The Philosopher Tier List

so very regularly I'll get asked questions like what do you think about schopenhauer or a Rand or Jordan Peterson and instead of just responding to comments I always think man I should just make a video where I talk about a lot of philosophers at the same time and a tier list seemed like kind of a silly but effective format to talk about my opinions about 20 or so philosophers and just tell you what I think and we are going to start with epicurus epicurus is an early Greek philosopher he is known for a couple of

different views one of them is a kind of Hedonism so unlike say Plato or the stoics or Aristotle we'll talk about all of them a little bit in a moment epicurus said that pleasure was what made life worth living Hedonism actually became much more popular later on in modern philosophy especially with the rise of utilitarianism and this is kind of a theme in epicurus actually epicurus seemed to get a lot of modern ideas very very early epicurian were also kinds of atomist so they believed that the world was made up of these sort of fundamental

particles it's pretty interesting that epicurus and his followers were able to come up with these ideas now I think that epicurus could be too easily maligned I am not a hedonist by far um and I tend to think that pursuing pleasure for its own sake can often lead to a lot of bad things for individuals so epicer had a really moderate form of Hedonism where in fact the goal was to regulate your desire and really what you wanted to do was pursue the absence of pain that itself is an interesting philosophical move despite the fact

that epicurus seem to have some ideas that have you know proven to be at least popular at different times it's not as if epicureanism has been the thing which has really stood the test of time and hasn't even been able to find a Modern Renaissance like you find with virtue ethics with Aristotle or in the popularization of stoicism and he's certainly less popular or less important historically than Plato So I think I got to say that Epicurious is B tier before we move on to the next philosopher I want to thank today's sponsor brilliant the

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get 20% off a premium subscription thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring this video now talking about Playdoh I think we all kind of know where this one's going to go you got the tripod theory of the Soul you've got the forums you've got the use of dialogues as a way of teaching philosophy to this day I think that Plato's dialogues are some of the best beginner text so if someone says to me I want to read philosophy but I don't know anything about it and I don't know what I'd want to read I just tell

them pick up playdoh and start reading you can find a little bit of everything you can find discussions about the relationship between goodness and God in Plato you can find theories of the Soul theories of universals which Plato called the forms you can even find critiques of theories of universals in the third man argument you can see political philosophy and its relationship to the soul in the Republic you also see huge amounts of drama in the platonic dialogues and really just shows that Plato Not only was a great philosopher but he was a great writer

of philosophy those are two subtly different things Plato I think clearly just shows a Mastery of both nobody really is a platonist anymore there are people who are sort of platonically inspired but even as you see like the most of the influences of Plato later on that really came through the school of neoplatonism which we'll get to in a little bit and so you might be tempted to say that Plato has not been that historically important after all you just don't find a lot of modern followers of Plato but I think that honestly we're just

looking at it and saying who is the most important philosopher in the history of Western philosophy it's Plato Alfred North whand was a logician and a philosopher once said that all of Western philosophy was footnotes to Plato and you know it's oversimplified like all cute expressions are but I think he was on to at least something there so I think you just got to put Plato in s tier next up is Aristotle Aristotle was the student of Plato and he was also the Tut of Alexander the Great so if you're looking at historical influence that's

already pretty huge I feel like tutoring someone who tried to conquer the entire world uh means that you were probably kind of an important guy Aristotle in many ways is kind of positing a refined and critiqued version of Plato's Theory this is why we see a slightly different theory of what universals are as existing in objects rather than sort of as abstracta we also see I think a much more thoroughly developed theory of of Ethics in Aristotle especially in the niiko mckian ethics and you might know that that is my favorite work of philosophy and

by the way I've been reading through that over on my substack we've just been going chapter by chapter together just posted something recently about book four of the nicam mckian ethics if you wanted to follow along there's a link down below arot also wrote about just about everything about logic you can read him on Poetics and rhetoric and also a lot of stuff in the sciences and this is where it gets a little bit tricky to rank Aristotle this is where we get to our first kind of complication we talk about you know how do

