The Wrongest Philosopher

Aristotle is the original meme philosopher and ruined everything

I don't pay attention so much to whether philosophers are "right" or "wrong" anymore (not that I'm saying these categories aren't useful), but to whether those philosophers are interesting, i.e. whether they offer a perspective or conceptual tools which can help me see my blind spots, help my own understanding evolve and become more sophisticated through the dialectic...

I guess I would say Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex was literally the most boring book I've ever suffered, and the most obviously a product of a mediocre mind. It only got published because she had connections through more capable and more (rightly) famous thinkers such as Sartre (for obvious reasons). Her answer for why sexism always existed in prosperous and strong civilizations was essentially a conspiracy theory, and that through the power of bien-pensant (muh existence precedes essence bullshit) women everywhere should rise up and overcome their gender roles through intellectual transcendence.

I don't have a problem with feminism per se (I do enjoy Butler and apply her ideas in my own thought), but there are a lot of mediocre thinkers associated with that school who get by on being a woman rather than through being interesting.

*fixed

tfy

>What philosopher was the most wrong, about the most things, in the most importantly wrong, bad, incorrect ways?
If you ask these questions you will never understand any philosopher. ]

Pyrrho - lol

NOT

Plato was seriously a fucking retard.

Durr what if everything is a big sphere existing in anuddah world durrr.

I'm fucking glad Aristotle came along and BTFOd that fucking retard.

L Ron Hubbard, duh

This

I think a lot of people would say Otto Weininger

Aristotle -arrogant presumptuous retard, believed in a bunch of nonsense (teleology, final causes, dismissed infinity without logic to prove god as first cause, essence/matter distinction, essence accident distinction, faggot ethics based on moderation instead of extremism and edginess)

Others are aquinas (a more retarded aristotle, also unoriginal as a cows dick)
Plato (although hes atleast poetical and trippy) Descartes was a disgusting moron as well. Rand.

Probably Schopenhauer.

this

Kant, started the entire shit slide that is Continental Phil

>Sophists
An insanely famous rapper released a bunch of diss tapes of a less known rapper and you think this signifies the less famous rapper is shit?
Nah, on the contrary.

But, generally, OP, you are using too many buzzwords. "Factual incorrectness of ideas"- is this like Hegel but after two dabs of positivism?
It's like you're trying to ask which philosopher was most un-sciency and wrong about sciency things. Then the answer is obvious- yea, basically any Greek philosopher of nature ever had (from our point of view) hilarious misconceptions about biology, medicine, physics or anatomy. Then again it's doubtful whether such parts of philosophic texts can even be considered philosophy- it's more like primordial natural science. Which, of course, had some hick-ups in its earliest days.

TL;DR: philosophy is never wrong

>only got published because she had connections through more capable and more (rightly) famous thinkers
>Her answer for why sexism always existed in prosperous and strong civilizations was essentially a conspiracy theory
>who get by on being a woman rather than through being interesting

...

>I don't have a problem with feminism per se

ugh, do you even realize the irony of what you are saying

Graham Harman is pretty fucking wrong.

thales

>]

> Her answer for why sexism always existed in prosperous and strong civilizations was essentially a conspiracy theory

Congratulations, that's the most facile interpretation of SS I've ever seen. Her argument is a logical follow on to the existential world view and no more a conspiracy than anything in Being and Nothingness.

And why are you sucking Sartre's dick when you say existence precedes essence is bullshit? That's the very core of his philosophy.

You are one dumb motherfucker!

Lol calm down SciCuck. The jury is out on that one. Though he did make philo more masturbatory (as if that was a possibility).

Probably Aristotle, factually. But hey he did the best with what he had. I think bits and pieces of their thought are valuable, but both Smith and Marx were pretty fad off from what factually happens/needs to happen when you offer a set-in-stone prescription for socio-economic ordering. Both are ideologically responsible for the oppression and death of countless people, so pretty big fuck ups id say.

You are unbelievably a dumbfuck

Adorno was among the most right.

