Was he the greatest American intellect of all time

Malcolm X, while imprisoned, taught himself how to read by requesting a dictionary, paper, and pencils, and copying down every word on the first page over and over until he had it memorized and moved on to page 2, and eventually until completion of the dictionary and could read and understand every book in the prison library which he then read constantly, even after lights-out by using the corridor light. He said that he read so much he would go months and never felt that he was imprisoned, and that it was the first time he had ever really felt he was free. It definitely shows, he was one of the most concise, eloquent, and impassioned American speakers. Very well-thought and well-read.

I wouldn't say he's THE greatest, but he's certainly a contender.

...

Anybody that thinks Christianity is somehow more anti-Black than Islam cannot possibly be intelligent.

If he wanted to be a proper African nationalist, he would have traced back his line and found what paganism his family followed and gone with that, Islam is the worst thing to happen to Africa.

No he isn't...i can think of many Americans that were intellectually superior to him

Charles Sanders Pierce

W.V.O Quine

Linus Pauling

Ed Witten

should I go on

none of those people have shaped american identity, have contributed to the american story like X has.

your right CS Pierce just happens to be probably the greatest American Philosopher of all time

Linus Pauling is arguably the greatest chemist period

but right Malcolm X is more intelligent then him because he contributed to the "american identity"

tells me you have no idea about the people I listed

thread is about the greatest, not the smartest.
Also
>Malcolm X is more intelligent then him because he contributed to the "american identity"
you're a fucking idiot

what makes Malcolm X "greater" than CS Pierce

like is this praise the negro session today...

honestly you guys never heard of Quine, Pauling, Pierce or you wouldn't be praising him over these giants

When Malcom X rights a influential philosophy paper on the level of Quine's "Two Dogmas" then get back tome?

Charles Sanders Peirce (/ˈpɜːrs/,[9] like "purse", September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.

An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost, a logician. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, and which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th century Western philosophy; additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulated mathematical induction and deductive reasoning. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits; the same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.[10]

In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".[11] Webster's Biographical Dictionary said in 1943 that Peirce was "now regarded as the most original thinker and greatest logician of his time."[12] Keith Devlin similarly referred to Peirce as one of the greatest philosophers ever.[13]

look i know you white liberals love to stroke over Malcolm X

but to claim he is the greatest american intellect is laughable

well im not sure why you think it's necessary to start cursing but okay

and secondly the OP says who are the greatest AMERICAN intellects, now this is somewhat ambigious so perhaps its partly OP's fault but what that means to me is who are the thinkers who are distinctly "American" who have contributed in some way to the american cultural identity.

the great american novel must satisfy some kind of american sensibility just as the great american intellect be distinctly american

also andyou two are agreeing but are too dense to realize this.

agreeing with each other I should say, you two have the same opinion but for some reason or another are just arguing with each other. its kind of a funny representation of Veeky Forums as a whole.

again I think CS Pierce would fit that mold...Pragmatism is pretty much a distinctive American philosophy that challenges the norms of age old European systems

Of course not. He doesn't even come close.

>white liberals love to stroke over Malcolm X
These days they do, when he's just a meme who can't talk back at them.

I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I'd lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

exactly

Many people in the UK would have read Malcolm x. Those other people. Not at all

The opening of state and revolution springs to mind

so....CS Pierce was 10x the greater mind that Malcolm X ever was

Everyone in this thread deserves lukemia and op deserves pancreatic cancer

Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, naturally, I read all of those. I don't respect them; I am just trying to remember some of those whose theories I soaked up in those years. These three, it's said, laid the groundwork on which the Fascist and Nazi philosophy was built. I don't respect them because it seems to me that most of their time was spent arguing about things that are not really important. They remind me of so many of the Negro "intellectuals," so-called, with whom I have come in contact-they are always arguing about something useless.

[...] Spinoz impressed me for a while when I found out that he was black. A black Spanish Jew. The Jews excommunicated him because he advocated a pantheistic doctrine, something like the "allness of God," or "God in everything." The Jews red their burial services for Spinoza, meaning that he was dead as far as they were concerned; his family was run out of Spain, they ended up in Holland, I think.

I'll tell you something. The whole stream of Western philosophy has now wound up in a cul-de-sac. The white man has perpetrated upon himself, as well as upon the black man, so gigantic a fraud that he has put himself into a crack. He did it through his elaborate, neurotic necessity to hide the black man's true role in history.

