Top 5 influential recent philosophers?

Recent? What is recent? In the last century?

Nobody mentioned Ayn Rand, also Sartre. Much easier to pick more from earlier times.
 
I thought I had asked this already, but nevermind.

Does the influence have to be positive (i.e. in the direction of the philosophy espoused by the philosopher), or can it be negative?
 
I too would put Derrida in a different category, that of linguistics. But his thinking does greatly impact philosophy for those who allow him too. His first two major works basically deconstruct what we know, he orginated the concept of binary opposites, and has taken culture on a major turn-- one that only seems to appear about every 500 years. But Derrida owes much to Wittgenstein, Sassure, & Focault at his roots. If you take Chomsky at only his "generative linguistics" work, then he too can be considered a "philosopher" in my opinion.

Again, as I said before, the lines between philosophy / politics / liguistics / science / religion are now greatly blurred in a way they were not even 30 or 40 years ago.
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No no no no no no no Oh God No!

Sorry, but seriously here - you're wrong.

First off because Derrida really isn't a linguist as far as linguistics is done today - he's firmly in the Philosophy of Language. (Bear in mind, he seems to display a profound semantical skepticism, and to write mostly about that. That isn't immediately a problem - many other philosophers do too. Semantics is a very tricky problem. )

Secondly, he invented the notion of binary opposites?

Um, I hope you meant something other than the literal meaning of this, because come on...

Thirdly, HAH! Derrida did create a small move, interesting mostly in the sociological aspects, among certain of the Humanities (though, importantly, not in the one he seems to be writing - this is always something to watch for, it tends to indicate the presence of a flamboyant and dramatic but not particularly profound or interesting writer). He hardly brought about any profound changes otherwise, though. Compared to the American Pragmatists (early and later); the Young Hegelians; the early Analytic movement; etc. his massive changes are pretty puny. And none of the above were the sort of massive changes that only happen every 500 years either.

Fourthly: Chomsky has actually written a decent amount of (well, not too great) Philosophy - usually within the mental representation debate. I certainly don't agree with him or think him particularly good at doing it, but he's certainly had more philosophic influence that just Generative Linguistics.

Finally the lines between all those catagories above have always been deeply muddled. Partially because all of them are the subject matter of philosophy, as well as being interesting subjects in themselves, and partially because that's just how things are when it comes to intellectual inquiry. The largest change in the last couple decades/centuries has been towards specialization, and not the other way around.
 
Vagabond said:
Nobody mentioned Ayn Rand...
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I've been wondering about this. Being new to the Forum I was wondering how this group responds to Objectivism. My impression is that most people don't like her ideas.
 
It's either a personal list or there is some objective measure. The objective measure as good as any is whether philosophers have entries in the various dictionaries of philosophy (which are generally compiled by those in the know) - if somebody makes it to the concise edition then he/she is probably a leading philosopher.

It does not mean they are good philosophers. Derrida is a leading philosopher by this measure, but to me he is a purveyor of meaningless gibber.

Perhaps it is better to identify the most interesting philosophical discourses in the past 30 years. For example the debate over whether there is a mechanistic model for the mind has been a pretty interesting one. It seems to have been kicked off by mathematicians - a brief remark from Goedel, a speculation from Turing. J.R.Lucas was the first to take it up in earnest and since it has been debated by Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, John McCarthy, John Searle and others. So they would have to head my personal list as people that have interested me philosophically.

But what criterion should be used to identify a philosopher as such? Those who have hung out a shingle are by and large fairly uninteresting - the po-mo crowd. But a good deal of philosophy has always been done through fiction. Think of Patrick White and the Tree of Man. If we include the novelist philosopher my list might include Ursula LeGuin (for example think of "The Dispossessed" as an essay on political pragmatism and idealism).
 
Moliere said:
I've been wondering about this. Being new to the Forum I was wondering how this group responds to Objectivism. My impression is that most people don't like her ideas.
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I haven't been here all that long myself but, I haven't seen it discussed. I personally don't agree with objectivism in total. I think it was an attempt to make selfishness look like a virtue. However, she does say many things about personal responsibility, justice and the nature of existance among other things I find to be extraordinary.

I would think L Ron Hubbard would be considered a philosopher as well since he started a religion. :)
 
I really hope you are not saying that philosophers create religions. Especially not religions wich does not allow access to the core beliefs of the religion from the outside and is hostile to criticism

Philosophy is not religion, and should not be treated as such.
 
Nobody included Marx? His ideas have killed MILLIONS... I would say it's in the top 5 of all time.

Recent?

Gene Roddenberry is probably the top of the list for me. His ideas have lead us into the technological age.
 
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