Right or wrong, I thought Sex and Character was brilliant given the entire scope of the work. At the very least it presents radically different ways of looking at things.

Plato, St Augustine, any rationalist, Kant, Parmenides, Xenophanes

>I don't pay attention so much to whether philosophers are "right" or "wrong" anymore

Then why are you continuing to read philosophy, as it sounds like you are still doing.

Very dumb posts, and dumb, presumably unique affirmations. It is depressing to think that three distinct people can so quickly agree that the /content of a philosophical text's ideas/ is among its least important attributes, which is what your very different statement does eventually imply.

It goes like this. Let me take a guess at your thought process which motivates this statement and the agreements. For you, philosophers are a train of historical figures who say xyz, and are "interesting" as cultural figures. As such, you might read them as a sort of entertainment, or for historical insight, or even for a nice turn of phrase. And one can even be honest about this - after all, I myself started the thread "for the sake of amusement", as I said. /But at some point, if one cares about the content of philosophical ideas at all, then one ought to begin comparing them, ranking them, judging them in some way shape manner or form./

For you, some sperg (me) who comes along and naively asks "but which ones are wrong?" (and by the same token, which ones are not wrong) has committed a faux pas. Silly boy, the point is (/never/) whether the ideas are actually right, wrong, or at some place on a scale of misguidedness. To even ask is to miss the point, as you've said. No, the point is only ever to get a bit of history and cultural context. Who takes any of these people seriously, anyway. We have a contemporary default worldview that we can uncritically fall back into once we're done with this book. In other words, for you, the point is not to read for the plot, but for the prose, which is where my original conceit comes back in.

Except that the "plot" is of course terribly important to large numbers of people. I'm given to understand that there are many Catholics who are quite fond of what Aquinas actually said. And I'll spare you the details on the historical importance of the content of Marxs' ideas, which as we know were taken quite seriously by large groups of people, with dubious results.

No, judging the content of ideas, building a personal view of them, comparing them, even identifying philosophers who seem to you to have been the most misguided, even once you allow that they are also historical figures and that they must be read on their own terms - that is /exactly/ how to understand philosophy.

/pure fucking autism/

All of them.

Stirner.

Funny, this is how I feel about Kant.

>D E S C A R T E S
lol no

>ideologically responsible for the oppression and death of countless people

this joke gets funnier every time i read it

Go fuck yourself.

>he thinks the self is the most primary entity

thales was magic, you're going to get rained on.

>Deficient morality - Sade is an obvious example.
Sade's not that hard to understand so I'm going to be kind and assume you haven't read him.

kek

>t. still sore i'm never right when a schopenhauer reader is around
it's a thread about who's wrong not who hurt your butt the most.

Unironically?

Wittgenstein.

Ironically?

Hegel.

>people saying Aristotle and Plato were morons

Find another hobby guys.

Aristotle was afraid of homeless people beating him at proverbs and Plato was a prancing lala homo man who re-wrote half the shit that happened because he couldn't cope with Socrates not wanting his ass.

>ends philosophy
>no, he's wrong, antinatalism is slave morality! Embrace the absurd!

Please stop

>antinatalism
>pragmatic

>if you don't have sex you spontaneously combust

There's no such thing as stopping

>ends philosophy
>just don't fuck guys, c'mon it'll be good trust me.

>Rand
>philosopher

Maybe someone like Aquinas? Or one of the Presocratics?

i always preferred cont to an my dude, seemed more grounded in humanity. You think your logic problems will solve the tougher questions, fuck off

the toughest questions are beyond science thats what makes it philosophy

but humanity sucks

which is why schoppy is kant's true heir, not a reason for kant to be wrong though he is wrong in places

>the toughest questions are beyond science thats what makes it philosophy
and philosophy has answered jack shit

Kant. Immanuel "Fuck reality" Kant.

