Greatest Philosopher in History

Related amusing anecdote:

The Nov. 30th episode of Philosophy Bites was kind of amusing. A bunch of philosophers, including famous ones, gave their answers to "Who's your favorite philosopher?" IIRC, when giving their reasons for liking their favorite philosopher, almost nobody said "because this philosopher turned out to be correct about so much" — except for all the people who picked Hume.

One could make a case for Epicurus -- see e.g. Yvain's review of a book about him (and much else). Warning: I have seen it claimed (1) that the book is full of errors and (2) that in any case much of what's there ascribed to Epicurus was in fact borrowed from other earlier thinkers. I do not know enough about Greek philosophy (or the other things about which the book is alleged to be wrong) to adjudicate any of those fights.

Other than Hume, I would vote for Quine, for espousing naturalism, for demolishing the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and for placing constraints on metaphysical discourses -- constraints which, unfortunately, many philosophers today have ignored to their own peril.

Thales of Miletus (the so-called 'Father of Science') seems to be the first philosopher of the Greek tradition.

Now, obviously, he was wrong about nearly everything, but the leap from being silent to being wrong may have been humanity's greatest step towards being more true.

I thought this was going to be a post about Hume.

Greatest ever: Hume

Honorable Mention: Democritus

20th Century: Quine

Francis Bacon?

I agree with listing Wittgenstein as a good philosopher, but Zizek is out of the question, he's not even trying to break his claims down into clear arguments and I'm not aware of anything significant or useful he wrote.

I would go with Hume as well. Not only was he far ahead of his time, but it also seems as if virtually everyone who came after him demonstrated a significant backslide from the extremely high level of clarity he brought to the table on so many topics.

Also I should mention that it's my contention that despite being considered by virtually all accounts to be one of the greatest thinkers in history, it nevertheless seems to be the case that there are large parts of his work that most people haven't yet seen the significance of. He apparently once stated that justice will not be done to him in his lifetime. I'd go further and make the perhaps controversial point that justice still hasn't been done to him. I hope to work toward changing this at some point.

Disclaimer: No evidence given here. Just throwing my opinion out there.

Sir Karl Popper nudged us to be less wrong, ever less wrong.

Sextus Empiricus is an important candidate I don't see discussed on LW. I don't endorse his positive philosophy, but his positive philosophy wasn't really what had the biggest influence; it was the distrust of speculation and theorizing he helped inspire. Historically, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Sextus' demolition of all the theories of the day had a larger impact on the growth of science than any particular positive epistemological doctrine.

Anselm is another good candidate, surprisingly. He made philosophy cool again after the age of darkness, inadvertently planting seeds of intellectual investigation and disputation that would cause Christian thought to burn itself out. And scholasticism wasn't a thing yet, so he didn't even have much obfuscatory systematicity on his side to slow the rot.

I know he's a boring choice, and also probably wrong about a lot of things (though that claim is complicated by the difficulty in figuring out what he really believed anyway), but Plato was by far the most effective and influential early advocate of an attitude of questioning everything and figuring things out for yourself. As such, I think he deserves more credit than anyone else for most of subsequent Western philosophy.

Ibn Al-Haytham or Francis Bacon would both be candidates.

How about Machiavelli? He was perhaps the first person 1500 years to say sensible things about politics-as-they-are, rather than about politics-as-we-would-wish them. He had very substantial influence on the modern understanding of politics and government -- People in England and France who were building modern states seem to have read him closely.

In terms of philosophical method: His rhetorical style is to look around, give examples, and discuss counter-evidence -- rather than to reason forward from definitions. Perhaps relatedly, he was one of the few notable philosophers with real experience in the field he was writing about. He was a senior civil servant in Florence, with responsibility for military and diplomatic affairs. As a result, he was personally acquainted with many of the major figures in Italian politics of the time. He wasn't simply guessing how these things worked.

Being a Freudian and a Marxist is the modern equivalent of being an astrologer and alchemist.

I suppose it counts in Hume's favor that he was a big influence on Adam Smith (and so on economics becoming something like a science) and on Edward Gibbon (and so on history becoming something like an objective investigation).

