The Philosopher Tierlist

[Music] tier lists it started as a way for fighting game players to figure out which characters are the most viable and now it's a way for YouTubers to get views by sorting things into an arbitrary hierarchy of preference now I'll only be ranking a small percentage of philosophers in this video which reminds me only a small percentage of viewers are actually subscribed to this channel so feel free to press this button if you'd like it helps me out a lot I looked through some popular philosophy tier lists and considered the most well-known philosophers of all

time when I compiled this list and then I reduced the list down to philosophers that I have something interesting to say about after giving a brief description of each philosopher's most important ideas and maybe some anecdotes about their lives I'll be Loosely considering three factors with my rankings influence how much I agree with their ideas and if I would want to hang out with them now I know these aren't objective criteria obviously and this one is pretty much just based on Vibes but I think these criteria are fairly effective for determining the value of a

given philosopher in terms of relevancy truth and personal character so without any further Ado let's go back to the beginning Socrates Socrates is where it all began he's the OG of Western philosophy and he didn't even write anything down Socrates believed that dialogue was a much more effective way to think and do philosophy which is a system we now know as the Socratic method because of this method though pretty much all we know about Socrates comes from dialogues written by Plato it was a very humble guy too in one of his most famous quotes he

says that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing later in his life Socrates went on trial for corrupting the minds of the youth in Athens and for worshiping false gods he tried to defend himself but was ultimately unsuccessful and was found guilty by a majority vote he was sentenced to the death penalty and was forced to drink a cup of poisonous Hemlock in general I think his influence is pretty undeniable given that virtually all Western philosophy started with him and I think he just goes into a tier automatically because of that Plato

so even though Plato was a student of Socrates he's seen as possibly the greatest and most influential philosopher of all time Alfred North Whitehead once noted the safest General characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato which is just a terrific line one of Plato's most famous contributions is his theory of forms this is Plato's metaphysics which claims that the physical world is not the real or true world and that what is real is the absolute ideas or forms that underpin what we would usually understand as

real in this view what we perceive as things in the world are just imitations of non-physical Essences which are what they really are these are often understood as shapes or concepts but I think a better way to understand them is real patterns they are that which makes an entity greater than the sum of its parts another one of Plato's famous ideas is the allegory of the cave firelight is casting Shadows of figures on a cave wall and people take these Shadows to be real things someone decides to leave the cave and is initially Blinded By

the Light and must adjust this reveals that self-transformation and contact with the world are interconnected or that our relationship with the world is participatory not passive when the brave Explorer returns he's met with ridicule and this part is alluding to Socrates this allegory basically constitutes a myth of Enlightenment the wisdom that the Explorer achieves when he finds patterns that actually mirror reality emerges in conjunction with a sense of peace and Harmony remember that the word philosophy from the Greek word philosophia literally means love of wisdom so to sum things up Plato is probably one of

the greatest human Minds to ever exist and it would be ridiculous to put him anywhere outside of s tier Aristotle now we turn to Aristotle notice what Aristotle and Plato are doing in the painting of the Athenian academy by Raphael Plato is pointing up towards ideals towards the world of forms and Aristotle is saying hey chill out bringing things back down to earth Aristotle was very scientifically minded he basically invented what we now call biological taxonomy categorizing different plants and animals we find in the world as Plato's student he borrowed a lot of ideas from

him like forms or Essences but Aristotle didn't want to claim that that's all there is and what we see around us isn't actually real he believed that universals do exist within each instantiation of that Universal so the form of Apple exists within each apple but doesn't exist separately in some metaphysical world of forms Aristotle also invented logical syllogisms here's an example of one of those all tier list videos are click bait and bad this video is a tier list video therefore this video is Click bait and bad s tier Marcus Aurelius Marcus Aurelius the last

great emperor of Rome and famous stoic philosopher being the emperor he could have anyone killed if he wanted he could get drunk constantly he could have sex with anyone he could tax everyone's money as much as he wanted and so on but he didn't do any of that because of stoicism he had no desire to do any of this all he wanted to do was be the best possible Emperor he could be I doubt many people could have that level of restraint I know I wouldn't I won't talk about stoicism itself too much here because

