Who Is The Worst Philosopher?

While it is common to look at lists of the best in every field and every art, very rarely we look at a list of the worst. Ιn the current issue of popular philosophy magazine ‘’Philosophy Now’’ (https://philosophynow.org/issues/135 ), the month’s question is: ‘’Who Is The Worst Philosopher?’’. The Big 10, chronologically:

1.Seneca the Younger (4BC-65AD), who preached stoicism while making a fortune and enjoying the luxury of Nero’s court. 2.René Descartes (1596-1650), simply because his physics – the famous vortices – is not only nonsense, but based on no scientific evidence.

3.George Berkeley (1685-1753) because his key notion that nothing exists except insofar as it exists as an idea in some mind is pure stupidity.

4.Karl Marx (1818-1883) for his thinking led to the totalitarian communist regimes and so to the mass killings of more people than even fascism.

5.Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) for his Social Darwinism.

6.Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) because he tended to work from a position of fancy and romanticism, thinking that he was more ready for action than he really was.

7.Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) because is responsible for the Logical Positivist movement, the group of philosophers attempted to curtail the criteria of what was considered ‘meaningful’, and hence worthy of pursuit.

8.John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) because his ideas are a convoluted thicket of supercilious jabs and straw-man arguments.

9.Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as a philosopher of Nazism im Sein und Zeit.

10. Ayn Rand (1905-1982), whose endorsements of ethical egotism and laissez-faire capitalism are formulated in the overused, hubristic and indolent arguments characteristic of the worst of what can, at a stretch, be called ‘philosophy’.