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Who is the greatest modern-day thinker?
Stephen Dubner asks, his readers answer. I say dead people don't count and give your answers in the comments. Can I consider Tim Berners-Lee for my nomination or Marc Andreessen -- you used a browser to read this post -- or whichever single person is most responsible for Google or search more generally? I don't intend any slight to Richard Dawkins or the others but I just don't see how they stand up to these guys.
Addendum: Arnold Kling nominates Vinton Cerf.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 19, 2008 at 06:58 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Maybe you should instead consider the Gopher team from the Univ. of Minnesota. They created a system with hyperlinking in 1991, before Berners-Lee (but never got the credit). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Posted by: Ben at Jun 19, 2008 7:47:13 AM
My intuition is that to be a great thinker you need to have an out-of-the-box idea (like Copernicus or Darwin or Kant) or just do something conceptually brilliant. Berners-Lee and Andreessen don't fit here, though anyone who reads Andreessen's blog can see he manages to come up with a lot of great ideas.
There's been some pretty impressive philosophy written by people still alive or only just dead. Rawls would have to have been in the running if he hadn't died. Parfit also has to have a claim. It's true the latter's work is not easy to read or influential in the grand scheme of things, but it is brilliant.
Whoever first had the idea of using the AJAX technologies together must have a claim. I use web apps all the time so that was pretty damn smart. I think it was someone at Google.
I think a distinction should be made between people who do something clever but not brilliant that becomes highly influential, and those that have a really brilliant idea or ideas. The former don't strike me as being great as much as lucky.
Posted by: Finnsense at Jun 19, 2008 8:34:34 AM
Maybe Peter Singer.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Jun 19, 2008 8:40:39 AM
I'll throw Thomas Sowell in the mix.
Posted by: Speedmaster at Jun 19, 2008 8:48:51 AM
It seems to me you misconstrue the question. Tim Berners-Lee is a great engineer and scientist, but he doesn't engage in philosophy. That doesn't lessen his accomplishments, perhaps it makes them more impressive, but he doesn't fit the question's definition.
Here are my votes:
For pure philosophy, as much as I disagree with Objectivism, I'd put Ayn Rand up there, just for her effort to create a coherent living philosophy, complete with metaphysics and ethics, based around capitalism. I don't think she succeeds, but then again, no philosopher has yet, so cut her some slack.
Culturally, probably Joseph Campbell. His analysis of how a loss of mythic and ritual structure in modern life seems, to me, to be the only believable explanation for the persistent neuroses that plague modern people. If you've ever read an interview of his, the man's brain is encyclopedic.
Literature: Bill Watterson, Philip K. Dick and Terry Pratchett. I'll defend any of those if someone asks.
But to go from the comments from the article itself, I'd have to agree on Alan Turing (his theories and tests shattered concepts of consciousness and mind) and Albert Einstein (for a plethora of reasons). I would add Michael Kaku, simply for his efforts to bring complex theories of science to the masses.
The history of economic thought is not my forte by a long shot, so I pose a more specific question to you, Cowen:
Of all the economists who flourished (were adults and publishing) after World War II, who do you believe is the most important/greatest thinker?
Posted by: Kyle M at Jun 19, 2008 8:51:01 AM
Julian Simon
Posted by: Floccina at Jun 19, 2008 8:53:18 AM
We have a sizeable spread of yery, very good thinkers around, even a few in economics. But great? and living? The nearest I can get is James Lovelock.
Posted by: Diversity at Jun 19, 2008 8:55:55 AM
We have a sizeable spread of yery, very good thinkers around, even a few in economics. But great? and living? The nearest I can get is James Lovelock.
Posted by: Diversity at Jun 19, 2008 8:56:11 AM
Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen are very bright guys, but their critical actions were incremental and at the margin. For greatest thinker I'd go for someone more original and more (pardon guys) sustained.
I'm afraid I also think Tim's Semantic Web is wrongheaded. The web grew emergently from small standards ... unfortunately small standards (free from IP restrictions) are under supported.
Marc's Ning is technically interesting, but doesn't really aspire to web-wide infrastructure change.
Posted by: odograph at Jun 19, 2008 9:12:31 AM
(I'll second Philip K. Dick. Talk about a hat-full of transforming ideas.)
Posted by: odograph at Jun 19, 2008 9:13:30 AM
Oh, consider Ted Nelson in the web relm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson
Posted by: odograph at Jun 19, 2008 9:16:48 AM
If you want an economist I'd say Paul Samuelson is an obvious candidate.