we rank Aristotle because Aristotle's ethics is very very interesting Aristotle's metaphysics is very interesting very influential especially in medieval philosophy but a lot of Aristotle's work on say biology which actually is kind of a very important part of his larger work it even informs his ethical writings I just don't think it stands up you know um and you know it might have been very interesting for the time but it's just something that we look at and say you know it's easier just for us to leave it behind I feel like I'm teetering on the edge

here between A and S to be honest because I love the Nick mck ethics so much I want to say s tier but I think when it comes down to it we're just going to say that Aristotle was a tier this next guy is a Greek philosopher but he was Greek born but he existed during the Roman Empire and he's really part of a group that we call the Roman stoics and that is epic tetus he is one of the two stoics that we are going to talk about on this list now epicus is probably

I think the most important stoic when it comes to Modern stoicism if you have been exposed to Modern stoicism at all probably epicus is the book that you've been told to read actually probably more people have been told to read Marcus celas's meditations but I think that serious readers would benefit more from engaging with the works of epicus it's also helpful that we just have more writing from epicus than we do from Marcus Aurelius because he's a Roman stoic epicus has this kind of weird fact about him which is that he represents I think a

simplification of the stoic system I made a video all about trying to explain stoicism and some of its weirdness it's only 30 minutes long but I thought I got into at least a little bit of depth and talking about how ancient stoicism in Greece was much weirder than we kind of acknowledge now nowadays and epicus is much easier for us to read because the weirdness just gets downplayed and I've always kind of thought that the lack of metaphysics or the sort of downplaying of metaphysics because it's not totally eliminated in epicus it does actually kind

of weaken his overall impact um if you're looking for practical life advice epicus is probably the philosopher to read if you're looking for a systematic treatment of life's problems and how to deal with it epicus might not be the one to look to maybe this would be my first really controversial pick here but I think I'm going to put him in B tier along with epicurus Marcus Aurelius is probably the most famous stoic because the meditations has proven to be massively popular especially in the Modern Age this is the book that someone like Ryan holiday

would recommend to absolutely everybody and hey I did a readalong of the meditations on my substack too and I like it I like the book a good pit but we need to look at Marcus's quality as a philosopher because one of the things that's like so relatable about Marcus actually is that he's just just like a guy yeah he's the Roman Emperor so he's not a guy in the same way that you and I are guys or you know people but it does seem like he's really grappling with just like day-to-day problems anxiety dealing with

others people feeling they're going to you know stab you in the back except in the case of Roman emperors actually that could mean you would actually get stabbed in the back the arguments actually in the meditations I think are pretty poor I just think they don't bear a ton of scrutiny and you're going to find better arguments in even the fragments that we see from the early stoics and you'll certainly I think see better applications and sort of stoic principles more consistently applied in the works of epicus and so I think I got to put

I got to put Marcus at this is hard because I think I'm going to put Marcus at D tier good book to read but really judging him as a philosopher I think he's got to be pretty low all right so let's talk about platinus platinus is a neoplatonist and neoplatonism I think is a big conceptual Leap Forward from platonism to the point where even though it's called neoplatonism we really have to distinguish it from platonism and one of the ways that I'm trying to evaluate all of these philosophers is to look at how kind of

interesting they are on their own but also to think about how historically important they've been it's one of the reasons why like why Aristotle couldn't ever be below a tier just cuz he had such an impact but I think that neoplatonism actually ended up being more influential than Aristotle in a lot of ways especially when you're looking at the development of early Christian theology but also some Jewish theology neoism just was a dominant force in the sort of ancient near East it provided a way of people to make sense of mysticism within sort of a

philosophical context and it wasn't mysticism that just was kind of an anything goes um it's also a sort of very early example of almost a kind of dialectical thinking this kind of dialectical thinking that we then attribute to someone like Hegel we're going to have to put platinus pretty high up on the list and I'm going to say platanus is probably an a tier philosopher by the way I worked with a few people to make this list for me so I wouldn't be like totally sure which ones were there so I'm kind of giving these