I already made a whole video about it for most of modern philosophy stoicism just kind of sat there as a practical Guide to Life but didn't really impact the rest of the field too much but recently Marcus aurelius's influence has absolutely exploded with loads of self-help in popular philosophy books being written about stoicism and in terms of actually impacting my life stoicism is probably one of the most significant philosophies I definitely hang out with Marcus Aurelius given the opportunity but I'm guessing he would be a bit of a prick telling me that I'm indulging too

much in distractions and Escapes in any case he's going in a tier Machiavelli Machiavelli is one of the most famous evil or dark characters in Western philosophy his most famous work is the prince and it's basically a handbook on how to achieve political power by being as ruthless and treacherous as possible it's a tutorial for a tyrant [Music] and it was apparently Joseph Stalin's favorite book for Machiavelli the ultimate good for humans is attaining political power and then from there chasing more and more power he wants us to be free from Childish feelings of guilt

or morality for him there are no rules there is only Power brute force and brutality here's a good example of a Machiavellian act a ruler conquers another state and instructs his second in command to lay down the law brutal executions torture instilling fear all types of evil things the people now hate their new ruler then the ruler has his secret police kill the second in command and put his body in the town square and then gives out a decree saying that his second in command acted without his authority and was overly brutal the people now

fear the ruler but no longer hate him Machiavelli would consider this good politics to be as Fair as possible Machiavelli did reveal some uncomfortable truths about how to achieve power but it would be disastrous to actually use his ideas in practice as a Guide to Life nobody in their right mind would want to work for a Machiavellian or have a Machiavellian work for them it makes it so that we can't be social animals in the first place D tier Descartes Descartes is usually seen as the father of modern philosophy who set up most of the

problems philosophy deals with it was also an important figure in the Scientific Revolution the Cartesian plane you used in math class is from Descartes his method involved a ruthless systematic skepticism which he used to try to find the fundamental fabric of existence and from there he could try to build knowledge he focused on sources of knowledge the senses for instance can't be trusted because they can deceive you an example he uses is dreams when you're in a dream your sensory experience is basically the same as when you're awake but nothing you perceive is actually real

it turned out that the only thing he couldn't doubt was thought itself since he has to be thinking in order to be doubting in the first place so from there he gets I think therefore I am and sets up his system of mind-body dualism unfortunately the legacy of mind-body dualism has been pretty annoying for people studying or philosophizing about Consciousness if the mind and body are separate kinds of things then how do we explain the interaction between them in general most philosophers these days try their best to avoid being dualists partly because it's unfashionable but

also because it doesn't really work Descartes also believed that animals don't feel pain since they have no conscious experience like humans do a crying dog for Descartes is no different from a creaky gear that needs oil there's also a pretty relatable anecdote about Descartes he was arranged to give lessons to Queen Christina three times a week at 5am they didn't really like each other very much and this was also a problem for Descartes because he often slept from Midnight until noon then spent the first section of his day hanging out in bed a few months

after giving lessons to the queen he developed pneumonia and died some argue that the shift in his sleep schedule weakened his immune system so Descartes died because he woke up too early I think I'll put him in seat here Spinoza Spinoza is one of the most challenging philosophers I've come across his main work the ethics is extremely Technical and literally takes the form of a geometric proof with axiom's definitions and everything not only is he challenging to read but his work also challenged the dominant Jewish and Christian religious ideas at the time and Spinoza ended

up excommunicated from both communities after this happened he would lie down in front of the synagogue at the Sabbath to let all the people praying know how much contempt he had for them the main idea he challenges is that there's a God in the sky somewhere who created the world and watches over us his point was that given our modern scientific knowledge of the world we shouldn't believe that if we could just investigate deep enough into the skies we will find heaven and God he also urged that if there is a God why would he

concern himself with us this was after the copernican revolution so we knew that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe but Spinoza wasn't entirely an atheist he just rejected the doctrines of judeo-christianity he disagreed with Descartes mind-body dualism and instead argued that everything in the universe is composed of a single substance which is a view called monism and Spinoza refers to that substance as God or nature so since there's no God in heaven Spinoza takes that sense of wonder awe and reverence and applies it to life in the universe itself and this view is

usually called pantheism spinosis influence is pretty enormous Hegel once said that you were either a spinozaist or not a philosopher at all and child de Luz named him the prince of philosophers even outside of philosophy The pantheist View has also been attributed to people like Albert Einstein Alan Watts Terence McKenna Carl Young and Carl Sagan so to conclude Spinoza is pretty high tier for me I think pantheism is one of the coolest and most humanist theologies his influence is unquestionable and according to personal accounts by people like leibenus Spinoza was a very char arming and

kind man he goes in a tier lock John Locke was a major Enlightenment thinker who's pretty significant in political philosophy but unfortunately that's not really my area of focus as for his epistemology he argued that the mind is a blank slate when we're born or a tabula Raza all our knowledge is determined by our experience and we aren't born with any particular ideas or predispositions so basically Locke would say nurture over nature it's pretty much been proven that this isn't the case both the environment and our genetic makeup determines our beliefs and actions but Locke's

idea was pretty important in the development of empiricism the gloss over his political philosophy he was in favor of the separation of church and state and he also emphasized the right to life liberty and property which ended up being very influential to the U.S Declaration of Independence and the U.S Constitution his influence was pretty significant people like Barkley Kant and Hume drew a lot from his work and virtually all political philosophy owes a debt to his writing unfortunately he did have have some really bad takes though even outside of tabular Raza despite writing against slavery