>humeian feel guy detected
your reality deserves to get fucked it might like it

I don't see the problem

>tfw aquinas couldn't have lived in the mid-20th century

> Immanuel "I bet most of them don't even understand what 'reality' means in my system" Kant.

Repair'd.

Immanuel von "u wot m8" Kant

>teleology is nonsense
>Doesn't understand that a causal series ordered per se necessarily must terminate at a first cause.

You're kidding, right? Read some metaphysics. I can understand disagreeing with these arguments, but you clearly don't understand what you're rejecting.

The reason?

>>Doesn't understand that a causal series ordered per se necessarily must terminate at a first cause.

So what explains the causality of that supposed first cause? That is, what explains its causing this determinate effect as opposed to some other determinate effect (say a universe with human life rather than a universe with only non-human species)?

Because if a cause were absolutely first, then that would seem to imply that nothing has determined this cause to act in any particular way - no prior cause has necessitated it to produce a determinate effect. So it seems like the effect of this first cause will be completely indeterminate, totally random.

> The first cause is determined by its own nature to act in the way it does.

But then the same problem seems to attach to this inherent nature - if nothing caused it to be the way it is, if it is absolutely undetermined, then its just a random original state, and there was nothing stopping it from being totally different from the way it happens to be.

The point: it seems like the concept of a "first cause" doesn't really help us to understand how the chain of causes and effects shows the particular determination that is does, rather than some other conceivable historical trajectory - and it also doesn't say anything special for this first cause (if someone wants to attribute wisdom or moral respectability to it), since this first cause could just as easily had a different or opposite nature.

The argument shows that an uncaused cause must exist. In principle an essentially ordered causal series is impossible without it (an accidentally ordered causal series could in principle exist without a first cause). The "what caused God?" objection is missing the point. I'd suggest reading some Aristotelian or Thomist metaphysics if you want to understand the argument in depth. Edward Feser is a good resource for this.

Also the idea that the divine attributes (like goodness, omnipotence, etc) are just assumed arbitrarily is wrong. People like Aquinas and Aristotle spend a significant amount of time arguing that the first cause must have these attributes.

I don't think your post really gives any explicit defenses - it reads to me more like "no, that's not accurate - just read these people and you'll see." But I'm more interested in *your* explicit reasons.

> an essentially ordered causal series is impossible without it

I guess my question is about the supposed essence of this order. What explains why this essence is the way it is, as opposed to some other way? And if no other way is conceivable, what explains that sole conceivability of the first cause's essence, that absence of any other alternatives? If you say "the first cause's essence just *is* this particular way, which explains the causal series of our particular universe," then it seems like that's just a non-answer that could be given by an intelligence in any universe, even if their universe contained, say, much more suffering than ours. "This is just the way things are, because the first cause couldn't have been any other way" is a response that can be given in *any* situation, so it doesn't seem explanatorily powerful.

> Also the idea that the divine attributes (like goodness, omnipotence, etc) are just assumed arbitrarily is wrong.

Why?? Maybe your preferred thinkers have given arguments, but how would *you* present those arguments, if you think they're sound?

Again: If the first cause's attributes aren't determined to be in a particular way by anything else, what stops them from being arbitrary?

Max Stirner.

Stirner or Schopenhauer

Only because I have never read them and they've never come up in any other philosophers I've read. Sure, Nietzsche talks about Schopenhauer often, but I feel I gain nothing if I read him.

Shit threads like these about philosophers "BTFOing" another philosopher don't help either.

I wonder if these responses are largely just reflexes against Stirner and Schopenhauer gaining memecurrency on Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums, irrespective of any faults or merits these thinkers actually had (especially since these condemnatory posts don't contain any reasons in their defense).

I'm the no stirner/schopenhauer guy.

Yes exactly. I am being prejudice, I admit it. I'm not sure where either fits in to the canon of philosophy. Maybe one of these days someone will prove me wrong. Philosophy takes a lot of time to really read and understand. I'm not going to waste my time when it comes to it.

The only thing that interests me in Schopenhauer is that Melville read him.

