Who are you favorite intellectuals?

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He was smarter than Albert Einstein.

ruveyn

Dang... 4 out of your list are on my list!

I would add Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly - having read almost every word of the Whole Earth Catalog, Coevolution Quarterly, and Whole Earth Review. And David Frawley.

Newton very well could have been on the autism spectrum.

Interesting fact: Newton died a virgin. And considered his lifelong celibacy to be his greatest accomplishment in life.

Hmm... that is pretty interesting.

What I find interesting about Newton are his unorthodox theological views. Like, I hear he wrote that calling Christ to God to be a form of idolatry.

Newton was an incredibly religious man. He was basically a hardcore christian when it came down to it. He had many mystic interests, like astrology and alchemy. He also loved cats and invented the cat door.

Newton denied the Trinity.

ruveyn

popularisation of those ideas is an accomplishment in itself. and please, stop blowing steam out of your ass, that's really not doing your credibility any favours.

personally I'd go for Herbert Marcuse, Karl Popper and Roland Barthes.

So did Thomas Jefferson. I am not sure how Jefferson felt about cats.

Yes, how would the world go on without Dawkin's bestsellers?

the Bible sells much better so there has to be some balance, yin, yang and s**t like that

leonardo, telsla,hawkins, jerry lewis

Intel insiders topic

Sartre (of course), Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Curie, Sir Martin Gilbert, are a few of the more famous ones. Also Dr. Seuss.

Also many who are obscure but I like their ideas. Too many to name here.

Intellectual writers include Beckett, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky.

All have influenced my way of thinking.

Edit: How could I forget Charles Darwin, and Sir Jonathan Miller? Here they are.

Last edited by sartresue on 02 Feb 2009, 4:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nope. Isaac Newton was a Unitarian.

From looking at his CV (http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/CV.shtml), its clear that, like all scientist, he started off his career doing his own research, although to be true it doesnt sound that great and wasnt published in the best journals (his first article published during his Phd was entitled 'The ontogeny of a pecking preference in domestic chicks' and was published in an obscure german journal). A lot of the articles seem quite theoretical rather than experimental, which generally makes me suspicious (or maybe I'm just jealous as experiments really are a pain sometimes). Most of it was animal behaviour. It doesn't sound particularly fantastic or ground breaking, so I guess it was his theoretical biology that got him well known. Of course, science is all about knowing the right people and playing the politics game, so if you are good in that sense you don't have to be hugely brilliant in your research to become well known - once people know you, they start paying attention to what you write even if it has been all said before. Note, I am not saying that his ideas are or are not new - I don't have time to go back and reread all the primary literature. Its likely that most are a synthesis of the ideas of others - and in general this is what most ideas always ever are, excepting the odd genius. However, you could say his 'genius' is in being able to draw the ideas together, make some (perhaps novel) conclusions and do it all in an engaging and easy to understand for the layman way.

Fame in science is like fame anywhere - there are thousands of talented individuals, but only a few are lucky. You do have to do something to get to that lucky stage, and well known scientists, although almost certainly no more brilliant scientifically than many other scientists (but better at networking and politics), will have done their time in research and proved themselves that way. I can imagine my current boss is a much better scientist than Dawkins, but is destined to rest in a fairly obscure area of science, where he is extremely well respected, but no chance of the public ever becoming that interested as it isn't controversial or relevant to most people's lives.

Ya, he is very good at politics/self-promotion. Which I guess can help you rise in science like it can in other professions. He is a good writer too. I just think he is like Ann Coulter or Michael Moore. Just takes cheap shots for his audience to cheer to. Just go look at his website. It is one big infomercial. It has more ads than a porn site.

Isaac Newton was a Christian non-Trinitarian, I think he tended to either be more Arian or Socinian, both of which were Christian non-trinitarian movements, with different Christologies.(Arian was more historical from around the time of the Council of Nicea, and Socinianism was the anti-trinitarian view of the time)

In any case, Unitarians were originally Christian, but eventually they moved away from Christianity to be more broadly spiritual. So, I don't see how blackelk really said much wrong.


Yes, yes he did. I referenced that already. "Like, I hear he wrote that calling Christ to God to be a form of idolatry." Trinitarians say that Christ is God and Trinity deniers would be the only group who could ever argue otherwise(although they don't necessarily have to do so, like in Sabellianism/Modalism which denies the Trinity but still affirms that Christ is God)