Maybe not the greatest American intellect but the greatest African-American intellect by a long-shot

Fuck MLK

OP's question wasn't "Did he shape American identity,", it was "was he the greatest american intellect of all". Your response is a non sequitur.

so he didn't have the capacity to understand their work....

lol spinoza a black jew

this guy is a fraud

You're retarded

Anyone who's IQ is in the 20th percentile (as in, 80 percent of the population) can understand Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche's ideas to a sufficient extent if they study them thoroughly enough. Also, after Babby's first existential crisis you realise that contemplating their ideas doesn't get you anywhere in life

He's also entirely right about Western philosophy winding up in a cul-de-sac and that it has no actual basis on any level

His shit about race tho is stupid

What got me about this statement was that he was impressed with Spinoza, not due to his writings or ideas, but because he was black.

How can this possibly be a rational reason for being impressed with someone's philosophy? It's absurd.

What an absolute fucking retarded fucking nigger cunt.

>If he wanted to be a proper African nationalist, he would have traced back his line and found what paganism his family followed and gone with that, Islam is the worst thing to happen to Africa.

Neo-Paganism and Traditionalism is for stupid white people, Malcolm took the religion of Africa, practiced by most Africans. X was his name because it is foolish to cling to fictions of past personal heritage like the white man does, his interest was the black people as they existed and as they have always existed and always will exist long after the white man is gone

>St- stop cursing at me

Holy shit kek, how old are you?

How do you learn to read by reading a dictionary. If you can't read the definitions what's the point in memorizing the words, they would mean nothing to you. This is hurting my brain

We aren't going to get good leftist musicians like Phil ever again are we?

Christianity is gobbling up Africa, though, so Malcolm's response was time-specific. If he'd lived today he might have become a Roman Catholic.

He read a lot of garbage, which is how he was convinced by people he knew about the whole Nation of Islam thing. If he was actually knowledgeable he could refute their claims with ease, prison libraries aren't great places to cultivate the mind all things considered.

"western philosophy" is too broad to be categorized as one thing...so how is it all useless

are you talking analytical, continental philosophy?wtf are you talking about?

He'd probably be one of those edgy /pol/acks yapping "Deus Vult!", trying to call a crusade against the Protestant fundamentalism of the White Man.

That's pretty good rhetorics.

You'd have to be pretty autistic to not recognise the hyperbole for what it is.

Meme-tier

this doesnt even mean anything

He's not even the best black American intellect.

>Ctrl + F - Pierce
8 times.
Plebs, all of you.

Thomas Paine or Emerson, clearly

wait, nobody mentioned those two before me?
this board is fucking retarded, I'm not even American

Richard Posner is pretty sharp.
He is certainly prolific, if that counts for anything.

All these responses are pretty good, but I would also add Steven Hawking to the pile.

he's british

lol

>be a google
>have "intellect"

Pick one.

This thread was made by social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit Nimble America. There is really nothing to say or see here.

wat?

A non profit organization that has scammed people out of money recently, just was backed through thousands of dollars by the millionaire behind the Occulus Rift, to basically do the following. also been part of this scam of a

1) "Shit post in real life"
2) Really it's an organization for millionaires in Silicon Valley who want to get involved in politics who have shit post their whole lives and actually bought into it, to give their own political influence everywhere on the internet instead of directly into the pockets of politicians. Just shill for the alt-right everywhere, perhaps even hiring people from Indonesia or Malaysia or India to do it.
3) By doing this, flooding youtube, flooding Veeky Forums, flooding news sites, they hope to help encourage the election of Donald Trump in order to achieve their goal of "shit posting in real life".
5) Basically it's a giant very ironic shill group to post tired as fuck /pol/ jokes everywhere while they themselves bitch about shilling.

Milo has promoted this scam of an organization and encouraged people to donate hundreds towards it on the reddit board he moderates. Just as well it's believed to be founded by Martin Shkreli.

If you see a thread like this daily, we now know it is likely by the money behind Nimble America

Finally Baldwin fucking Christ this board is worthless

Blacks simply aren't intelligent enough to philosophize 2bh. They're not a curious people and more concerned with resentful self-pity than the consideration of ideas outside their narrow and immature purview.

This post, similarly to /pol/'s idea of what the jidf is, is by 501(c)4 non-profit Nimble America.

well..i mean its kindo true

What's kindo true

What's kindo

So they want to preserve the white race...what is wrong with that

go back to tumblr, you SJW fag

>So they want to preserve the white race...what is wrong with that

>"I hate facebook and shilling but I love facebook and shilling"
>"I have to make a non profit organization from thousands of dollars of facebook money and con my entire subhuman reddit.com base of hundreds of dollars for an obvious scam nobody is buying to get my point across"
"Hello trump voters, please, donate to Nimble America, instead of the Trump Campaign itself. It's me your friend, Milo."

I mean your overall reasoning being "But it's ok when /pol/ does it" really does amuse me so

Just before he died he unfucked himself and had some cool shit to say... Unfortunately dindus didn't appreciate his new tone and had him killed.