Top 10 list, a la David Letterman

So I was reading a book (yeh yeh in linguistics) which had an interesting quotation and one thing led to the other and I ended up finding this interesting list. It is a list of the 10 greatest philosophical works (well, linguistics.. philosophy, it figures.. what else did you expect? :) ) that was a result of a survey done by Philosophers' Magazine back in 2001. You can read about it in The Guardian article here.

Are you ready? Ladies and gentlemen, here is tonight's Top 10 List:

[10] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[8] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

[7] Aristotle, Metaphysics

[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

[5] Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

[4] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

[3] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

[2] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

[1] Plato, The Republic


So, any surprises? any names you miss? ok, any names you actually recognise? ;-)

I was surprised to see Darwin, since I think his work affected science more than philosophy, and I expected to see Derrida but was shocked to know that he didn't even make it to the top 50!!

What the article says was no surprise to anyone is that Plato's The Republic is on top. This is despite the interesting fact that "you will be hard pressed to find a philosopher working today who will agree with more than 5% of it".

But get this, the British thinker Alfred North Whitehead once said that "philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato". I love the description.

Ok, now its time for WILL IT FLOAT? :) (if you watch David Letterman, you'll get it)

Mai