he was an investor in the slave trading Royal Africa company and was also in favor of child labor there aren't really any interesting anecdotes about his personal life so I'll just skip that part and stick him in seat here Berkeley so weirdly his name is in fact pronounced Barkley even though the university named after him is pronounced Berkeley Barkley is most famous for advancing an idealist metaphysics he argued that the material objects in the external world do not exist and only exist in the realm of the mind and ideas so for Barkley in simple terms

when a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it it does not make a sound although in his view it would still be perceived by God's infinite mind since that perceives everything one of my favorite arguments he has for this is the challenge argument try to conceive of an object that is unconceived you can't extract the thing being represented from the representation so the distinction between real objects and the representations is still nested in ideas in general though I'm not sure I'm totally sold on his articulation of idealism Barkley was also unfortunately

kind of a bad dude when he moved to America he purchased a number of enslaved African people to work on his Plantation and he also advocated for opening a missionary school to convert children of indigenous people to Christianity and he proposed to kidnap indigenous children if peaceful methods of separating them from their parents were unsuccessful I'll put Barkley in D tier Hume David Hume was an empiricist and argued against reason as the source for metaphysical or epistemic truths at the time people considered him a skeptic but now he's considered more of a naturalist in that

he tried to understand human nature rather than try to justify beliefs Hume was a well-known party animal and booze hound in his day he started drinking Bordeaux in his teenage years and at 17 years old he was prescribed a pint of Clare per day to deal with a bout of depression Humes and burrow house was a well-known location for dinner parties among other Enlightenment figures one of his major intellectual moves is known as hume's fork and no that's not referring to his size and enjoyment of food Hume split truth into two categories relations of ideas

things like all Vixens are foxes or euclidean geometry and matters of fact like the claim Hume was born in Scotland he used his Fork to attack our rational justification for ethics and causation he argues that you can't determine morality or value through reason since you can't arrive at claims like being generous is good through matters of fact or relations of ideas and causation works the same way you can't derive at causation through relations of ideas because negating the claim when I push this coffee mug it will move forward results in when I push this coffee

mug it will not move forward which is still an intelligible claim you also can't use matters of fact if you say well every time I've pushed this coffee mug in the past it moved forward so it will do the same again this presupposes the uniformity of nature which is a circular argument why is the universe uniform well because it has been previously Hume argues that our causal predictions don't come from reason but they come from Custom or habit we make causal judgments because it's a fundamental capacity of our psychology Hume had some other injury interesting

insights too like arguing for a compatible middle way between Free Will and determinism called compatibilism and he was also skeptical about the existence of the self arguing that our sense of a continuous identity is an illusion this notion of self is pretty cool in my opinion and it's also associated with Buddhist teachings along with insights people have in meditation overall Hume was incredibly influential I tend to agree with him on most things and he also seems like a genuinely fun guy to hang out with s tier can't Emmanuel Kant was one of the most influential

philosophers of all time and he acted as a kind of transition towards the rise of Romanticism in culture and literature and the development of German idealism in philosophy it's common to talk about modern philosophy in terms of the pre-kantian and post-kantian eras he basically wrote about every aspect of philosophy but here I'll focus on his ethics and epistemology his ethical Doctrine is the categorical imperative only do things that you would also want to be a universal law so you shouldn't lie or steal for example because you wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone

was constantly lying and stealing but hold on suppose you're a German person during World War II and you're hiding 15 Jewish people under your floorboards to protect them from Nazi authorities one day a Nazi comes to your doorstep and asks if you're hiding any Jewish people here obviously you want to lie now I'll talk a bit about his epistemology and critique of metaphysics from his work the critique of pure reason for Kant when we experience things out there in the world those things in themselves as they actually are independent of our perspective are unknowable he

calls this the numinal realm we can only ever experience the world through our representation of it which he calls phenomena these representations create a kind of filter for the things in themselves which includes the conceptual scheme of his 12 categories and the formal intuition of space and time so those 12 categories along with space and time aren't actually in the external world of the numeral realm the mind takes the things in themselves and imposes these categories a three-dimensional spatial grid and the flow of time onto them okay so now we'll talk a bit about Kant

as a person he was kind of a weird guy he never married and he lived in an isolated province in Prussia Cronenberg for his entire life he never even traveled more than a few hours away he lived a rigorously disciplined life he woke up at 4 45 a.m every morning and went to bed at 10 pm he was so precise and regimented in his routine that the other citizens in cowingsburg would set their watches based on when Kant would pass by their doors on his daily walk after lunch Kant was also unbelievably racist and wrote

extensively about human races as a part of his anthropological work he proposed a full-blown theory of race with a hierarchy of four racial categories with white Europeans at the top then Asian people African people and Native American people Kant is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of all time even though I don't really agree with his moral theory his critique of metaphysics fundamentally changed philosophy forever as a person I probably wouldn't want to hang out with Kant his racism and overall weirdness means I won't be putting him right at the top he's going into