remarks off the cuff and I didn't have a chance to really prepare them in advance but the next philosopher we have on the list is Augustine also known as St Augustine uh this is Augustine of Hippo not of canterberry by the way but I think for a philosophy channel that should be pretty obvious Augustine's influence especially on Western theology could not be overstated um and obviously philosophy and theology for a very long time were difficult to distinguish and so it's not as if we can pretend as if like because he was a theologian thus he

wasn't a philosopher I also really like Augustine especially the confessions it was kind of an important book for me at one point in my life um I think it's beautifully written I think it's a wonderful use of personal philosophy still get that systematic treatment here and it's clearly showing those neoplatonic influences and that's cool Augustine wrote about pretty much everything he's kind of the Aristotle of his day except not really biology I guess but just on every matter of philosophy or theology that you want Augustine probably has something to say he's also interestingly one of

our primary sources for learning about early Christian heresies because a lot of those writings were burned and then we have to kind of piece together what they actually taught and believed based on what people wrote about them Augustine is one of the writers that kind of gives us that context now of course that's always doubtful like it's always doubtful how much of that is reliable because you know who knows if he was always accurately representing his opponents but historically I mean that alone from an intellectual history perspective is incredibly important to this day in metaphysics

you will see Augustine's theory of time sometimes refer to as the moving Spotlight Theory referenced in the debates about the metaphysics of time and while I have never had much affinity for a moving Spotlight Theory when I was thinking about metaphysics I was definitely a b theorist if you know what that means a growing block theorist is what always seemed kind of more intuitive to me but I never got too deep into those debates um so he's still at least um kind of relevant in contemporary philosophy but honestly I think the stuff that was most

interesting about Augustine was like his stuff on memory and its mediation here um the Theologian Rowan Williams I think has written some of the most beautiful stuff about that but when we're looking at some of Augustine's peculiar ideas and then like the role they had they're obviously been very important but I think like the I but but I think that for instance Augustine's particular view of original sin which is like all tied up in a whole bunch of philosophical and Theological things ended up being pretty harmful to the world um in a way that despite

my love for him I have to say definitely can't be an S tier kind of guy um I also have to say that there's something a little bit hard to judge when you judge Augustine and then one other person I think is on this list which is that often times in crucial points of their arguments they're just like going to quote the Bible and that makes it really hard for us modern readers to look at it and say uh is this an compelling argument cuz it's like there's a crucial missing premise and then they quote

something from the Bible as like the Gap in their argument in theology that's a perfectly fine way to argue in philosophy it's not and so and so this really is kind of a a struggle to where you would Place him and I think but if you're just trying to think of him as like sort of a philosopher Theologian working within a framework namely the kind of hermeneutical interpretive framework of the Bible that he had inherited then you got to give him credit for his many Innovations and despite the fact that this list is a little

top heavy I think we're going to say that Augustine is a tier all right we are leaping Way Forward into history with this one and that is Thomas aquinus who was the other guy that I suspected someone had added to this list so Thomas aquinus arguably the most important Catholic Theologian ever he's also the one really responsible for synthesizing Aristotle with Christian theology the kinds of criticism that I leveled against Augustine just a moment or two ago could I think easily be applied to aquinus and so we have to keep that in mind I am

also going to say just like kind of putting my biases out here and let's face it when you're doing a tier list this is mostly me kind of giving my opinion rather than having super strong reasons for every selection I just don't like to read aquinus his sort of method or style I think should interest me I kind of like the structure and yet I never find it like super Illuminating and I've never really found it super worthwhile to kind of go through in more detail you know there's something to be said about philosophers hooking

