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/