beat here schopenhauer schopenhauer was a bit of a Debbie Downer which is honestly fair enough since his father committed suicide and his mother was very cold and distant throughout his entire life and eventually threw him out of the house I already talked about some of schopenhauer's metaphysics and My Philosophy Iceberg video so here I'm just gonna summarize it he drew heavily from Kant and developed an atheist system that rejected the dominant view of German idealism the biggest thing he drew from Kant is the idea that our knowledge of the external world can never be direct

because it is always mediated by experience and he believed that the world is just a complex of appearances that happen through mental representations as an answer to what constitutes the thing in itself from kant's work schopenhauer proposes will which is the essence of all things and strives towards existence and life an interesting thing about schopenhauer is that he was one of the first Western thinkers to be interested in eastern thought having read the upanishads and some Buddhist texts he was also a pro-animal rights guy which is pretty cool he wrote that it may be confidently

asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man he also had a series of pet poodles which he apparently loved and cared for very much unfortunately just like many philosophers this old he had some really awful takes too he was extremely misogynistic claiming that women are childish frivolous and short-sighted but he did give them some compliments too saying they are more sober in their judgment than men are and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others he was also very racist claiming that the white races are more cultured and have

more sensitivity to creativity although he was opposed to slavery viciously condemning the treatment of slaves in the United States so to summarize his philosophy is fascinating and widely influential his interest in eastern thought and belief in animal rights is pretty cool too but his misogyny and racism takes him down a few pigs for me c tier Hegel Hegel with his intense stare in incomprehensible writing style is one of the big boys of philosophy one of his Central Concepts is Geist which roughly translates to Ghost spirit mind or intellect for Hegel all human beings form one

giant Collective subject called Geist which is a kind of Soul or greater consciousness of the human race the progression of human history is seen as the life story of this subject hegel's project in Broad Strokes was the last great attempt to articulate the meaning and significance of all of Human Experience he seriously believed that he could tell us what the ultimate purpose of human history is which is an absolutely massive philosophical project I think it's fair to say that most people think he was unsuccessful but the fact that he was bold enough to even attempt

something so all-encompassing is definitely impressive Hegel would go on to massively influence Karl Marx who basically took hegel's philosophy of history and converted it into a material metaphysics in contrast to hegel's idealist metaphysics so if there was no Hegel there wouldn't be Karl Marx and so there wouldn't be a Soviet Union and so most of the major events in the 20th century would have looked completely different because of that I think it's safe to say that Hegel is one of the most materially influential philosophers along with Marx and angles he also influenced philosophers like the

Frankfurt School post-modernists like dareda existentialists like South de Beauvoir and Kierkegaard and loads of others so even though I'm not totally sold on hegel's absolute idealism or even his philosophy of History his influence is enormous and the scope of his philosophical project is remarkable be tear Kierkegaard Kierkegaard is often seen as the granddaddy of existentialism most of his thought has to do with tackling the mixture between humanistic rationality and the tradition of faith and religion he looked at the previous attempts to reconcile reason and Faith such as people like Hegel and argued that we must

instead pick one so which are we to choose religious Faith or rational certainty a human-centered approach or a god-centered approach what grounds do we have to choose one over the other Kierkegaard urges that no matter what we choose when we attempt to prove or argue for that position it will always presuppose that initial decision if we choose reason we will appeal to reason and rationality in our arguments but if we choose faith we will appeal to religious texts so he tries to dig a little deeper into this problem and he finds that if you're oriented

towards the pleasurable or aesthetic life you will always choose the humanist rational side and if you're oriented towards ethics and principles you will always choose the side of faith and metaphysics he argues that at some point in a human's life they will have to choose between the aesthetic life or the ethical life this argument was part of his work either or which was split into two parts the first part either dealt with the aesthetic life and the second part or dealt with the ethical life ultimately for Kierkegaard you can't come to any kind of compromise

between the two it's either or and here's why Kierkegaard is considered the first existentialist he presents us with the Grim horrifying view that there's absolutely no basis for either decision you just have to make the decision and there's no standards upon which to make that decision good luck so for this irreconcilable situation Kierkegaard urges that we should just choose the ethical life and we should take a leap of faith with no rationality or reason behind it so Kierkegaard overall is undoubtedly influential partly because of existentialism even though counter-intuitively many existentialists rejected religion he was also

tremendously influential in theology but as with most people here he did have some pretty bad takes for instance his first published essay was criticizing the movement for women's Liberation and many of his earlier Works expressed misogynistic statements and in general from what I know about his thought I don't really agree with his assessment of The Human Experience personally if I had to make the choice between faith and metaphysics or the aesthetic humanist life full of pleasure and culture I would pick the aesthetic life every time seat here marks basically everyone knows this guy given that