>No, the point is only ever to get a bit of history and cultural context

This is where the edifice of your argument falls apart. For the assumption being made by those anons is not that philosophy is a purely historical pursuit (but I'll suggest that it is that, anyway) but that the way philosophy is practiced is not inherently "progressive," nor is it "evolutionary," in the sense of the possibilities of "wrong turns" made by the writers of "bad content." on the contrary, the assumption being made is that philosophy consists of so many sedimented "re-readings," in which either the texts in more explicit cases, or merely the "problematics" in the more implicit cases, of past philosophers are re-read, rearranged, and recycled to produce something new, which, regardless of your epistemological position, must retain some value of "truth," at least at the level of appearance, for it is, no matter how sloppily conducted based on a reinterpretation of a real text or problem. and it is here, with the problem of the reality of the appearance, that your argument really must jump through hoops to avoid the inevitably historical conclusion: for it is impossible except in the most Berkleyan of idealisms to ignore the fact that the standards of hermeneutics, and even of logic, are historically determined (however it is you chose to define this is a matter for theory, not philosophy), and thus, with the realization that so too must the readings of texts and problems which those hermeneutics and logics yield up must be determined in a symptomatic way by that same history, we are forced to conclude that the "content" of philosophy is less an indicator of truth in any platonic sense, but rather "the truth of the times," the particular character of intellectual life unique to the lifeworld out of which it emerged.

in that sense i would answer your question in the op by suggesting that the wrongest philosophers are usually the best, for the constitute the most violent rejections of this inexorable logic of determination, in such a way as to every the more radiantly prove the thesis. the untimely Nietzsche becomes in this perspective a good candidate.

I was a bit busy when I posted that last response. So the idea of an essentially ordered causal series is a series where all the later elements in the series depend on a first element. The example given by Aquinas is a person's hand moving a stick which moves a stone. The stone's movement at every moment depends on the person with the stick. Should the person drop the stick, the movement stops. Of course, the causality doesn't stop there. The hand moves due to the contraction of muscles, which move due to nerve impulses etc. This kind of series can't regress to infinity, since each element in the series derives its causal power from something else from outside it. It would be like expecting an infinitely long paintbrush to paint a picture or expecting an infinitely long train of passenger carriages to leave the station without a locomotive.

Now an accidentally ordered causal series can go off to infinity. An example of this would be a family's genealogy. Once a father gives birth to his son, he can die and the son has the ability to beget his son without relying on his father.

You seem to think God is some really powerful being in this universe. That's a wrong-headed modern way of thinking about God. Instead, classical theism holds that God is not a being, but He is instead subsistent being itself. This is because if he were just another being, his existence would need to be explained by another cause, and we are back at the infinite regress problem.

As for the arguments about the divine attributes, I can give you a taste, but the full effect can't be given in a Veeky Forums post. The first cause is clearly the source of all things if you assume that Aquinas's arguments are true (you may not accept these arguments, but I just want to show you that some classical ideas about God emerge from the metaphysical arguments for His existence). As the source of all things, all good things must come from this entity. An entity cannot give that which it doesn't itself posses. This is how we can attribute goodness to God. Of course an objection to this is "but he's also the source of all evil!" It's a pretty good argument, but the response is that evil has no metaphysical existence in and of itself. Instead, evil is just a privation of goodness.

Similarly, as first cause, things receive their power from this being. Something cannot give power if it does not itself contain that power. It then makes sense to refer to the first cause as the source of all power or omnipotent. This is just a start. In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas painstakingly lays out the consequences of his arguments for God's existence.

iCringed

Aristotle was bad at science

> I was a bit busy when I posted that last response.

No worries.

> So the idea of an essentially ordered causal series is a series where all the later elements in the series depend on a first element.

This seems like the notion of vertical causation, in which the movement from potentiality to actuality requires *at every moment* the agency of one and the same cause; this would be the rationale behind Aquinas' first way.

> Now an accidentally ordered causal series can go off to infinity.