you enough to actually make you go through all the work of understanding the nuances and I don't think that aquinus has ever hooked me enough for that so I'm going to say that aquinus is C tier next up is Renee deart deart is like often blamed with all of the problems of modernity and I think that is deeply unfair so a certain type of person would want to put dayart at the very bottom and just say F tier he's the worst form of rationalist he's almost a solipsist he can he can barely even prove that

other Minds exist or there is people who want to criticize his seemingly circular Arguments for the existence of God that you see um I think that actually deart often proves himself to be much more nuanced than his critics suggest um however one of the benefits of reading dayart now is that you get to read dayart and then the correspondence between dayart and his many interlockers and when you read someone like uh Elizabeth of bohemia or Thomas Hobbs responding to dayart it's pretty easy to feel like they consistently got the better of him and I think

that's got to lower our estimation of dayart quite a bit and so I think that decart's going to be hanging out with aquinus over at C tier blaz Pascal is most famously known for his wager Pascal's wager it's this almost kind of probabilistic argument for why you should believe in God even if you like don't really believe it it's often mocked as kind of a silly argument but honestly it's not even like a major part of his project the pon say is doing a lot of other kinds of stuff sort of part of I believe

this like French jansenist project which philosophically is kind of an interesting move um got suppressed as a heresy um for reasons that I'll let a pope explain I guess and while you know I'm kind of remiss to say that anybody is like such a terrible philosopher if they've made it onto this list I honestly think with Pascal I don't know how much of it is like worth reading now I don't know I don't know when I would recommend to anybody that they need to go and read a lot more Pascal is just how necessary is

he so I think he's gonna be hanging out with Marcus Aurelius over at De here all right but this guy Baro Spinosa Spinosa I think is a beautiful writer the sort of geometric structure to the ethics is such an interesting read um if you kind of like mathematical or formalized reasoning but you like it about like big picture topics I think um Spinosa just is your guy I think Spinoza's God the pantheistic God is actually a very compelling picture in a lot of ways so if you're sort of inclined to any sort of theism like

spinozistic theism I could see being quite philosophically respectable and appealing Spinosa famously was excommunicated from his religious community a band that has never been lifted he is still sort of a condemned thinker in some Jewish circles um I don't know how seriously everybody takes it but it was certainly at least significant for him Spinosa was also part of this broader project of the Enlightenment along with a lot of other Enlightenment thinkers um but I think in many ways Spinosa represents some of the best of the Enlightenment in my mind um and I think we're going

to put Spinosa up there with Aristotle and say that he's an a tier philosopher I think he's certainly when you look at sort of the rationalist and the empiricist when you're studying early modern philosophy I think Spinosa is my favorite of the rationalists to read yeah so a TI for spin David Hume I think is the best of the empiricist I think that he's sort of the most honest of the empiricists that you see in the sort of big three he kind of takes empiricism and this kind of radical claims about the world and about

the limits of our knowledge more seriously even his weaker work A Treatise of human nature which actually is one of my favorite books is worth reading in depth because there are just so many interesting little arguments there's also some tricky stuff about Hume I think Hume sometimes relies on almost Scholastic principles um that he otherwise would want to reject because he's sort of an anti- Scholastic kind of thinker uh and so there's some questions about hume's intellectual consistency understood it as just an empiricist you would think that Hume is clearly like an ester philosopher in

my mind Hume stuff on ethics is a little less compelling it's actually kind of what makes empiricism less compelling to Me overall um because it really just ends up being reduced to sentiment I find that kind of a troubling consequence you know I'm sort of treating this list as there's going to be probably a lot of A's and B's decent amount of C's d one or two uh e and Fs very very rare and S is like incredibly rare for me I I would just be really reluctant to have too many s's and so I

think we're just going to make we're we're going to make Hime an e tier philosopher all right Emanuel Kant is sort of the guy you learn about when you first start learning about German idealism you know I always was educated at least for the most part aside from about 2 years in very analytic Department where you learn a lot about early modern philosophy and you learn about K K's taken very seriously and then none of the later German idealists are taken seriously and it's sort of a surprising thing right most people probably know Kant because