he's one of the most influential human figures of all time you know you've made it when your name is used as an ism or an IST he was an interesting guy when he was a student at the University of Bonn he seemed to have spent most of his time getting drunk and being disorderly he joined a radical political group and was co-president of a drinking society that antagonized the more aristocratic organizations on campus he also avoided military conscription because of his quote weak chest which was a vague diagnosis that was probably exacerbated by his bad

diet drinking late night partying and chain smoking he often carried a gun to defend himself and at one point he accepted a duel with someone and got a cut over his left eye after about a year at Bonn he transferred to the University of Berlin and seemed to mature a bit after that Karl Marx's primary achievement historical materialism was a philosophical project that fundamentally changed geopolitics social struggles and historical and sociological analysis to summarize the intellectual context Hegel attempted to revive philosophical idealism by attempting to find a counter example to the popular materialism and Enlightenment

science of the time Hegel posited this if everything in the world can be described by mathematical laws then what are the mathematical laws for human history and human development Hegel argued that we can't account for these things without positing a free human consciousness which he called Geist Marx's goal with historical materialism was to answer Hegel and argue that human history can be described through scientific laws and understood as a materialist causal process where Hegel identified Consciousness as the fundamental unique character of humanity Marx posits something more fundamental the necessity for labor to ensure our survival

the unique characteristic of humans for Marx is our ability to produce things with cognitive foresight manipulating and changing our environment to fit our historical needs history is seen as the way humans engage in labor and survive in class Societies in particular the primary driver for historical change is a change in the mode of production which is a combination of productive forces like human labor power tools and machinery and the relations of production like property power and the relations between social classes I'm not very well versed in Marxism so this was a very broad overview if

you want to dive deeper I would highly recommend the lecture series reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey which is all on YouTube so to sum up Marx he seems like a cool guy that I would definitely want to hang out with his influence is undeniable given that he fundamentally changed several disciplines and changed the course of history he's not just one of the most influential philosophers but he's one of the most influential people in human history a tier Nietzsche ah Nietzsche the philosopher with the hardest name to spell he was a very poetic philosopher his

most personal book the gay science is comprised of a series of aphorisms poems riddles jokes and songs which aren't more than a few paragraphs long Nietzsche tries to overcome what he calls the dreary systematic nature of traditional philosophy which he thought involved a kind of heavy-handed seriousness rather than being systematic he tries to be edifying playful and mischievous with a very readable prose compared to other German philosophy even though figures like Kant and Hegel can be very rewarding reading them is like crawling through miles of broken glass his most famous quote is God is dead

and we have killed him this doesn't have to do with Humanity killing God in a physical sense but it's concerned with the lack of a unifying truth to guide Humanity he said God is dead rather than God doesn't exist because it has the connotation of a rupture and change in our way of life rather than merely a metaphysical claim he said we have killed him because this shift is a consequence of our Collective disengagement with religion another nietzschean idea I find really fascinating is his concept of eternal return this is the idea that the Universe

has been repeating itself and will continue to repeat itself for an infinite number of times across Infinite Space and Time there's no spiritual reincarnation into another being but just the repetition of our own lives over and over for eternity we've already lived Our Lives countless times and will continue to live it over and over again forever he considers this Prospect potentially horrifying and paralyzing which it is but also urged that we must embrace it by affirming life and achieving Amor fatih love of Fate Nietzsche had loads of other key ideas like the apollonian versus dionysian

advocating for perspectivalism the will to power and the Ubermensch but I don't have time for those in this video unfortunately Nietzsche was enormously influential but mostly in the Continental tradition some examples include post-modernist thinkers like Deluge derida and Foucault and existentialist thinkers like Heidegger and sartro his poetic almost artistic philosophy is one of a kind in the western tradition and in general I don't have any major problems with his ideas s tier Heidegger Martin Heidegger is seen as one of the most important 20th century philosophers existentialism for instance was in some ways born out of

Heidegger's work along with Kierkegaard and he also made significant contributions to phenomenology influencing thinkers like Merlo Ponte Heidegger was a student of huseral and his most important work being in time was published in hussarel's journal and was also dedicated to husaro there was a deep student teacher relationship between the two huceral made developments in phenomenology and Heidegger in turn transformed those developments into his phenomenological existentialism one of Heidegger's main projects was to revive ontology the subset of philosophy from the Greeks that concerns itself with being understanding being or ontology is like trying to bite your

own teeth it's very difficult to make any Headway by analyzing individual beings like tables and chairs Heidegger instead follows hussarel's phenomenological method of trying to understand being through introspection to achieve this he creates a theory of human existence which he calls dazine which doesn't translate from German the closest approximation is human being in the world which is finite contingent and uncertain a constellation of mental States so in that sense we can only come to understand being from the perspective of being a human being what what this all sounds awfully circular and strange but that's just

