I just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to rank philosophers;
Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Here's a revised list of 100 philosophers born after 1899, ranked approximately by their impact on philosophy and related fields. I've ensured they primarily considered themselves philosophers or worked in closely related fields:
1. Michel Foucault (1926) 2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905) 3. Simone de Beauvoir (1908) 4. Jacques Derrida (1930) 5. Jürgen Habermas (1929) 6. Noam Chomsky (1928) 7. Hannah Arendt (1906) 8. John Rawls (1921) 9. Judith Butler (1956) 10. Thomas Kuhn (1922) 11. Karl Popper (1902) 12. Theodor Adorno (1903) 13. Gilles Deleuze (1925) 14. Frantz Fanon (1925) 15. Simone Weil (1909) 16. Albert Camus (1913) 17. Emmanuel Levinas (1906) 18. Martha Nussbaum (1947) 19. Richard Rorty (1931) 20. Peter Singer (1946) 21. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954) 22. Julia Kristeva (1941) 23. Roland Barthes (1915) 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942) 25. Edward Said (1935) 26. Slavoj Žižek (1949) 27. Hilary Putnam (1926) 28. Daniel Dennett (1942) 29. Iris Murdoch (1919) 30. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929) 31. Paul Ricoeur (1913) 32. Charles Taylor (1931) 33. Cornel West (1953) 34. bell hooks (1952) 35. Donna Haraway (1944) 36. Luce Irigaray (1930) 37. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919) 38. Donald Davidson (1917) 39. W.V.O. Quine (1908) 40. Saul Kripke (1940) 41. Bernard Williams (1929) 42. Alvin Plantinga (1932) 43. Patricia Churchland (1943) 44. Robert Nozick (1938) 45. Derek Parfit (1942) 46. Thomas Nagel (1937) 47. Philippa Foot (1920) 48. Susan Haack (1945) 49. Alain Badiou (1937) 50. Jacques Lacan (1901) 51. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929) 52. John McDowell (1942) 53. Onora O'Neill (1941) 54. David Chalmers (1966) 55. Bruno Latour (1947) 56. Michael Walzer (1935) 57. Christine Korsgaard (1952) 58. Giorgio Agamben (1942) 59. Charles Mills (1951) 60. Hubert Dreyfus (1929) 61. Seyla Benhabib (1950) 62. Jerry Fodor (1935) 63. Patricia Hill Collins (1948) 64. David Lewis (1941) 65. Catharine MacKinnon (1946) 66. Michael Sandel (1953) 67. Ernesto Laclau (1935) 68. Peter Sloterdijk (1947) 69. Carol Gilligan (1936) 70. Hélène Cixous (1937) 71. Sally Haslanger (1955) 72. Ernest Gellner (1925) 73. Marilyn Frye (1941) 74. Kwame Gyekye (1939) 75. Chantal Mouffe (1943) 76. Ian Hacking (1936) 77. Eva Feder Kittay (1946) 78. Enrique Dussel (1934) 79. Iris Marion Young (1949) 80. Simon Critchley (1960) 81. Rosi Braidotti (1954) 82. Axel Honneth (1949) 83. Linda Alcoff (1955) 84. Robert Brandom (1950) 85. Uma Narayan (1948) 86. Elizabeth Anderson (1959) 87. Paulin J. Hountondji (1942) 88. Nancy Fraser (1947) 89. Jürgen Moltmann (1926) 90. Ruth Millikan (1933) 91. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929) 92. Harry Frankfurt (1929) 93. Stanley Cavell (1926) 94. Jurgen Mittelstrass (1936) 95. Cora Diamond (1937) 96. Charles Larmore (1950) 97. Bas van Fraassen (1941) 98. Susan Neiman (1955) 99. Kwasi Wiredu (1931) 100. John Searle (1932)
This list includes philosophers from various traditions and geographical regions, focusing on those who have had significant impact on philosophical discourse in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The ranking is subjective and based on perceived influence in academic philosophy and broader intellectual impact.
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I love Rorty’s clarity and humor and general ironic and deflationary approach to philosophy.