Comments Elsewhere

Cleis: oy gevalt. Susan Haack ought to be there as well. And the failure to include Philippa Foot is frankly just flabbergasting. But I’m not sure whether that’s Honderich’s fault or Leiter’s fault for (apparently) assuming that no living philosophers were born before 1930. (Edmund Gettier’s still alive too, but he’s not the list that Leiter culled (!!))

logicnazi: The point here isn’t just about quality of work (although it is about that). If you’re just looking at citations there are plenty of philosophers that Cleis mentioned who could go toe-to-toe with almost anyone on the list—Foot, if she is missing, is the biggest example; Baier, Card, Anderson, Haack, etc. also ought to be there.

As it stands, I sincerely doubt that Honderich made any substantial effort to determine who is and is not “influential” by examining citations. As is usual when men draw up these sorts of lists, he seems to have made it up on the spot, e-mailed a few of his buddies for suggestions, and cobbled it together. There’s nothing intrinsically objectionable about carrying on in this way, but these kind of lists are always going to be biased towards what the author and his (or her) buddies know and care about. This isn’t weird or unusual, and it’s not weird or unusual (although it is unfortunate) for male philosophers, like most other men in our society, to think along boys-club lines. It seems pretty silly to rush in and insist that ad hoc Top 42 lists like these are really carefully objective reflections of the state of the discipline.