Michael Knowles RANKS The Greatest Philosophers

Everyone knows that the purpose of reading philosophy is to make yourself seem smart at parties. The problem that people have is they haven't actually read philosophy.
Now, I've read a little bit of philosophy. Not a lot, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
So my team has asked me to provide the definitive ranking of philosophers. They have assembled the philosophers.
they will present the philosophers to me

and I will place them where they deserve in the hierarchy. Take it away.
There are five tiers. S, A, B, C, F.
S tier, that's galaxy brain. A tier just below means there could and maybe should be a college course dedicated to that person.
B tier, it's good airplane reading. You know, good way to pass the time.
Productive use of your precious moments on earth. C tier, we're getting down to the Reddit tier.
These are the gurus that the big brains on Reddit really like. Then you get down to the F tier.
You're at the bong rippers. You're at the philosophers where you have to just tear rips from a bong.
Before you're like, hey, man, you know, you ever, but actually, man, I got a quote for you. You ever heard about, you know, that's the lowest tier.
Let's take it away. Socrates, the galaxy brain.

I'm glad we're starting off easy. Socrates is the beginning of Western philosophy.
We don't have any writings from Socrates, so we know Socrates through the writings of his student, Plato, and then down through his student-student, Aristotle. So Socrates, He's a galaxy brain.

He gets it.

Nietzsche.

Where does one put Nietzsche? Nietzsche was intelligent, at least, and he was wrong about everything, but he was wrong in a kind of delightful way. He's known for hits such as the claim that God is dead for the notion of the will to power for the critique of Christian morality.
His philosophy was important to the rise of Nazism, not to have guilt by association for the philosophers, but he was quite wrong. I'm not going to say that you have to be totally right to be an important philosopher, that one could be edified by reading, even if to figure out where not to go wrong.
So I put him at, I'm putting him at C tier, actually. I was going to maybe give him B tier, but I'm giving him C tier.
He's so wrong that the good that you'll get out of reading him doesn't, it doesn't push him up another notch. You know, it's just, you should read him as a bit of a warning.
Okay. And because he's a good observer of the times in which he lived, but he's just wrong.
Okay, next one. John Stuart Mill.
Mill gets better grades than Nietzsche, so he'll get B tier. John Stuart Mill is a big promoter of utilitarianism.
He's the author of On Liberty is probably his most famous work. Utilitarianism is usually summarized as promoting the greatest good and happiness for the greatest number of people.
So it's good airplane reading. He's a very intelligent guy.
He's wrong, but he's wrong in a really instructive way because he starts to show you where our whole civilization really started to go off the rails intellectually. So don't buy into him, but he's an amiable reader who will give you a lot to consider.
Next one. John Locke.
Edmund Burke, one of my favorite philosophers, considered one of the founders of modern conservatism. Edmund Burke said that John Locke's second treatise on government was one of the worst books ever written.
Locke is the father of liberalism. I want to lower him a little bit.
However, John Locke does in fact contribute something to good philosophy in as much as he contributed a fair bit to Catholic social teaching. Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum,

one of the great encyclicals

in which he outlines Catholic social teaching,

does in fact draw on John Locke.

So he really does make a contribution to serious things.

I'd put him, he's B-tier.

John Locke gets B-tier.

He doesn't get A-tier.

The libs and the libertarians want to give him A-tier or S-tier, but he he gets B tier. He's important.
He's good. He gets better marks than Nietzsche.
Next one. Karl Marx.
He goes down with Nietzsche. He's not a total bong ripper.
He's not a total joke. In his personal life, he kind of was, because he was just a disreputable man, physically filthy, just disgusting, unhygienic, a total mooch off his buddy Angles for his whole life.

and just his family killed themselves,

I suspect, having something to do with the general aura around this man.

He also wrote poetry about demons and stuff.

He makes some valid critiques of politics,

but he's totally wrong about it. around this man.
He also wrote poetry about demons and stuff. He makes some valid critiques

of politics,

but he's totally wrong

about everything.

So he's C-tier.

He's close to being a bong ripper.

I'm tempted to put him

a little bit below Nietzsche

because Nietzsche was probably smarter

or at least funnier to read.