the result of trying to make sense of something like being for Heidegger the main responsibility we have as humans is to be authentically concerning ourselves with capital B being rather than lowercase b beings and confront the reality of human existence unfortunately later in his life Heidegger became a literal Nazi as I mentioned his teacher hussarel was a significant Mentor for him but unfortunately hussarel was Jewish so when husrol was moved out of academic life Heidegger publicly disassociated himself from him and ended up taking his chair at the University of Freiburg it's always a really sad

situation when philosophers who seem to have a particularly profound insight into Life In The Human Experience end up letting us down in such an awful way Heidegger was definitely a piece of [ __ ] in his personal life and I would probably never hang out with him I find his ideas interesting but ultimately obscure and impenetrable to the point of ridiculousness which is a pretty popular attitude people have towards his work his influence on existentialism post-modernism and other areas of Continental philosophy can't really be ignored though so I'm putting him in D tier Freud Freud

was primarily a neurologist but his writing was also really influential in philosophy and culture in general so I figured I'd include him here he was the founder of psychoanalysis a method of clinical therapy to treat mental illness one of the main ideas he developed was the unconscious the aspect of our psyche that we aren't consciously aware of for Freud this unconscious is based on the theory of repression ideas or memories are repressed but stay in the mind unconscious but operative and can reappear in Consciousness under certain circumstances we also manifest these unconscious desires all the

time like when we make mistakes here's what's called a Freudian slip which you've probably heard of let's say I accidentally called Dr Freud Dr fraud that's not just a verbal mistake it's a psychological mistake it indicates that I unconsciously or secretly believe him to be a fraud and that belief manifests itself in my mistake there was also a popular instance of a Freudian slip in the news a little while ago and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq I mean of Ukraine all right anyway another one of

his famous ideas is the Oedipus complex Freud believed that every single young boy goes through a phase in life where he sometimes unconsciously hates his father and wants to have sex with his mother this theory was named after the mythological story of Oedipus who accidentally fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother he was also very interested in dreams and thought that the main function of dreaming is wish fulfillment our deepest unconscious desires are supposedly satisfied in our dreams as a person Freud was a pretty interesting guy too he constantly

chain smoked cigars while working and believed that it enhanced his capacity to work he was also a major proponent and user of cocaine and believed it was a cure for many mental and physical problems eventually after a series of reported addictions and overdoses he stopped publicly recommending cocaine but continued using it himself so personally I think the Freudian slip Dr fraud is fairly accurate most modern psychologists don't really take most of his theories seriously and neither do I he does seem like an interesting guy to hang out with though I'll put him in seat here

Wittgenstein Wittgenstein was a 20th century philosopher who had a background in mathematics and Engineering which led to a strict mathematical rigor in formality that you don't really find in other Western philosophers his work is a bit tricky to sum up because there's a sharp distinction between his early philosophy in the tractatus and his later philosophy in the philosophical investigations his early work was associated with the movement of logical positivism and he was concerned with finding the logical relationship between propositions in the world his goal with the tractatus was to solve all philosophical Problems by accounting

for logical relationships the last sentence in the tractatus really sums up wittgenstein's attitude with respect to philosophy he writes what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence however in the philosophical investigations he ended up rejecting many of these assumptions and argued that the meaning of words should be understood as their use within a quote language game not that language game this language which game is essentially the context that determines the meaning of a word the word fire for instance could be a warning the answer to a question or some other kind of

communication so instead of language being characterized as a set of precise rigorous and logical propositions language is understood as ambiguous and dependent on context for Wittgenstein good philosophy is not a matter of constructing theories but deconstructing questions while I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that you have to admit it's a pretty based attitude he also even encouraged his students to quote give up academic philosophy and do something useful I'll put them in B tier Sartre Jean-Paul Sartor was one of the key figures in existentialism and wrote extensively as a philosopher novelist playwright and political

activist politically he co-founded a socialist group with Simone de Beauvoir and some others and actively engaged with Communism until eventually moving towards anarchism later in life there's a very cool photograph of sartora and Simone de Beauvoir riding in a boat with none other than Fidel Castro sartra held a lifelong open relationship with Simone de beauvor which was quite radical at the time given the cultural assumptions about marriage and monogamy the main premises of existentialism and by extension sartre's philosophy is that there's no meaning in the world in itself there is no God and there is

no objective morality Sartre argued that existence precedes essence we must create our own moral systems and values rather than having them to begin with another major theme in his philosophy is authenticity even though there's no objective morality Sartre argued that we should still avoid deformity and live authentically or in other words we should ensure that our beliefs and actions line up if what we believe in how we behave is incongruent sarch recalls this bad faith in general I tend to sympathize with most of sartre's politics and philosophy however sarcher is still a little controversial with