This seems like the notion of horizontal causation, where the reduction of potentiality to actuality does not require the persistence of one and the same original cause - but the causal series can continue even after the exhaustion of the priori cause's causal power, like the pushing force of the first domino in a line.

But I still don't see how this distinction addresses my question. Using either notion of causality, the question remains: what explains why the first cause has this particular causal power, that makes it possible for it to bring about this determinate effect? What, if anything, could explain the ability of a first cause to sustain every moment of *this* universe's existence, in such a way that *this* series of effects, sub-causes, and further effects follows from that first cause? What explains the fact that *this* universe followed from that first cause, rather than some other universe? That is, what explains the fact that the essence of the first cause implied that the existence of *this* universe would follow from it, rather than some other conceivable universe?

Because if, in seeking for an explanation, we can't point to anything apart from this first cause, then it seems like this first cause is totally unexplained - it seems like its action, its essence, is totally arbitrary, since we can give no account of it.

> You seem to think God is some really powerful being in this universe.

Not necessarily - my point is that even if the first cause acts as some supposedly non-physical, beyond-the-universe principle of explanation, it's *still* an unsatisfactory explanation, because it leaves the explanation of its own essence undetermined (in fact, since it's a first cause, the explanation of its own essence is in principle non-determin*able*) - thus random.

>That's a wrong-headed modern way of thinking about God. Instead, classical theism holds that God is not a being, but He is instead subsistent being itself. This is because if he were just another being, his existence would need to be explained by another cause, and we are back at the infinite regress problem.

I guess my point is that I don't see how the classical theist position avoids the problem; even if the first cause is not a physical being, but is rather the *ground* of being, this ground still presents itself as explanatorily powerful because it has some determinate essence, from which follows this universe's determinate causal series; but if that original essence can't be explained, then it merely presumes a degree of explanatory power that it can't warrant, even in principle. "It just is" isn't a satisfactory answer - so any completely satisfactory answer, theistic or otherwise, isn't to be expected.

>Was Cioran "wrong"?
Please explain this part to me.

This is a very interesting reply, thank you. It has many layers, which can be taken in their turn.

The point of the text of your post is to somehow negate what I wrote above , where I generally insist that philosophers should in principle be "ranked by quality" in the course of learning philosophy. A series of very telling things happen over the course of your own post, however, and for the rest we must entertain three basic possibilities:

1) you are an educated person who is genuinely conversant with philosophy, or
2) you are having some sort of a troll, or
3) (most likely) a third blend is also possible: you might actually know and understand the vocabulary of modern western philosophy, and be amusing yourself harmlessly via this post by throwing out "expensive vocabulary".

In any event, we take the potential bait since it's interesting. This is always the basic trust taken when posting to this website.

You identify yourself as other than the three anons that I had addressed earlier when you write "for the assumption being made by /those/ anons...". This is not an ad-hom, but a substantive point in the dialogue: by indicating in your own language that you are not the same as any of those three, you disclaim authority to speak on their behalf, not being any one of them. True, you still have an interesting third party perspective, but the problem with your initial statements is that you claim to speak for the intent of those authors to which I had addressed myself when you say that "the assumption being made by those anons is x", except that by your own admission you cannot claim knowledge of such. Nor does it matter that I did a very similar thing in my earlier post, because in the context of my post, I made clear that I was making a purely rhetorical thrust, whereas you actively claim to represent the views of people who are not yourself. I had been vocally /supposing/ what was meant, while you are claiming knowledge where no present context indicates that you have such, and you have been careful to disclaim such.

