HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who is your favourite living philosopher?

13 points by eimrine ↗ HN
Which living philosopher has changed the world the most? Which of the living philosophers is the most truthful, at least in theory? What should a person do in 2023 for you to recognize him as a philosopher?

17 comments

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ttonkytonk
Who is your favorite living philosopher? Which living philosopher has changed the world the most? Which of the living philosophers is the most truthful, at least in theory?

Greta Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlTBi5nkBT4

eimrine
You just broke my bias that no female can be a philosophist. She changed the world because everyone knows her as a symbol of realizing the problem, for example auto bloggers use to remember her frustration as a good joke when their cars product too much smoke and/or use too much fuel. But what exactly has she done to consider her as a philosopher, can you formulate this criterion for me?
ttonkytonk
She understands that to know the good is to do the good, the criterion established by Socrates, the only philosopher worth his salt in a sea of bigoted pedants.
JumpinJack_Cash
Doing good = breaking everybody’s balls by constantly shouting that the world is coming to an end, disrupting vehicles circulation, causing traffic all over the place and looking at President Trump in a judgemental way.

TIL!!!

eimrine
I vouched you not because you told something vise but because I hate censourship. I expect you to model a following situation: suppose the world is heading to the end because of burning fossil fuels (discussing this point is oftopic, just suppose this is true).

What a wise person has wannabe philosopher has to do to counter this situation? My example is bad because all I can do is just to burn less. But what are any ways to make the world (including you and me) to burn less?

JumpinJack_Cash
A wise person would turn up the consumption and pull all stops in order to clock the quality of life aNd experiences that one imagined to accumulate in 70 years in 30 instead .

Even if the world was about to be destroyed by fossil fuel consumption (which isn’t the case) you’d need 8bn people to get onboard with the plan, which is impossible especially given that 4bn live on a day-day basis

eimrine
Your manifestation of nihilism and shamelessness looks touching, but for the purposes of collecting answers to my question, I took it away from your answer and this is what I got. In the bottom line, we have the problem of informing the remaining half of the population, minus the nihilists. Have you forgotten your own TIL from yesterday? Four billion below the poverty line - why did you mention them in the fossil fuel burning thread, where do they get the money for burning the fuels?
JumpinJack_Cash
> > why did you mention them in the fossil fuel burning thread, where do they get the money for burning the fuels?

China, India and Pakistan don't have to deal with all the EPA regulations so the unit of greenhouse gases per unit of fossil fuel consumed is much higher than the US or Europe.

And now Nigeria is joining the party of greenhouse gases, their unit of gases per unit of fossil fuels burned is off the chart even for India and China standards.

But Gretha knows fuck all about living in a Lagos slum, so she thinks she can will stuff into existence like she willed her trip across the atlantic in a 20m sailboat which alone granted her a CO2 footprint that not even a year of economy class plane travel across the world would match.

adhvaryu
> You just broke my bias that no female can be a philosophist.

Uh, why is that?

eimrine
Any second example? If there are no another female philosophist in this topic then my question to you would be "why not?".
eimrine
upd I have found a list of female philosophers in the topic, thank you HN.
jurgenwerk
Well, that's easy. Slavoj Žižek. He's incredibly amusing.