of deontology if you are familiar with I don't know trolley problem memes or something then you kind of know what Kant would say about the trolley problem um understanding ethics purely as a set of rules is probably the least interesting part of K moral framework and it's probably actually the least interesting part of kant's entire philosophical framework the rise of idealism itself I think is huge especially when you look at German philosophy but without Kant you don't get the German idealist without the German idealist I don't think you get the phenomenologist without the phenomenologist you

don't get basically any of what you would have as Continental philosophy uh and I think that's huge and so while Kant is maybe not personally a favorite of mine um I mean I'd be silly if I didn't say this right I think you got to put k along with Plato as kind of one of those great founders of a style of philosophy so I think Kant is s TI okay but the next philosopher on the list is Hegel and I love Hegel which sounds nuts because I don't think I could properly explain Hegel yet but

it's like I have this Burning passion to understand Hegel and to apply him in life in many ways I think also when you kind of look at how Kant became the dominant figure in German philosophy well that actually eventually kind of gets superseded by he bringing dialectical reasoning back to the four I think is uh pretty interesting and then sort of really systematizing it in a lot of ways and then obviously I think you can't talk about Hegel and his impact without talking about Marx and his impact Mark's OB obviously incredibly influential but almost all

of that is traced back to Hegel in some way and so Hegel is really high up there I love Hegel I wish he were higher than K but I'm trying to be at least semiobjective about this stuff uh so I'm going to put Hegel as an a tier philosopher I think Kirk has something to say for the modern reader in a way that a lot of philosophers don't like obviously have kirkgard is sometimes described as an existentialist I don't think that's an accurate label just gets the timing wrong but I think it's fair to call

him kind of a Proto existentialist and this then to sort of kind of group him into discussions about existentialism this idea that there are things we want to believe but we have to take a kind of leap of faith because uh that we really view as irrational but we want to do it because we're just compelled by something else some other force that isn't just reason I think that's just kard being incredibly honest about the human condition and not letting a kind of hyper rationalism take over our lives if you want to read about anxiety

to this day kard is I think one of the best writers to turn to um and something tells me that the kind of people who watch philosophy videos on YouTube probably want to understand anxiety a little bit better kirkgard might be someone that you want to read and so let's say kirkgard kirkgard is B tier that's and that's pretty good B tier B tier is good you know another thing about this list the philosophers wouldn't make it on this list if they weren't probably good so it is feeling a little topheavy but um you know

it is what it is I think to talk about KL Mars we need to separate Marx from all of Communism basically and what I mean by this is it's not totally fair to assess Marx by like the actions of the Soviet Union or like communist in Romania or whatever and yet it also has to be at least part of the assessment of him because he was part of you know popularizing uh communism he's not the founder there were Communists before Marx um but clearly that is a part of the discussion and so some of the

both virtues but also the many abuses that we saw in uh communist countries has to be sort of part of the assessment I think that a lot of people would benefit from Reading More marks I think marks had an insight into what work is like and what it feels like to be a worker in a way that few other philosophers really capture um and I think that's actually itself really important his views of History are very important and I love this like little letter he wrote to Arnold Rouge I believe on a kind of Ruthless

criticism of everything existing or maybe it's a ruthless critique um it's a great little short thing about sort of his intellectual project and you see this kind of young fervor in Marx that was really quite admirable um I read a good biography of Marx actually um that really kind of humanized him for me in a way that a good biography does and uh you see early on just this kind of passion in his writing that I found um very inspiring then when you read something like Capital um capital's boring capital is a boring boring book

going over pages and pages about wage tables and like linen exports and all sorts of things and I think it actually root the fact that capital is trying to be a serious work of Economics not so much a serious work of philosophy I mean it's philosophical in a lot of ways but it uh but it was an economic uh text and I think that is going to lower him slightly because actually most of his foundational super interesting work was more in economics even if other people have kind of disputed that work um clearly it had