the left since he publicly supported Israel during The Six Day War which can be construed as inconsistent with anti-colonialism he was also one of the French intellectuals who signed the extremely controversial petition against age of consent laws but to be a little charitable there was some context to this at the time in France there were a number of social revolutions happening like LGBT rights civil rights the feminist movement and so on and French intellectuals were signing many petitions every day with the ultimate goal of Freedom still a bit weird to sign this kind of petition

though sartre's influence is pretty broad including the other existentialists some postmodernists like DeLuise and lacan and Marxist theorists like Gita board I'd say the existentialists would also be some of the most fun people to hang out with since they spent a lot of their time just chilling at cafes smoking cigarettes drinking coffee and discussing philosophy I'll put him in a tier Simone de Beauvoir Simone de Beauvoir who I mentioned earlier was also a key figure in existentialism even though she didn't consider herself a philosopher in contrast to Sartre de Beaufort consistently criticized oppression in her

philosophy sarcher would only develop an account of Oppression later in his career she shared the existentialist view that there's no rigid moral code or principle you should follow like a utilitarian or kantian ethics instead her view is an ethics of relation and action for her ethics is ambiguous and you can never be totally sure if what you're doing is right or wrong we are embedded in a world of interconnected Freedom this Freedom isn't the power to control outcomes but the power to pursue open Futures to will yourself free is necessarily to will others to be

free since the freedom of others broadens our possible Futures and possible meaning we can find in our lives so our own freedom is fundamentally connected with the freedom of others because it enhances our personal freedom rather than inhibits it as for her account of Oppression describes it as a systematic negation of people's freedom in order to promote the advantage of others the one solution to this is to deny the suppression and Revolt even violence can be justified in cases of Oppression if it's necessary to rescue the freedom of individuals de Beauvoir also wrote extensively on

feminist philosophy particularly in her work The Second Sex she described gender not as a biological characteristic but a situation of becoming so in this sense gender is understood as a social construction women have their freedom disproportionately constrained by facticity the existentialist concept for the things that shape us outside of our control like biology culture and history in particular as the title succinctly describes women are seen as secondary or other men are considered the neutral mode of being whereas women are the negative or secondary mode of being this creates a unique situation of Oppression because the

division of the Sexes precedes human history which makes it distinct from class struggle or racial struggle and gender oppression can hide behind the guise of natural order de Beauvoir is one of the most interesting and eye-opening philosophers that I've personally read because I wasn't really exposed to feminist Theory prior to reading her work her influence also transcended that of other existentialists since she also influenced many feminist philosophers unfortunately she also signed that petition against age of consent laws in France so that's a bit of a drag in any case I'm putting her in a tier

kemu many people associate Camus with the existentialist movement but he rejected that label and preferred to call himself an absurdist the Absurd is all about the conflict between the human desire to find meaning and value in life and our inability to actually find these with any certainty it can also be understood as the conflict between the rationality of humans and the irrational Universe between what we intend to do and what actually ends up happening or between subjective judgment and objective value in his famous essay the myth of Sisyphus Camus compares the absurdity of human life

with Sisyphus the figure in Greek mythology who is condemned to continuously push a boulder up a mountain watch it roll down again and then do that all over again forever for Camus suicide is the most basic way out to escape the absurdity of the universe in fact he urged that the most important philosophical question is whether or not one should commit suicide kamu argued that we should actually embrace this absurd condition of our which is encapsulated in the final line of the essay the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart one must imagine

Sisyphus happy camoud died at the age of 46. he had spent New Years with his family along with his publisher and his family Camus wife and kids went back to Paris by train but Camus decided to return in his Publisher's luxury car instead on the ride back they crashed into a tree and camoud died instantly Camus was found with the train ticket in his pocket there was some speculation that Camus was actually assassinated by the KGB because of his criticism of the Soviet Union in general I think AMU is pretty cool his influence isn't anything

massive but his political thought and alternative path to Communism was very influential to the new left his absurdism was also the first philosophical view I read about back when I was in high school so his thought was what started this hobby for me I'd also love to grab a beer with this guy a tier Ain ran Ein Rand was a 20th century writer and philosopher who developed a philosophical system she called objectivism so you can already tell she's very humble if she considered her philosophy objective her ideas mostly come from her fictional books Atlas Shrugged

in The Fountainhead the main tenet of objectivism is a bit counter-intuitive essentially selfishness is good and altruism is evil she was a rationalist who believed that reason is the only way to acquire knowledge she rejected religion and supported laissez-faire capitalism Rand was not an academic didn't participate at all in academic discourse and she was very dismissive towards her critics as a consequence of this along with her lack of methodological rigor most academic philosophers dismissed her and didn't hold her in very high regard there's a hilarious anecdote from an episode of The Simpsons where Maggie is

