Who is your favorite philosopher and why?

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I will start.

Mine is Arthur Schopenhauer.



I like his pessimism and non pretentious style. I can relate to his life and what he experienced. He related to his poodles and he hated loud noises.
He believed humans and nature responds to this will and it would be best if it were to become extinguished. Perhaps he meant his own dark will fueling thoughts and impulses society disapproved of?
His book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung discusses his idea the will drives humans toward illusion.
Schopenhauer is a pessimist and thought life was a miserable trap we are all born into only to witness the agony of living. I can relate to this well because I tend to philosophize about why humans are the only creatures so painfully aware of misery. I find this a thoroughly miserable revelation in itself.
He harbored anger toward the opposite gender due to his relationship with his mother which was strained and also, he is a product of the patriarchy through and through. Still, I forgive him because there's so much that's endearing.
He devoted himself to pet poodles that he started keeping during his student days til his death. They all had the same names Atma and Butz. Atma is a sanskrit word for universal soul that births all little souls in existence. Whenever one of his dogs chewed something up or pooped in the house, he would scold them by calling them a human instead of a dog. He claimed the dogs felt ashamed when he did it. A guest once asked Schopenhauer of he minded being addressed as "your dog" and he said he wouldn't mind. So, he was very burnt out on people and got along better with his pets, apparently.
He ended up nick naming all the poodles Butz to demonstrate his theory of individuality. He thought non humans species lacked it.

So what do y'all think? Who are some of your favorites and what is it that attracted you to their philosophical systems?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

The Motivational Hedonists

Motivational Hedonism is the theory that the desires to encounter pleasure and to avoid pain guide all human behavior.

Thus, an honest recognition that humans are greedy, selfish, self-interested, pleasure-seeking creatures.

Prophetic words (written on the subway walls & tenement halls & bathroom stalls : ) :
- Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
- Wine, women and song
- Party hardy rock and roll, drink a fifth and smoke a bowl

I think Diogenes of Sinope has to be my favorite, for much of the same reason you say you like Schopenhauer - Diogenes was very practical and unpretentious, and humiliated Plato more than a few times (example: Plato once openly defined man as a 'featherless biped'; Diogenes presented before the Academy a plucked chicken, and proclaimed "Behold Plato's man!").

I also like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Max Stirner; Sitrner particularly for his radical egoism and willingness to criticize every human institution and notion of the "common good".

Smells like Randian horse s**t to me...

Just sayin'

I'm sure nobody could guess that I'm a huge fan of the Roman Stoics--specifically Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.

These guys were fantastic intuitive psychologists, as evidenced by the fact that modern cognitive behavioral therapy was derived from stoicism.

If you are interested in living a good, meaningful, tranquil life, the stoic path is the one to follow.


~from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

the second statement does not necessarily follow from the first, since one of the more reliable sources of happiness than selfish gain is to delight in the joy, success, and well-being of others. one might, as people often do, identify with a family, or a community, in such a way that the fulfillment of personal desires is less satisfying than attending to the needs of others. to say that even a person's relative unconcern with thoughts of self is selfish seems to me a misuse of the term, that takes for granted the inherency of the distinction between 'self' and 'other.' we could just as well formulate a theory of motivation where love is (not merely ideally, but already) the guiding force behind all human behavior. we need only go one step further; why do we seek pleasure and avoid pain? love is the supreme neutrality that all desire intends toward.

1. Your argument would appear to undermine motivational hedonism, however, the motivational hedonists reject this. They would say for example , Mother Teresa or Gandhi were hedonistic, and motivated by their own self-interest to help others.

2. In psychology, the philosophical concept of "motivational hedonism" is called "psychological egoism" i.e., the ego pursues self-interest.

Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from doing so.

So, Mother Theresa, and Ghandi were just as selfish as Mr. Scrooge.

source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism



The motivational hedonists would say we seek love for selfish reasons. Perhaps, because we crave the comfort of others, or desire affirmation from another.

^^^ You know, you're actually right. The problem is, you've cooked things down to such a basic level as to render it meaningless.

That is one of the objections. That the concept of "self-interest" is unknowable, thus, the philosophy is "meaningless".

I believe in determinism + motivational hedonism, at the basic level we need neuroscience to help us answer the self-interest question.

Phantom post....

Last edited by GoonSquad on 11 Feb 2014, 11:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

Who is your favorite philosopher?
Can't believe there's no one who likes Schopenhauer!

You know, Schopenhauer looks a lot like Gowron from Star Trek...

*nods* could be inspiration?
I would think Aspies might relate well to him. His own mother was jealous of his intellect. Sounds somewhat Aspie, no?

Ayn Rand. I had been depressed as a teenager, and was on my way to being very cynical and bitter. Through Objectivism I learned to love life.

Oooo, here come the haters ....

ego is not a thing that pursues self-interest; rather, ego is any intentional process with reference to a self. non-egoic intentions occur with people who do not make a strong distinction between personal desire and the desires of others. the ability to narrate the experience of another the same as if the experience were personal, i.e, with little or no emotional boundary, makes it possible to act in the interest of others without any expectation of personal benefit whatsoever, as the narrative subject is not fixed. as i said, the view seems to take for granted the inherency of the distinction between self and other, whereas, in practice, people seem to be able to suspend this distinction.

if one's thoughts and actions are without reference to a self, then what does it mean to say that their motivations are still inevitably selfish?

i suggest, if we look further, without totally abandoning that motivational framework, we could see that underlying seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, is not selfishness but love. if desire were not "the feeling of not wanting to feel this feeling" it could not be a motivating force. if desire seemed like a perfect feeling all on its own, we would never feel compelled to do anything about it. it would be an end in itself. so, how is then? by always seeming to be in the way of something better, such as love, or peace, or contentment; something that is already present to the degree that desire is absent. that all desire intends toward its own absence is what i mean by, "love is the supreme neutrality that all desire intends toward."

My favourite is David Hume, with Karl Popper as a close second.

The reason why I put Hume above Popper is because many of the central claims in Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (which today constitute the core of the scientific method) from 1934 were already developed by Hume 186 years earlier in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748.

That, and the fact that Hume identified the two most fundamental problems in philosophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_fork
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem