Who are your favorite thinkers?
They don't have to be people associated with philosophy.
I can't list any women, unfortunately. There are plenty of women in journalism who I respect and whose work I read and learn a lot from, some of them regularly. But I have not yet discovered the work of any woman in theology/religion, academia, literature, social/political activism, etc. that I found to be original, groundbreaking, and greatly impactful. I have no doubt that the latter exists; I simply have not discovered it, unfortunately. That lack notwithstanding, I think I have a list of people from a diversity of backgrounds.
Anyway, my top ten right now would be:
1.) Ken Wilber
2.) Christopher Lasch
3.) David Smail
4.) Chris Hedges
5.) Wendell Berry
6.) Gustavo Esteva (development critic)
7.) Martin Luther King., Jr.
8.) Mahatma Gandhi
9.) Marvin Harris (anthropologist)
10.) Richard Wilk (anthropologist)
I can't list any women, unfortunately. There are plenty of women in journalism who I respect and whose work I read and learn a lot from, some of them regularly. But I have not yet discovered the work of any woman in theology/religion, academia, literature, social/political activism, etc. that I found to be original, groundbreaking, and greatly impactful. I have no doubt that the latter exists; I simply have not discovered it, unfortunately. That lack notwithstanding, I think I have a list of people from a diversity of backgrounds.
Anyway, my top ten right now would be:
1.) Ken Wilber
2.) Christopher Lasch
3.) David Smail
4.) Chris Hedges
5.) Wendell Berry
6.) Gustavo Esteva (development critic)
7.) Martin Luther King., Jr.
8.) Mahatma Gandhi
9.) Marvin Harris (anthropologist)
10.) Richard Wilk (anthropologist)
Comments (27)
I have not discovered prose fiction or poetry as intellectual documents to use on my own. I have only experienced them as school assignments to try my best to survive. It's never too late to change habits.
I tend to gravitate to non-fiction that is iconoclastic, original, independent, against the mainstream, etc. Work that recycles or feeds off of already popular ideas does not interest me much.
Who is the Noam Chomsky of female intellectuals?
Interesting to see Wendell Berry on someone's list.
Then you might appreciate this: authors from Mexico and India using Wendell Berry as a source.
In Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri-Prakash quote Wendell Berry extensively.
A pleasant surprise in a book that only by chance got my attention at the last minute before the bookstore closed (after browsing for several hours I had to leave with something).
Cool. I need to read more Berry. I like his unabashed individualism; not for it's own sake, but for the sake of saying what he feels needs said.
Cultural anthropology, especially economic anthropology and ecological anthropology. Development, colonialism, neo-colonialism, North/South political and economic relations, etc. Indigenism. Political theory in general. Postmodernism, especially in social theory. Some general philosophy. Some general sociology.
Emma Goldman & Simone Weil, but they're not modern.
Have you already read Eric Wolf's Europe and the people without history?
Weil sounds especially interesting, judging by the Wikipedia article.
It is probably buried in the many sticky notes on my phone or in a folder full of links I emailed to myself.
Iconoclastic works in anthropological theory are always good.
I've been wanting to read Robert Edgerton's Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. Maybe Wolf should be read first.
Wendy Brown probably places a close second, and her recent Undoing the Demos is perhaps one of the most prescient diagnoses of our contemporary situations that I know.
Melinda Cooper’s recent Family Values is also a monumental work of political anthropology/history and well worth reading.
Angela McRobbie’s work on consumer culture, feminism, and postmodernism might be something right up your alley as well - a mix of cultural studies and anthropology - and although it’s hard to pick a single work, the ever popular The Aftermath of Feminism is always a good place.
Saskia Sassen’s work on the sociology of globalisation might be of interest as well.
Doreen Massey’s works on cultural geography ranks among my favourite writing as well - see her Space, Place, and Gender, or her For Space.
As far as classic anthropology, there's always Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa), and Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture).
Otherwise, authors like Linda Zerilli, Susan Moller Okin, Iris Marion Young, and Nancy Fraser, are among the best philosophical philosophers, living or dead.
In (roughly) temporal order:
Plato
St. Augustine
St. Anselm
David Hume
Edmund Burke
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Soren Kierkegaard
Feodor Dostoevsky
Sigmund Freud
Martin Buber
Jacques Lacan
Louis Althusser
Julia Kristeva
Jacques Derrida
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Gilles Deleuze
Judith Butler
https://www.amazon.com/What-Gandhi-Says-Nonviolence-Resistance/dp/1935928791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501138662&sr=8-1&keywords=norman+finkelstein+gandhi
https://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Saint-Annihilation-Between-Ambedkar/dp/160846797X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501138613&sr=8-1&keywords=arundhati+roy+gandhi
Friedrich Nietzsche
William Blake
Sören Kierkegaard
Simone Weil
Plato
Arthur Schopenhauer
Giacomo Leopardi
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Gregory of Nyssa
Meister Eckehart
Anscombe, on morality.
I recommend Simone Weil.
Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, The Abolition of Political Parties, The Need For Roots...
Gabriel Marcel
Tolstoy
Aristotle
Plato
Socrates
Philip Yancey
Martha Nussbaum
the ancient Stoics
But I don't really play favorites, because that's when you narrow your perspective and become one of those insufferable dick-sucking acolytes. :-d
Favorites:
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Friedrich Nietzsche
Niccoló Machiavelli
Plato
Albert Camus
Alexis de Tocqueville
Soren Kierkegaard
C.S. Lewis
Leo Tolstoy
Do they have to be associated with people?
If not, probably pine trees, and the retarded squirrel who resides in a cage just outside of our bedroom.
Seriously. NOT being clever, cutesy, snarky or humorous etc.
Why study what somebody says about reality when we can study reality itself?
Why content ourselves with second hand sources?
Since this doesn’t seem to be solely limited to philosophers, I’ll go with:
John Dewey
Wallace Stevens
Marcus Tullius Cicero (of course)
O.W. Holmes, Jr.
Nietzsche
Socrates
Diogenes
Hume
George Carlin
Camus
Plato
Hitchens
Johnathan Haidt
Saul Williams
Aleister Crowley
Carl Rogers
Marx
John Lennon
Cornell West