But I really think that anyone who seriously claims to have an answer is a raving egomaniac. It is impossible for any one person to have sufficient grasp of all the intellectual activity in the world to be be able to evaluate the importance of any individual's contribution.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Jun 19, 2008 9:50:10 AM
Rene Girard. He's a French anthropologist, most original thinker of the post War era. Cuts against the orthodoxy so you probably won't have heard of him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
Posted by: David at Jun 19, 2008 10:02:17 AM
While the internet is a really big deal for humanity's intellectual life, there isn't one person you can saddle with credit for this. So I'll vote against Berners-Lee.
As Bernard just said, it's hard to see how big the big guys in other fields are, so I don't hold my opinion very strongly. That said, my vote is for Ed Witten...
Posted by: improbable at Jun 19, 2008 10:09:11 AM
How do we define "modern"? I'd consider "people who were alive in my lifetime" or "people who are still alive". Seconding Bernard Yomtov's observation, I wonder whether we don't mean "modern thinker of whom I have heard"?
Andreesen or Berners-Lee? No, that's availability bias. Claude Shannon is more important to reading this post, as are Robert Metcalfe, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain (and now Jimbo Wales!). Going further back, Tesla is a monumental figure.
If you've ever survived a high-speed vehicle accident, you might have noted the work of John Paul Stapp. More important than Bing Crosby (who, besides the obvious, pioneered the use of mag tape recording equipment?)?
Posted by: Eric H at Jun 19, 2008 10:39:46 AM
What about the modern European philosophers?
Slavoj Žižek
Giorgio Agamben
Jürgen Habermas
I guess because I did graduate work in Europe, I'm more aware of these guys. And they are probably thought of more highly in Europe than in the United States.
If someone would be so kind, e-mail me some links and names of the 'great' U.S. thinkers at this time, besides the obvious of Thomas Sowell and featured columnists. They are great public intellectuals, but I wouldn't necessarily think the 'greatest'.
Posted by: Keith at Jun 19, 2008 10:40:05 AM
Posner
Posted by: Wilson at Jun 19, 2008 10:58:39 AM
Steven Wright.
Posted by: ostap at Jun 19, 2008 11:17:35 AM
Charles Taylor
Posted by: Patrick Molloy at Jun 19, 2008 11:41:23 AM
I think it's hard to imagine a great thinker today who just THINKS. So, we keep nominating people who've actually DONE STUFF, as well as think.
I'd go with the search engine people -- Google's dominant right now, but they didn't invent the concept. If Google didn't exist, we'd be pretty happy with Lycos, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.
The reason for this nomination is pretty simple. The search engine changes the way we work and think, and it changes what we consider knowledge in a subtle way.
Posted by: ZBicyclist at Jun 19, 2008 11:45:41 AM
I think tha Norman Borlaug is the greatest living doer. If one considers that he needs to think in order to do, then it is not unreasonable to nominate him for greatest living thinker.
If we can extend it to the recently deceased, I nominate Milton Friedman, but I can't help but think that that is for parochial reasons.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Jun 19, 2008 12:02:47 PM
If being alive is a condition, then Graham Priest.
Posted by: LouisNapoleon at Jun 19, 2008 12:12:28 PM
What is it with people's obsession with Marc Andreessen? He is a one-hit-wonder. Has anything he did since Netscape been a success? I don't think so. Andreessen was more of a right-place-right-time kind of success. Smart guy, obviously, you have to be smart to take advantage of your luck, but Netscape's actual success should be credited more to Clark/Barksdale. And even then I don't know if Netscape should be counted as a success. These days when I talk about the early Internet to anyone under 25 I can't rely on the fact that they know what Netscape was!
Tim-BL-- very smart, but he didn't invent hypertext. Per odograph, I think Ted Nelson takes that one.
Posted by: Sameer Parekh at Jun 19, 2008 12:24:47 PM
I don't get the labeling of Thomas Sowell as a great thinker, and he also got several nominations in the Freakonomics poll too? I have never read an original idea in any of his columns. He is a smart guy to be sure, but everything he writes is done to advance the conservative cause in a Paul Krugman sort of way, except that Krugman at least established himself as a great thinker before becoming a newspaper political cheerleader.
But back to the question at hand, I add to the Paul Samuelson vote. When he was young, he would swoop into a subfield of economics and suddenly have major theorems and models credited to him, then off to add to a totally different field (Public Economics: theory of public goods; International: Stolper-Samuelson Th., factor price equilization th.; macro: overlapping generations...). And on top of all of this he modernized introductory economics with his intro textbook that everybody used (or clones of it) for several generations of college students.
Posted by: liberalarts at Jun 19, 2008 12:58:26 PM
For greatest living thinker, it's a tough battle for second place following far behind Tom Schelling.
Posted by: Dan Cole at Jun 19, 2008 1:15:03 PM