The earlier you are, the more non-obvious leverage you have; the later you are, the more obvious leverage you have. I'll tentatively go with Aristotle; I think that "his ideas were dogmatically accepted and held back both science and philosophy later on" is a (likely ideologically tainted) mischaracterization of the history of Western philosophy & science.

On those criteria, I would say Plato. Because Plato came up with a whole mess of ideas that were... well, compelling but obviously mistaken. Much of Western Philosophy can be put in terms of people wrestling with Plato and trying to show just why he is wrong. (Much of the rest is wrestling with Aristotle and trying to show why HE is wrong... but then, one can put Aristotle into the camp of "people trying to show why Plato is wrong.")

There's a certain sort of person who is most easily aroused from inertia when someone else says something so blatantly, utterly false that they want to pull their hair out. Plato helped motivate these people a lot.

So you're looking for a person who's ideas (not necessarily due to their own merit) had the most positive effect on science and philosophy in the future?

Well, I'm not sure why you're interested... Although I'll add that does seen to exclude people currently alive like Nick Bostrom, who's effect upon the future is currently unknown to us (I would assume that calculating his effects upon the probability of saving the whole human race and the future, and thus causing a near infinite amount of science, might make him beat any others I know).

Asuming "Eliezer Yudowzsky" is not allowed? Alan Turing.

Wittgenstein advanced philosophy to the point where it could have become an applied discipline, having solved many philosophical problems once and for all, but philosopher's balked at the idea of an ultimate resolution to philosophical problems.

Today I'll say Adi Shankara.

Hume also showed the problems with design arguments which today's creationists still haven't fully appreciated.

http://youtu.be/6MW3plOgGZY

I want to point out what may be two incorrect presuppositions in the question. First:

I am referring [...] to [...] the [philosopher] who deserves the most credit for advancing human philosophy towards being more true.

There may be an assumption here that the work of "advancing philosophy towards being more true" is mostly done by philosophers (in which case, it's reasonable to ask which of those philosophers has done the biggest slice of that work). But actually it seems likely, at least to me, that if you look at present-day philosophical opinions and long-ago philosophical opinions, pick out the changes about which we can be most confident that today's opinions are better, and ask how it came about that philosophers used mostly to believe X but now mostly believe Y -- then in many cases the reasons would be largely down to progress in (what is now called) science rather than in philosophy.

So if the question were altered slightly, asking for the person rather than specifically the philosopher who deserves most credit for advancing human philosophy towards being more true, people like Eratosthenes and Darwin and Einstein might be better candidates than the likes of Socrates and Hume and Russell.

The second possible incorrect presupposition is that "being more true" is the best way to compare the merits of philosophical positions. Isn't it possible, and even likely, that many philosophical questions are ones for which there is, actually, no fact of the matter about whether one answer or another is correct? Some philosophical questions might be important even if they don't have true answers as such; answering them one way rather than another might lead to greater happiness or scientific progress or something.

In such cases it might actually be best to find a way to reframe the debate so that it doesn't take the form of arguing about truth and falsehood. (So, for instance, suppose it turns out that moral realism is wrong, so that many, many philosophical debates about substantial questions of ethics were asking questions that have no true answers; it might then be better to ask questions like "what moral principles tend to lead to stable societies and happy lives?" or something.)

For me it's Nietzsche by a wide margin. After Nietzsche, you can safely throw away most of your philosophy books. Nietzsche brought psychological insight that Western philosophy had never seen before. Nietzsche dared to deconstruct and challenge the foundations of Judeo-Christian morality, rationalism and liberalism. Nietzsche created potent memes like the Ubermensch, the Last Man, God is Dead, the Will to Power, and the coming of the strangest of all guests, Nihilism, that shape our intellectual discourse to this day. Nietzsche was perhaps the closest thing the West has seen to a prophet -- a dark Buddha or Antichrist who haunts the Western philosophical enterprise like a specter. Nietzsche has been ignored, misinterpreted and criticized relentlessly, but his challenges to the philosophers are as potent as ever.

These are my thoughts.

What's the answer gonna be in a hypothetical post-Singularity which was positively shaped by FAI?