Rational philosophies

Oh, I'm not saying "Stoicism is the one true philosophy and all others are inferior--" more like "I've found Stoicism to make a surprising number of practically useful and empirically justified claims/suggestions and I'm curious as to whether other philosophies contain the same." If Epicureanism or Cynicism or postmodernism or whatever have claims of equal validity to those of Stoicism, I'd definitely include those too.

I thought it was pretty clear the post idea was "I've learned some good strategies from Stoicism and wondered if there were practical strategies in other philosophies". This looks like philosophy-bashing for its own sake.

You're supposed to have a philosophy because you actually believe in it. The practical strategies come from the fact that the philosophy is true. Just like you wouldn't say, "Let's just take the technology of practical value and throw out the scientific principles."

I'm not so sure about this. We all know the downsides of identity, but it seems to have its upsides as well - generalizing from one example, I know that I have a much better track record trying to change my behavior through "x is what a good {boyfriend|student|Green Team fan|Star-Bellied Sneetch|...} would do" than "x is a wise thing to do." (Although perhaps someone who self-conceptualized as wise would have an easier time.) My guess is that people who say (accurately, as far as I know) that Stoic philosophy has helped them benefited not so much from exposure to the advice that one shouldn't make one's happiness dependent on external circumstances (surely everyone has been so exposed) but from actually motivating themselves to do it by leveraging their identity as an adherent of Stoicism. Mutatis mutandis "rationalist," and so on.

Late forms of Stoicism were pretty light on claims, relative to the strategies.

The main claims that I can remember are that determinism is true, and that the highest form of excellence for humans is to be rational.

I'm a 'he,' but those are indeed some pretty good introductions.

I would recommend one instead train themselves to read scientific research papers, especially in one's field of interest, then later compare those results to existing philosophies.

This strikes me as biasing your choice based on what one's field of interest is.

I agree that most of these philosophies were more rational, in a broad sense, that their chief rivals in their historical context. I would add to the list the empiricism of Locke and Hume, and the Enlightenment rationalism of Voltaire and others. On the other hand, there are a couple of mistakes in your list:

positivism, logic school of Carnap, Wittgenstein and others (Saul Kripke today)

Wittgenstein was never a positivist, and though his Tractatus did influence the Vienna Circle, he disavowed them as disciples. And I wouldn't say Kripke is a positivist in any sense. He believes in non-empirical "metaphysical necessities" and is a mind-body dualist (in fact, a lot of the current discussion on zombie arguments originates in his writings).

finitism, mathematical "intuitionism" of David Hilbert

Hilbert was a formalist, not a finitst-intuitionist, and both philosophies are generally viewed as polar opposites in their conception of mathematics. For example, Hilbert embraced Cantor's transfinite sets, while intuitionists rejected them.

positivism, logic school of Carnap, Wittgenstein and others (Saul Kripke today)

Kripke? Hardly. Unless you just mean "analytic philosophy in general", and Kripke was the first/most famous name who came to mind. But there are better names to pick when one wants to identify successors to positivism specifically.

finitism, mathematical "intuitionism" of David Hilbert

This, I'm afraid, is an outright howler. Hilbert was vehemently opposed to finitism ("No one shall expel us from this paradise that Cantor has created for us" is among his most famous quotes) and intuitionism (he was the founder and leading champion of the rival school of formalism).

The utilitarian case is interesting because both Mill and Bentham seemed to espouse a multidimensional utility vector rather than a uni-dimensional metric. There is an interesting paper I've been considering summarizing that takes a look at this position in the context of neuroeconomics and the neuroscience of desire.

Of interest from the paper: They argue that "pleasure" (liking), though it comes from diverse sources, is evaluated/consolidated at the neurological level as a single sort of thing (allowing a uni-dimensional representation as is common in economics), but show that when it comes to anticipation of pleasure (and the heuristics for evaluating the future rewards an action might yield) we can be quite inaccurate. So effectively, the Bentham/Mill model of utilitarianism is predicated on the perfect or near perfect coherence of "wanting" and "liking" (which does not really exist) and incorrectly prescribes a multidimensional utility measure because of this.

However, Bentham does appear to be unusually rational for his day. Look at his highly unpopular progressive stances and this becomes obvious - they are typically stances that we would consider sane and moral today, but which were highly taboo at the time.

Personally, when it comes to clarity of thought, I've never found anyone who tops C.S. Peirce. He was unbelievably rational in his view of the world and of science and mathematics - he was scary. This is someone who recognized the fundamentally statistical nature of the sciences in the 1800's. He was able to see the broad philosophical implications of evolution in nearly as much clarity as many of your so-called "evolutionist" thinkers (can provide citation if requested).

C.S. Peirce is by far my greatest inspiration as an epistemic rationalist. Just look at what he did. The clarity and breadth of his thought and philosophy is incredible to me.

Upvoted with the disclaimer that I don't know what exactly is meant by "evolutionism." Being aware of the history of evolution doesn't sound like a philosophy. Is there some body of insights from evopsych that goes by that name, or is it something different?

You mean instrumental rationality, right?

I generally agree, though I think that psychology will likely have some useful insights beyond the heuristics and biases program and CBT (which is itself largely repackaged Stoicism).

I was under the impression that people who endorse Objectivism also tend to be jerks that are unpleasant to be around...

If you would like to know more, specifically I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, due to the unbelievable quantity and quality of philosophical content she was able to concretize in fictional format, and just because they are awesome novels in their own right. Following that, "Philosophy: Who Needs It", "The Virtue of Selfishness", "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand", and the Ayn Rand Lexicon (available online) are all great non-fiction sources (although I strongly recommend the fiction first!).