some thoughts. Although the Philosophical Investigations is certainly a book worth keeping, its coming first in this poll would these days indeed be a function of its intrinsic merit, and not (or no longer) of its influence.
The North American Wittgenstein Society concerns itself only with the 'later' Wittgenstein, out of the belief that e.g. the Investigations is no longer much written about in the journals, although the Tractatus is. The NAWS publishes in its journal only articles which, in virtue of their appearing, are meant to remedy that.
Though the Tractatus appears to be much admired, my hunch is that it's admired more in the way that Proust is admired at cocktail parties; and that would seem true of many of the books listed, especially perhaps Being and Nothingness and After Virtue. After Virtue is, I think, mostly the Nicomachean Ethics run through the Cuisinart. That it should appear above The Logic of Scientific Discovery, doesn't give me much confidence in the whole enterprise.
What reduces the list to gossip enshrined is that Frege does not appear on it. In his Begriffschrift, he developed a second order predicate calculus which made possible what's now called 'modern logic.' Before Frege, there was Aristotle. After him, there was, well, logic. His Grundgesetze der Arithmetik was, although ultimately unsuccessful, an important contribution to 'logicism,' (the view that logic is the foundation of all mathematics, which Russell was trying to develop in Principia Mathematica).
These are personal gripes, but I would think most philosophers share them, and this leads me to wonder how 400-some responses out of 4000 solicitations could be a representative sample of philosophers. Of course, a representative sample of philosophers would have to be determined. By other other philosophers. Right.
John, thanks for waking me from my dogmatic slumbers to complain about something.
Robert —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
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.
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