Talk:Timeline of Western philosophers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shouldn't there be something like this at the top of each list interlinking the lists? I think so. gren 21:44, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
| Timeline of eastern | western | global philosophers |
- Sure. Have you hit up Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Philosophy yet? -Seth Mahoney 16:28, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Bold, italics, etc...
Ummm, I'm not exactly sure how this system works... notable to whom? I think muhammad is probably boldly notable... or not a philosopher... (I mean, hadith aren't nearly as philosophical as Qur'an... and that is supposed to be revelation...) I just think it's a degree of point of view... maybe it's this list is mostly right to Americans... but... it's supposed to be an English language encyclopedia... not not Anglophilic right? 04:32, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The bolding makes no sense at all. I suggest it be removed. --142.104.250.115 07:30, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
It seems that the bold names are arbitrary. Every philosopher would disagree about which names ought to be bold. And it seems that the descriptions are also nonstandard and arbitrary.
Collingsworth 06:14, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] How to fix this page
I propose: 1. Eliminate this condition "The traditionally most popular or noteworthy philosophers can be found in bold." 2 Add the condition that the philosophers name is followed by philosophers categories on wikipedia.
I encourage debate on this proposal, especially 2.
Collingsworth 06:14, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Ooh, what a mess
I've been bold, and none of the philosophers are now in bold. The line 'The traditionally most popular or noteworthy philosophers can be found in bold' has been removed.
I noted 'Included are not only philosophers, but also those who have had a marked importance upon the philosophy of the day' and think it's misguided. A timeline of philosophers should only contain philosophers. Among others, I'd remove:
- Riemann, Fibonacci, Cantor, Venn, Gauss (mathematicians)
- Heisenburg, Isaac Newton, Einstein, Max Plank, Copernicus, Euler (physicists / astronomers)
- Darwin, Mendel (biologist)
- Ghandi, Tom Paine (politicians)
- Jesus & Mohammad (religious figures)
- Jung & Freud (Psychology / psychoanalysis isn't philosophy - although I'm open to persuasion on this)
- J M Keynes, von Hayek (economists)
- Luther, Calvin, St Francis (theologians) (NB St Augustine I think should stay for blending Plato and Christianity)
- W. E. B DuBois (sociologist)
And finally, many of the descriptions of the philosophers' works are silly:
- Niccolò Machiavelli - leadership, success by any means, militarism
- Friedrich Nietzsche - nihilism, ultimate skepticism, primacy of the will
- William of Ockham - nominalist, demands necessity of an entity identified before existence, preference of clear arguments over convoluted ones
- Immanuel Kant - synthetic a priori truths, metaphysics of morals, duty morality
For philosophers who are unambiguously members of a school, such as Diogenes, Husserl or William James, the name of the school (as a link) after the name, maybe, but trying to sum up the main interests of Kant or Nietzsche in 6-8 words is not a good idea, I think.
What do other people think? --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 15:33, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
- I've removed some of the more clear-cut cases from the later portions of the list. I'll do a few more if no-one complains about these. --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 16:41, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree (for what it's worth) with most of your list. Some people can't resist heaping praise on their heroes, even in inapropriate places—Jesus and Muhammad got their thought straight from God, which should better than the dabblings of Kant and Aristotle! (Although I would keep Thomas Paine, as he is, in my opinion, indeed a political philosopher; and keep Jung: philosophy and psychology are distinct, but were not always so, and Jung's work does have a philosophical streak.) And please do discard the descriptions; perhaps this will stimulate the actual reading of books (or at least the entire Wikipedia-page), in stead of thinking in six-word definitions of everything. All the best, Jacob 213.93.167.189 15:31, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
-
- I'm surprised that most of these are still here. If you think they should be removed, then remove them. But for my part, I don't see how small descriptions of the main points in the works of philosophers is destructive. Lucidish 02:58, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Page has serious problems
This timeline is a bit of a mess!
I changed some of the pre-socratic stuff because much of it is basically wrong or Highly disputed -- e.g. attributing "evolution" to Anaximander is a misread and there is a lot of dispute over how to interpret the various arches -- the former attributions seemed to assume too much. Had to change it -- could not leave plain errors here.
Otherwise, the only other change I made was to call George Herbert Mead a pragmatism, as he should be understood.
But there are more problems. In general, the idea of characterizing a philosopher's work with a phrase is bound to lead to mischaracterization.
Also, it would nice to add each philosopher's date as well and a link to their respective wikipedia pages. I could perhaps work on the former.
Qwerty18 03:47, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
- Fair enough. It's an exhaustive sort of list, so it's going to take time to change. As a first pass, I'm going to go through the list and sharpen the formatting. When that's done, as a second pass, we can revisit the small descriptions. I like the idea of the descriptions, but if they're misleading or wrong, then that ought to be pointed out. In any case, they should be examined systematically. At that point the NPOV notice can be removed. Agreed?Lucidish 18:21, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] standard for inclusion
to prevent anyone claiming to be a philosopher, this list needs a standard for inclusion. since it is a general list, the bar should be set pretty low, i'd think. so i would say if 2 encyclopedia articles defining one as a philosopher and 50 citations in the philosophers index would clearly be enough for the classics. --Buridan 12:43, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
- If we're going by "all reference types" in the P.index, then it absolutely must be at least as low as 30. Slightly less knowable (but still vital) philosophers like James Mill receive about 31 hits, total. Non-philosophical historical figures like Oliver Cromwell receive 16 hits, which may indicate the lower limits of the threshold.
- Also, these are perhaps the first steps toward a good policy for a general standard, but I'd also hope there can be exceptions for those historically uninfluential philosophers who we now know have obvious merit. Lucidish { Ben S. Nelson } 15:57, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
- It might be that you need 2 standards, one for classics before 1920, which would be probalby based on encyclopedia entries, and another one for contemporary and beyond that is fairly high. That would account for James Mill.--Buridan 16:52, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
Verifiable source of Rand as a philosopher: http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761579630 "Ayn Rand (1905-1982), American novelist and philosopher, whose championing of the gifted individual established her as a controversial figure in 20th-century literary and philosophical debate."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VERIFIABLE "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader must be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, because Wikipedia does not publish original thought or original research."
So, please provide a reliable verifiable source that she is not a philosopher. 144.189.5.201 22:19, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
