Apr 27, 2025
Who are some underrated philosophers? Despite how brilliant and important Kripke is, I find that he is virtually unknown outside of professional philosophy, unlike many continental contemporaries.
Feel like I'll get dogged for saying Hume, as he isn't even close to unknown, but Hume. For all his influence, Hume is criminally under discussed. The Rationalism vs Empiricism debate, which dominated early-modern philosophy, was all but ended by Hume, whose skeptical jabs at Induction not only provoked the emergence of Transcendental Idealism under Kant and German Idealism under Hegel, but also created the epistemic uncertainty that made the Existentialist movement possible, anticipating it by a whole century. He is probably the most pivotal philosopher of the modern era, and, unlike his competition for that title, his writings are clear and well-developed. His Problem of Induction is a masterstroke: simple to explain and comprehend, yet vast in its implication. It is 300 years old, and still hasn't provoked a solid counter-argument.
joyce1 year ago
pretty much most analytics after Russell and Wittgenstein and maybe Quine are hardly known. Donald Davidson is as important as Derrida. David Lewis is massively creative, one of the great philosophers of the last 50 years. Kit Fine and Ted Sider continue to define this era. As far as historically, Jacobi is quite underrated, as is Fichte.
rogue_insider1 year ago
Peter Sloterdijk is massively underrated in the English speaking world.
"'The taming of man has failed', Sloterdijk laments. 'Civilisation's potential for barbarism is growing; the everyday bestialisation of man is on the increase.'" (from wikipedia) – very iconic!
rogue_insider1 year ago
He's very quotable and often really funny too, in a dry way. "Breasts are the universal ornament of capitalism."
amf1 year ago
Edgar Saltus! The Anatomy of Negation is a delightfully weird text written by a true American weirdo.
Having discovered Jacques Ellul well after college, I was surprised I had never heard of him when majoring in philosophy.
Derek Parfit is similarly not underrated within philosophy, but he is certainly underrated outside of it. *Reasons and Persons* is genius and incredibly provocative. It poses problems that I didn't even realized existed before I read it. The footnotes to this book can also give you a "Who's who" of the last few decades of analytic philosophy, especially in ethics. I feel like most philosophers really only trickle out into the (educated) mainstream world once they are recognized within the "canon," even if they make interesting arguments. N. B.: I'm not a philosopher, nor do I have any formal training in philosophy.
I'm well familiar with the name, but I'm pretty sure I've not yet read any of his works. Maybe I'll give that book a shot sometime.
I'll second Hume, Jacobi, and especially Fichte (Breazeale's translation of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre is a scholarly masterpiece.) The analytic philosophers mentioned here I don't feel are so unknown, I know a few quasidisciples of Lewis and Kripke, but yeah, outside of professional philosophy no chance of recognition. I would hazard that the subject matter of analytic philosophers is not as conducive to the prophet-status that Foucault, Deleuze & co. have in the academic literature/humanities circles, and those circles are the drivers of the lay culture. Bolzano hasn't been mentioned and he's honestly criminally underrated. Solved a whole host of problems in analytic philosophy before it was even a thing, but none of the 20th century analytics reference him. Influenced Brentano/Husserl significantly. On the mathematical side he solved the infinitesimal problem with the epsilon-delta definition of a limit, rigorously proved the intermediate value theorem, Paradoxes of the Infinite was a huge step forward in the analysis of infinities and influenced Cantor, and did a lot of stuff in the foundations of mathematics before anyone else was really looking at it. Would probably be remembered as one of the greatest 19th century philosophers if not for his geographical obscurity.
Wow, I only knew of Bolzano from the Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem! I was totally unaware of his philosophical work.