[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical League Tables
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2012 08:15:08 -0230
This is just silly.
Walter O
Quoting John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>:
> 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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