1/2

Some cosmetic points are worth making about your post, though they don't go straight to the heart of the matter, which is the point, but they do have the effect of undermining the substance of what has been written, which is rhetorically helpful. The image is a "tumblr" grab of a "gucci" fashion show, and although the rest of the language is only /vaguely/ continental and obscurantist, the best tell of your commitment to the frame is your invocation of "lifeworld", Habermas' word. On some level, it is therefore to be suggested that the reply is less than wholly serious, and is playing with fashion, a la contemporary understanding of continental philosophy. You're "getting into character" as a person who is "doing, defending" continental philosophy, in some contemporary sense. Image choices for such thought-out replies are never accidental. You wanted to present an image of a serious, frowny, yet slightly feels-y, mystical Europe. A fashion model is ideal for this. And my supposition does not contradict the above point because I am /observing/, as opposed to claiming knowledge of intent. This is the difference.

The more /substantive/ pushback of the post, once it is decoded (and it has some merit), is that one cannot be objective about the rightness and wrongness of a historical train of ideas, since we are all trapped in real history, and forced to subjectively, self-interestedly participate in the same state of affairs. What this pushback ignores (yet it must clearly know and pretend not to know, given its continental tradition of thinking in terms of practical, rational and emotional realities of human life) is that objectivity is not essential to the possibility of useful or meaningful or even "rational" judgment, from a human point of view. Ex: Ooh, a snake bit my brother and he died, well that's bad. Let's kill snakes and construct our houses in such a way as to repel snakes from now on. Subjective, "sensible", and clearly undermining the point that had been attempted to be mounted.

Finally, and this is really the important point: by meaningfully engaging with the prompt that I put in the OP to conclude your post, you vindicate my later insistence that ideas should in some sense be ranked according to quality. You attempt to do so in a contrarian way which says that "up is down, the worst are the best", etc, but of course that's not what is really going on because at the end of the day, you correctly accept the frame that I've proposed and said that xyz are the "most right" philosophers, for such-and such reasons that you deem to be "right". The point being that at some level, even the Continental tradition is obliged to care about "truth", "being right" etc, however much it might flagellate to the contrary in the most extreme cases. Human beings like being right.

You forgot how Simone was a filthy degenerate who sexually exploited her female students and then pimped them out to her cross eyed boyfriend, all the while keeping a journal on how their nether regions smelled and tasted.

Champion of equality indeed

i like a lot of schopenhauer's ideas, but the embrace of eastern asceticism is a dealbreaker

it's also kind of dumb how he very ranks aesthetic experiences, saying that music is at the top

nietzche is the answer to schopenhauer, kant, and hegel

sartre and robert solomon build on the foundation laid by nietzche to round out a pretty coherent worldview

This is not intended as a positive claim on my part but as an engaging prompt regarding a philosopher who is popular on Veeky Forums these days (and whose conceits I often happen to agree with).

>the embrace of eastern asceticism is a dealbreaker
schopenhauer is usually criticised for embracing luxury instead of the usual definition of "eastern asceticism". he recommends fine wine and good food and art work until you stop.
>it's also kind of dumb how he very ranks aesthetic experiences, saying that music is at the top
>dumb
>because reasons
>reasons i won't bother with explaining

>nietzche is the answer to schopenhauer, kant, and hegel
Nietzsche recommends more asceticism than Schopenhauer. Less than Kant, but your first objection seems really weird to then praise Nietzsche as the answer.

>sartre and robert solomon build on the foundation laid by nietzche to round out a pretty coherent worldview
kek, I hope you're trolling at this point.

I wish people would just say how Rand was wrong about everything rather than just use buzzwords and without mentioning the welfare she took at the end of her life.

funny story: I was in this literal communist bookstore once and these two old white guys were holding court with each other, like an unfunny Statler and Waldorf.

They shortly get round to Rand, I'm browsing but really just listening to them. "oh yeah she took that welfare you know, feh.". The other one comes back: "yeah, but she was an atheist, so she wasn't all bad."

desu it was remarkable to hear two old white guys openly speaking with each other in those terms, although they were of course doing "teenage" talking points.

Ok. Thanks for your input.

>nietzsche reccomends slave morality

ok

kek

found the marxist teen

I'm not sure what you're saying. Is it Rand or communism that's for teenagers?

congrats on the most retarded post of the day

meme failed faggot, also user is right about your internet star