an impact and so I think we're going to put Marx uh he's like teering the edge of b and a tier for me uh and so I wish I could put some put them in the middle here but I feel like we're going to say Marx's a tier all right John Stewart Mill he is a proponent of utilitarianism this is part of that Resurgence of Hedonism I alluded to when we talked about epicurus that's an interesting thing utilitarianism obviously hugely influential especially in the anglosphere and to this day I think utilitarianism kind of implicitly is

how a lot of us morally reason even if we would repudiate uh utilitarianism we often say things like well you're not hurting anybody um or you know it's fun you know we we like to apply to those kind of Proto utilitarian justifications on Liberty for instance is a really interesting uh work Mill was also kind of an early proponent of both animal rights and women's rights he's not perfect on any of these issues but um it turns out that like mill was really Forward Thinking in a lot of ways um and not just forward thinking

in the sense of like always thinking that history is progressing in the right direction which is a notion I think we should reject but just that a lot of us came to see sort of the soundness of his conclusions even though at the time he was being dismissed as overly radical it's hard though you need to talk about Mill's wife uh that's Harriet Taylor Mill um because she was actually kind of a silent collaborator in a lot of Mill's work um I think Mill utilitarianism not the biggest fan um but there's a lot of good

there too so we're going to put Mill in this very crowded beer people might know that recently I kind of fell in love with n after for a very long time kind of hating him and I really took the time to read the gay science for instance and I came away thinking wow I misunderstood him and even if you end up disagreeing with his conclusions the kind of forcefulness of his writing the kind of liveliness that is there on the page and also some of the insights and some of the deep challenges he has to

our sort of conventional way of thinking I feel like if you're a theist of any variety but especially a Christian um you probably need to read n if you want to be intellectually honest and in that way he's sort of the an anti-prop there right he sort of uh challenged you to rethink those things that you already believe I guess really that just might be a prophet I find Thus Spoke zarathustra sort of impossible to read um and uh kind of tedious to read to be honest but like the gay science I really like the

genealogy of morals that's good Beyond Good and Evil that's good so there's good stuff there there's some stuff that's kind of bad nisha's affiliation has often happened with uh the Nazis is kind of a later interpolation mostly by his sister I don't really think this is something we can attribute to n in fact n broke off basically a friendship and like a lifelong admiration uh with uh Vagner because of Vagner some of his strange sort of race science opinions I think that was a good thing on n's part so I think n is probably going

to hang out there with the a tier philosophers you know I am looking back at my list and um I can't do this um I'm sorry we we are revising this slightly uh Hegel is uh being moved to s tier Hegel is not an atier philosopher he's an S tier philosopher my conscience wouldn't let me continue all right gotl fragga is really like the founder of analytic philosophy in a lot of ways you could maybe attribute that to bur and Russell but I think with fra um we see really those early thoughts you know fra

really is just concerned with the foundations of arithmetic mathematics um and you would think that that would mean that he would be dry and uninteresting and yet he ends up doing interesting work in both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language and for that I think we have to like really admire him one concern about Fraga is that he had uh really no interest in other areas of philosophy and this is where we start to see a kind of siloing of philosophy where you could be a good philosopher who's only interested in one or two

things and um that's a bit of a bummer and that's going to limit him certainly can't be S tier he's not systematic enough and he's not um kind of approaching everything uh however uh he's going to be pretty high up there however his like project of logicism did sort of get demolished by bertron Russell with Russell's Paradox um that's pretty devastating to have like a one paragraph letter explain to you why why your whole book isn't going to work and yet oh there's so much interesting work there and I do love frga but I think

fra is going to be B tier too B tier's getting cra B tier is B tier is a crowded bracket all right Martin heiger obviously there kind of there's a kind of a dark shadow hanging over haiger because haiger um was a member of the Nazi party at one point um I know there are Defenders who like to talk about how he actually saved some of his Jewish colleagues and stuff I've never been dug into the historical record about this um I'm going to judge him mostly based on just the philosophical work um but like

