This article is... god-awful. It read's like what a second year undergrad writes assuming they're the first person to ever call bullshit on the ideas they're being presented with (or not even realising that calling bullshit was part of the reason they'd been presented with those ideas in the first place). It's a very "everyone else are just sheeple" vibe.

Starting off with the Plato section, it's talked about how Socrates seems to reply over-literally to Thrasymachus' claim regarding rulers, failing to understand the rhetorical point being illustrated. But Thrasymachus himself probably wasn't even real, or at least was heavily fictionalised by the dialogue - the whole thing itself is a rhetorical device! It's not that I suspect Plato was trying to make Socrates look like a bad thinking, it's that the whole dialogue itself is just an excuse to exposit ideas, not necessarily a realist account of two blokes arguing.

And the end thesis has a gigantic gap in it as well. Philosophy is a field filled with people who love to argue, deep arguments, petty argument, pedantic arguments, broad arguments, and are generally well trained to pick apart each other's reasoning (and strongly incentivised too - bringing down a big philosophical theory is a great way to make a name for yourself). For a "great" philosopher's flawed work to survive in that environment, one of two things must be true. Its flaws must be either so subtle as to require another "great" philosopher to come around to unpick them, or the works must have value in spite of their obvious issues.

The issues picked up on in the article are, well, not new. Hell, the issues with the categorical imperative are so famous that anyone studying formal ethics will learn about it. These are very old observations. It's then reasonable to assume that, given how philosophers tend to bicker, dissect and scrutinise ideas, that these thinkers must hold some value in spite of their very well known flaws.

The article tries to sweep a whole lot under the rug by simply describing these thinkers ideas as "interesting", in a semi-contemptuous way. But most "interesting" ideas put forward by blowhards soon lose people's attention, and many philosophers considered important for a while fall into obscurity. The article doesn't really answer, why THESE thinkers, THESE ideas, in spite of all the scrutiny? Fun hypotheticals alone don't tend to secure people a place in the canon. It completely fails to tackle its own questions by just using the label "interesting" as though that explains anything. Most gradiose ideas with shit reasoning fall away - so in what different way are the "great" philosophers "interesting" that their ideas are kept around in spite of their known mistakes?

My issue is not that these thinkers are sacrosanct and shouldn't be questioned. It's that this article is so goddamned adolescent that it seems to assume the author is the first person to claim the emperor has no clothes, and doesn't seem to even think to pause and then check if that's true.

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Transform philosophy into mathematics. Extremely good.

Judge a philosopher by his bad points, not his good ones. Good!

There's almost a reasonable point here among the ridiculous writing: philosophers become "great" not because they were necessarily right about everything, but because of their influence. That's not particularly in dispute; I don't think even the most ardent fans of these three philosophers think they were literally 100% correct or that every argument they made was equally unassailable. I don't think anyone thinks that about the intellectual giants in any field.

However, the examples Huemer picks on here aren't particularly good ones, and all of these deserve vastly more serious treatment than he gives them. Imagine deriding Kant's ethical theory, much less the entirety of Kant's work, based on one formulation of the categorical imperative and one quote from the Groundwork! Imagine critiquing Hume's "bundle of perceptions" theory of the self, without noting how it set the stage for Kant's unity of apperception.

That last example is significant, because where this article is absurdly incorrect is in further saying these were bad philosophers, bad thinkers, or that their "greatness" is entirely due to the provocative nature of their ideas. These people are great because of the groundwork they laid for the further development of philosophy, not because "whoa, dude".

One of the worst articles I've seen in the sub. Even the end, with the greatness definition, is so basic yet they seem to believe they've found a revolutionary idea.

Written like a stubborn 15 yo, with an evident lack of understanding of the concepts and yet judging them as an all-knowing being.

Don't waste your time reading this, I kinda wish I had my 10 minutes back.

Yeah, and Galileo, Newton, and Darwin were bad scientists.

"These were not the best philosophers of the past that we were reading. They were merely the greatest philosophers."

That's a very thought-provoking thesis, and rings true. Greatness here could be thought of as 'intellectual celebrity'. No philosopher's system will ever be bulletproof, because philosophy is not just logic, but literature, and therefore depends on the fallibility and inexactness of language. The 'greatest' philosophers are those who 'won' the contest for celebrity, but the winning in these cases is more like 'winning' a political campaign than 'winning' a 100m dash — that is, not so straightforward, and involving lots of cultural factors. The 'Greats' are more like stable nodes, or irreducible particles, from which greater networks and systems may be generated. Or they are like prospectors who secure a particular piece of earth for the rest of us to dig into and build upon.

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Starting a paper with “My introduction to philosophy was largely through…” is like starting novel with “Sarah woke up in her bed in her bedroom and…”

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Philosophy is a popularity contest where the 'greatest' is most able to sway legions of mediocre minds. Thus r/philosophy is born.

It is very good. Thanks