But no, he's a Reddit-tier guru and people on Reddit love Karl Marx. He's C tier.
Ayn Rand. I'm going to catch a lot of heat for this.
I'm going to catch a lot of heat for this. Ayn Rand is a bong ripper.
She's a bong ripper. She's F tier.
Michael, you're putting Ayn Rand, an erstwhile hero of the American right, below. Karl Marx, what's the matter with you, Michael? Are you a commie? No, it's just...
She's not a serious thinker. That's the problem.
She's not a serious thinker. And look, there are plenty of people who are not serious thinkers.
She's not a serious thinker. And she wasted so much of my time when I was forced under duress to read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead.
Fountainhead was better than Atlas Shrugged, but it's just not serious. She too, like Karl Marx, makes some valid critiques of her time period, but that does not make her a systematic or serious thinker.
and for the so-called conservatives who really just love Ayn Rand, just are totally gung-ho for Ayn Rand, you know, she is a modernist, atheist, radical individualist. What about that is conservative? What about that am I supposed to like? I get that some of her writings get a little saucy, you know? That's's kind of entertaining it's also funny that the plot lines of all of her books are that super hot rich successful gigachads all just really really want to sleep with Ayn Rand my friend Spencer Clavin pointed that out one time to me and he sort of says like okay Ayn you know yeah alright sure maybe so anyway's F tier.
I spent hours of my life that I will never get back reading those books. There's so much more to say.
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Aristotle, thank goodness, S-tier. He's back to S-tier.
Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers ever to live, write about pretty much everything. If you can only read five books in your life, the Nicomachean Ethics must be among those books.
He's just write about almost everything. I think, forget about even ethics, politics, maybe physics too.
He's just, I'm not even joking, increasingly, I think physics is vindicating Aristotle over the more modern scientific writers. S tier, no doubt.
Next one. Voltaire.
How charitable am I feeling? It's obviously between C and F. That's F.
He gets F. He's sometimes, there's this phrase that is often attributed to him.
It's probably his most famous quote. I do not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to your death the right to say it.
I don't think he actually said that. There's no evidence that he actually ever said that.
And it's wrong. My version of it is, I might not agree with what you say, and I will kill you for saying it.
But I don't think he said that. But he says all sorts of nonsense.
Christopher Hitchens loved to quote this one line from Voltaire. Those who will make you believe absurdities will also inflict upon you terrible cruelties or something like that.
I don't know. Anyway, he was awful.
He's just truly wrong about everything. That's it.
He gets F. The more I talk about him, the more certain I am that he's in the bong ripper tier of philosophy.
Next one. That's a nice palate cleanser.
S tier, right about everything. I've said so far with Socrates, Aristotle, these guys are right about basically everything.
Thomas Aquinas, just right about everything. Just, and he also wrote about everything.
In fact, his most famous work is the Summa Theologica. Traditionally said, it's really the Summa Theologiae, but we're being pedantic.
In any case, there's a legend that he would write three books at a time. And maybe it's not legendary.
Maybe it's just true. Anyway, he's right.
Yeah, he's right about everything. If you could read one thinker, read him.
I'm getting whiplash. Voltaire, Thomas Aguinas, the great scholar Andrew Tate.
Hmm. He wouldn't call himself a philosopher, to be fair to Andrew Tate.
I don't think he would call himself a philosopher, so I don't want to knock the guy. I mean, he does leave himself open to some criticism on account of all the things he's done and said.
But I don't blame him for being included in this list. But I would say he's not a philosopher.
Not exactly a systematic thinker, so he would have to go with the bong rippers.

Zeno. Zeno.
Not quite my man, but he's a cool founder of stoicism. A lot of people like stoicism now.
It's really big in Silicon Valley. It was big, what, in the 80s and 90s with Wall Street types.
Definitely not S tier.

Maybe not

A tier. Maybe B tier.

It's between B tier and A tier. Well, look, if we're going to put John Stuart Mill in B tier, yeah, he's in B tier.
Stoicism goes to B tier. S tier, no question.
No, what other philosophers could we rank Harry Sisson in with? His work on politics is not very impressive, but his work on Eros, on the relation between men and women, which has recently been published, is actually more impressive. It impresses itself upon your mind.
Even when you want to get it out of your mind, it just stays in your mind.

You want to spoon out your mind's eye

because you actually read those texts. Anyway,

if we're going to be fair to

Andrew Tate

and Ayn Rand, I think we

have to put... We can't put

Sisson above them, so I would say

he gets F-tier.