with Hume I think it kind of bleeds in a little bit and so it's probably going to lower him uh hi I ER is you know honestly like the greatest phenomenologist I mean if you read being in time it's kind of astounding it's an astounding work of philosophy uh it's kind of weird coming from a guy who mostly was training in analytic departments to say that but no it genuinely is just a really really great book and I I wish more people read it with care and actually paid attention to its definitions I kind of

compare being in time to like a math textbook he defines something once for you and then he's just going to keep using the term and he assuming that you understood the definition and like with a math textbook if you don't understand what some function is doing or what something how something is defined the expectation is that you go back and just read the definition and I found that was the best way for me to read being in time I think heider is a b tier philosopher I was going to say that I think there should

be a few more people on this list that I should hate and I don't ever really say that I hate people to be honest but the next person here I have serious reservations about so um that's iron Rand I have been kind of planning an iron Rand video for a long time I read a biography of ir Rand I have read Atlas Shrugged and I have read through some of the uh I've also read through some of the writings about like um her writings on capitalism I even own her letters and also some of the

newsletters she used to send out so I actually kind of dug deep into iron Rand a bit um I say this because I find that people like to say if you say that you don't like IR Rand you get told that you were not smart enough to understand her and so I'm just going to to say I gave it an Earnest go and I tried to be really sympathetic here is what I came away with I think Rand is fundamentally dishonest about herself um and if I ever make the long Rand video that would be

the takeaway Rand was dishonest about herself Rand really is a nitian she is not I think the best form of a nitian but she's heavily influenced by n her biographer uh Jennifer Burns demonstrates this with a huge amount of evidence and I think that the IR ran Institute has edited some of her letters to some subtly take away some nature references because Rand started to say that her only influence was Aristotle and I think she's just lying about herself and if you understand some of her work as just this love of like Human Excellence and

this belief that everyone else who critiques sort of the excellent humans are fueled by resentment some of her writing becomes much more compelling it doesn't ultimately justify some of her other conclusions though and this is where we have to talk about you know that ran believes in selfishness as sort of a moral ideal but she also supports a kind of free market libertarianism and I when I was doing research for that video which I guess I should revive because I did a lot of research for the video but Michael humer who's kind of a different

sort of libertarian philosopher points out that selfishness is actually a very bad justification for a free market libertarianism which is supposed to be based on rights and about mutual respect uh selfishness just isn't going to get you there philosophically that's obviously a summary here but I remember reading humor and thinking that's like a devastating criticism of of Rand so her political project kind of falls apart um there are better defenses of libertarianism out there if you're looking for them she's dishonest about her own intellectual history and you know I didn't find her Pros awful but

I didn't love them either um even though occasionally when I atas I like liked a few of the characters at least some of the time but I honestly think understood as a philosopher and not as not just a pedler of political rhetoric I honestly think and I and I really mean this I think that Rand is f tier U I just don't think she's very good okay so I think I knew we would have to have at least like one real existentialist on this list and uh we have Camu now if you're going to talk

about sort of the existentialist to be honest you only really think of two people you think of sart and you think of Camu um you might think of Hana orent um I don't know if she ever claimed the title of existentialism but really it's s and Camu um I have a much lower opinion of sart but he's not on this list that was sort of semi- made for me and so I uh I'm not going to rank him with Camu uh I think he kind of gets that sort of absurdism uh and it resonates with

readers clearly there are there's a reason that so many people are kind of drawn to it I ultimately don't think that his views kind of stand up to scrutiny I don't think that if you are even going to go kind of down the sort of nihilism route Camu is sort of the style of nihilist that you would want to be this kind of the absurdism stuff I remember reading a great Thomas Nagel paper about uh the absurdity of life that really made me change my perspective there if I can find like a free pdf maybe