sent to the Ein Rand school for Tots there are signs around the school like helping is futile and the school encourages toddlers to develop the bottle within Mrs Simpson do you know what a baby's saying when she reaches for a bottle Baba she's saying I am a leech our aim here is to develop the battle within that sounds awfully harsh so pacifiers are banned and confiscated if the babies bring them in Maggie ends up leading the other babies in a rebellion against the teacher to steal back their pacifiers but the most hilarious part is how

the Ein Rand Society responded to this obviously negative portrayal of Reign's philosophy they called Matt Groening the creator of The Simpsons to say that they were amazed at the reference to Rand and they also asked him if the show was making fun of them in general I'm not really a fan of Rand her philosophy of selfishness and rejection of altruism just seems cruel to me she had some other bad takes too she said that European colonists were fully justified in invading and taking the land of American indigenous people and called homosexuality immoral and disgusting advocating

that we should repeal all the laws concerning it and hypocritically after spending her life advocating against programs like Social Security and Medicare she got lung cancer in 1974 after for decades of smoking and enrolled in Social Security and Medicare for the rest of her life at her funeral a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket F tier Nick land I covered Nick land extensively in the lower layers of My Philosophy Iceberg video so I won't talk about him too much here some of the ideas I talked about

there include the Lemurian time War hyperstitions hypervirus and the hyperestational character DC Barker he was a leader of the 1990s group cybernetic culture Research Unit or ccru which Incorporated a surreal blend of philosophy with cyberpunk and Gothic horror Aesthetics during this time he participated in Virtual Futures which were cyber culture conferences in one of these sessions Nick land was found quote lying on the ground croaking into a mic while Robin McKay plays jungle records in the background most of Nick Lan's early work is associated with the political philosophy of accelerationism which wants to accelerate capitalist

growth in technological change as much as possible to bring on a new world after accelerationism land helped develop an edgy political philosophy called the dark Enlightenment which is anti democracy anti-agalitarian and eventually became associated with the alt-right Nick land is probably one of the least influential and most obscure philosophers of all time I find some of his ideas really interesting to think about but in general I don't agree with any of his political philosophy or edgy dark Enlightenment values if given the opportunity though it probably would be pretty fun to hang out with him and

listen to jungle music while he Rambles on about Kant and beaudryard detier Jordan B Peterson if you're watching this video I'm guessing you're already pretty familiar with this guy Jordan Peterson is in a state of quantum superposition between being a jungian psychologist and being a philosopher so I was hesitant to include him in this video but then I thought to myself how else am I supposed to put him in the thumbnail Jordan Peterson Rose to popularity not by his psychological or philosophical work but by being a contrarian about transgender issues criticizing bill c-16 in Canada

because he thought it constituted quote compelled speech his popularity continued to explode after he was interviewed by English journalist Kathy Newman where they discussed gender equality the gender pay Gap freedom of speech and transgender rights Peterson's bigotry has been covered by YouTube video essayists Ad nauseam to the point that making a Jordan Peterson video is basically a rite of passage for this medium for that reason I'll be skipping that for now and I'll direct you to Contour points excellent video about him instead I'll touch on a couple particularly bad takes had Peterson is skeptical about

climate change saying that quote you can't trust the data because too much ideology is involved on an episode of The Joe Rogan podcast he also made the pretty insane claim that there is no such thing as climate because quote climate and everything are the same word well that's because there's no such thing as climate right climate and everything are the same word and I that's what bothers me about the climate change types it's like this is something that bothers me about it technically it's like well climate is about everything so okay but your models aren't

based on everything your models are based on a set number of variables yeah so that means you've reduced the variables which are everything to that set so his problem with climate science is that the model doesn't fully account for every aspect and influence of climate I wonder what he'll do when he finds out about how psychologists model personality because that definitely doesn't account for everything his epistemology is also very religiously flavored in a lecture he has claimed that the Bible is the precondition for truth it's not exactly clear how the Bible is the precondition for

claims like two plus two equals four or all Bachelors are unmarried though Peterson also famously misunderstands post-modern philosophy and characterizes modern Academia as being plagued by postmodern neo-marxists if you want to Deep dive into the problems with conflating post-modernism and Marxism there's a really good video by cck philosophy on the subject to conclude Jordan Peterson Rose to prominence by being a contrarian and then continued to become even more popular among young men who need to be told to make their beds to be fair his actual work in Psychology and self-help isn't bad and some of

the advice he gives tends to actually be pretty decent but his consistently awful takes and word salad lectures kind of Ruin him for me personally F tier so this is my final list it's worth mentioning again that this ranking is entirely arbitrary rating philosophers to begin with is a pretty silly thing to do but if anything I hope this video provided a useful rundown for most of the major Western philosophers thanks for making it this far into this ridiculously long video if you want to see more of me press this button and if you want

to help other people see my stuff hit this other button thanks [Music]