But with his new work

on romantic love, maybe he's a young man, maybe he has the potential to rise up. Martin Luther.
Also, to be fair to Martin Luther, I don't know that he would call himself a philosopher, and he really wasn't, not just with prejudice because of my mackerel-snapping papism, but he's not really a philosopher of Protestantism. There are many other more serious thinkers in Protestantism.
In fact, Hilaire Belloc pointed out, for Martin Luther, Martin Luther was more a political figure. You know, the splitting away of the early days of the Protestant Reformation, which is better understood as a revolution, really is Martin Luther gaining favor with German princes, German princes cynically maybe using Martin Luther as an excuse to wrest more political power from the Catholic Church.
So I don't see a lot of systematic thought in Martin Luther. Martin Luther contradicts himself throughout his career, and it's not really, Hilaire Belloc makes the point, the real genius thinker of Protestantism is John Calvin.
So Calvin might, even though I think Calvin's wrong,

he might get a higher ranking. But in terms of philosophy, not political impact, but philosophy, I'm going to have to say C or F.
And really, I would say, really, I would have to say F. play-doh okay play-doh's back at I guess we have to put him in S tier.
Even though he's not as good as Aristotle, Aristotle is more correct than Plato. But I put Socrates in S tier, and we only really know.
We have a sense of Socrates from Plato. So it would seem wrong to put Plato in A tier and Socrates in S tier.
So Socrates Plato and Aristotle all get S tier but make no mistake Aristotle is the best of them next one Epicurus I would be very tempted by Epicureanism if I were not Christian Epicurus believed that the highest good to be sought in life was pleasure. Not merely, Aristotle would say that man seeks happiness.
And happiness he defines as excellent rational activity done in accordance with virtue. That's how he defines it in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Zeno and Stoicism would say that the highest good to be sought is virtue, which is a little different. and Epicurus would say that the highest good to be sought is virtue, which is a little different.

And Epicurus would say that the highest good to be sought is pleasure.

So not merely happiness, which results in pleasure, but pleasure itself. So the maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
And so one can imagine this as a kind of degraded hedonism where you're just doing a bunch of drugs and sleeping with hookers and, I don't know, like riding roller coasters for your, just kind of stuffing your face with pizza. I don't know.
But there's a higher-minded Epicureanism, which is that, oh, we're going to listen to the best music, look at the best art, consider the best philosophy. But that's not really the end in itself.
That's mistaking. That's putting the cart before the horse, I guess.
So he gets, Epicurus gets, he gets B tier. I'll give him B tier.
It's definitely better than some of the other guys, but he just kind of goes off. And in some ways, maybe I should put him lower because Epicureanism is so tempting.
Next one. Alistair MacIntyre.
Now we're moving back up to... Ooh, do we go S-tier? Do we go all the...
Alistair MacIntyre, he's still alive, I think. Contemporary philosopher who revived virtue ethics.
Very famous, very popular book, After Virtue. Highly recommended reading.
Is he S-tier? Or is he... I not himself Aristotle.
He's really, really good and important. He's at least A-tier.
He gets A-tier. Is he the first A-tier? I don't know if we've had other A-tiers.
Descartes. There's a joke I used to know about a horse in a bar, and the punchline is Descartes before the horse, but I don't remember the whole joke.
I said it in an interview though some years ago. Descartes is famous for mind-body dualism.
Well, his most famous line is cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am and mind-body dualism, which is wrong.
That also mistakes how human nature works in the relation of the body to the mind or the soul.

Because actually Aristotle's right about that.

We're hylomorphic creatures.

So body and soul are inextricably linked here on Earth.

So because of that, and Descartes is responsible for a lot of modern philosophical errors.

So he gets B tier.

Low B tier.

Carl Schmitt. Come on, dude.
Don't. Are you going to get me on record here? Because I guess so.
Carl Schmitt. Carl Schmitt.
He was a Nazi. Okay.
So let's just get that on the table to begin with. Schmitt was a Nazi, though he eventually fell out of favor, I think, with the Nazis.
But whatever, man, you know, there were plenty of thinkers who were Nazis. Heidegger got rehabilitated, so let's, so okay, we'll get that off there.
But he made important contributions to political philosophy, to political theology. He's probably most famous for the friend-enemy distinction.
The politics ultimately comes down to friend and enemy. The notion that the sovereign is he who makes the exception.
That's a famous quote of Carl Schmitt. So he's, anyway, all I'm saying is he, like, look, man, Hitler drank water.
Okay. That's not an indictment of water.
So can we, it's not an indictment of watercolor painters and dog owners. So let's just, he's at least good airplane duty.
Let's put it that way. Maybe even a little better than that.
Maybe, we're talking high B, low A. We'll leave him in B for now.
That's it. So who wins? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and above them even, St.
Thomas Aquinas. Who loses? Internet influencers and Ayn Rand.