I'll link that down below it made me kind of suspicious of General Camu style reasoning I think as a novelist though much better as a novelist than as a philosopher but we're understanding him a philosopher here and he is D tier next up we have Judith Butler Judith Butler is really in like a rhetoric Department not even in a philosophy Department these days uh but very much like a theorist of sort of the Continental tradition did a lot of stuff on gender um I tried to read gender trouble I'll be honest there are very few

books that I've read that have just like totally defeated me but um but gender trouble was one of those books and I it's kind of a old complaint about Butler that their writing is hard to understand or possibly meaningless I understand this is an old complaint but man I felt like I was like walking through a swamp full of dangerous creatures when I was reading that book I felt like I never felt like a book was fighting me so much when I was reading it and I do think that more work could have be done

to make that work actually um maybe slightly easier to consume I'm sure that some critics would hear me say this and say that I'm just admitting my own ignorance or inability uh maybe but that kind of changes my estimation and I think Butler because of that is going to hang out probably about D tier as well um but here I'm going to admit that I haven't read a ton of Butler stuff um other than trying to read gender trouble and reading a few articles that have been written uh for more like popular audiences um the

popular audience stuff I think was easier but I did kind of always feel like there was like a slight of hand going on um I never felt there you know if you want stuff that's kind of on like the sort of radical side of the gender debates there are other good people to read as well um Butler is sort of the name that gets uh brought up a lot but I just I didn't love it I did not love reading any of Butler's work honestly someone put Jordan Peterson on this list um suggested it I

don't want to rank Jordan Peterson because um I already mentioned rank uh Ein Rand and I feel like it could go uh horribly wrong in the comment section if we talk about this I think also just think it's actually not fair to put Jordan Peterson on this list because I don't think Jordan Peterson is a philosopher that's not an insult by the way it's just do not a philosopher so uh just doesn't make sense to put him here he is a psychologist who's turned into a social critic or something like that um and people who

know psychology especially Yung could sort of do a better job uh of talking about his work than I could but the other the last person here is Peter Singer Peter Singer wrote a massively famous book called uh animal Liberation that is really really good actually and despite the fact that I'm not a vegan it's made me always feel a little unsettled by the fact that I'm not a vegan and it's like always in the back of my mind that maybe I'm doing something horrific uh every time I eat an animal product um and the fact

that a work of philosophy like that could stick with me is um probably an indication of some of its Force singer uh paper famine affluence and morality is I think one of the great examples of a modern ethics paper because it's short it's clear it's brief but it it really is incisive I believe jefford cin has a whole video just on that article and if I can find that I'll link that down below too um though I I always forget to link stuff down below when I say I will so if someone else finds it

and they want to link it down below that would be super helpful um he's also a founder of the effective altruism movement or he's kind of The Godfather of it if he's not like the founder um which has actually a lot going for it you might think but seems to always kind of Crash and Burn when put into implementation in a way that um I think speaks to a kind of necessary epistemic humility when we're coming to make our moral decisions and I think uh the EA movement often presents these complex issues as much less

complex than they are uh and they kind of fall into what I sometimes call like the sort of heterodox uh f poliy or the sort of sort of the the problem of being a heterodox thinker which is you start challenging conventional wisdom and it actually kind of leads you to not acknowledge gaps in your own position I think Peter Singer is probably C tier um yeah I've also faulted other philosophers for not being as interested in lots of issues um and I think with singer that's true does some things very well doesn't do everything very

well you know as a joke I thought I was going to put myself on this list but let's say let's face it the only way for it to be funny is for me to put myself an S tier or an F tier it's more accurate than I'm an f-tier philosopher why even go through the humiliation of moving myself into the f-tier bracket um okay well we have talked about I think I was going to say 20 I think I cut a few people in the end but uh you know talked about some philosophers try to

give you my quick opinion of them this is probably a very long video if you want to talk about uh where you disagree with me or how I really messed up this list I'm not super familiar with tier list anyways so I could see how that could be uh a little bit weird but anyway I would love to hear your thoughts down below and as always I'll see you soon