Philosophers are those individuals who have questioned and studied the nature of reality. Philosophy was once the only academic discipline and it encompassed all of the areas of study that have since been divided many times over. I think these divisions of academic study hurt more than help.
This page is an extremely brief summary of philosophers I have studied. My eventual goal is to have individual pages for my thoughts on the following people. I will expand this list as my studies continue. None of my rankings are anything more than subjective appreciation or criticism of the individuals listed and have little to say about their importance in the history of philosophy. If they are on this list, it is because they have made impacts of one degree or another on my own thinking.
These brief or long thoughts in no way necessarily represent any main-stream or general academic view of the people I mention. I am summarizing my independent views, be they ignorant or enlightened, about the following figures. I think arguing about the greatest or weakest philosophers is like arguing about the greatest or weakest color. We simply like some more than others for reasons specific to our own experience of them.
These are the color rankings for the following philosophers I've studied to some degree or another. This color scheme is in line with a general use of these colors, more of which are listed and described on the about hiartx.com page.
bold bright pink name |
means |
Exceptional, Philosophers who stand out through the ages, in my opinion. |
bold bright blue name |
means |
Very good, Exceptional philosophers, in my opinion. |
bold bright green name |
means |
Good, Figures I would recommend studying and enjoy immensely. |
bold dark yellow name |
means |
Decent, Very much worth studying, but some problems, in my opinion. |
bold orange name |
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Not Good, Worth studying, but deeply flawed in some way, in my opinion. |
Aristotle was a philosopher who thought about the nature of force and motion, amongst almost everything else, and developed one of the first systems of physics.
A.J. Ayer was a philosopher who studied language and truth as it relates to epistemology and logic.
George Berkley developed idealism or the idea that the world is, essentially, mind. His writing was thorough and I have often found this metaphysical position more coherent than materialism. But, neither can be certain.
Ned Block has worked to help us undertstand consciousness and the mind in terms of cognitive science.
Radu Bogdan is a philosopher who has developed teleological theory, or theory about goal-directed behaviour, in a rigorous and important way. He has also written about meta-representation or thoughts about thoughts. I think his theories should be considered important for artificial intelligence and evolutionary analytic deconstruction in terms of functional mechanisms. His push for interdisciplinary studies is notable and admirable.
Bruce Brower is a philosopher of epistemology who is very adept at making the topography of the field clear.
Ronna Burger is a philosopher of ancient history who is extremely insightful and meticulous about interpreting the ideas of the Greeks.
David Chalmers is a philosopher who has worked on the problem of consciousness and delineated the problem in useful ways as well as looked at the possibility of philosophical zombies. I have an essay that treats these problems here.
Noam Chomsky is a philosopher who developed theories about grammatical understanding as a modular function in linguistics and who has written numerous important essays on the American empire.
Although, I think he is severely naive to believe that 9-11 could not have been orchestrated or at least allowed to happen. He is less suspicious of the rulers, war criminals, and torturers than I am. In fact, if Chomsky looks at the World Trade Center 7 collapse and doesn't see that it was controlled demolition, then the man is a moron, really. Great mind? Mental midget in my humble opinion. How many sheep are in academics and don't want to go outside the spectrum of acceptable debate?
Apparently, Mr. Chomsky, in his feeble old age, never learned much about physics or how to use the internet. But "He's the god of knowledge at MIT!" No, he's a mentally defective old coot who is so arrogant he has outright dismissed a theory as true and apparent as the light of the sun. Chomsky has said he does not take such theories about 9-11 very seriously. Well this so-called brilliant mind must neither take simple chemistry or physics or simple detective work too seriously. He is either an idiot or a Zionist. I would have to go with idiot given that Israel just barred him from entry the other day.
I appreciate what Mr. Chomsky has done, in his essays and in his books, to expose the media and military. However, ridicule from him set back the 9-11 truth movement years. He basically helped Bush and Mossad by claiming the event was what it looked like.
Also, I have qualms with his anarchist views because I do not think it would work for the same reasons communism does not work. They are ideals that overlook human psychology. All this being said, he has contributed across many fields and he is quite brilliant.
How dare I say such things about this religious, I mean, academic god! Have I stepped outside the bounds of acceptable commentary? Oh my, please, burn me at the stake promptly! I have no respect for the vast majority of my elders or my teachers. Anyone who does is a fool. This world that we live in is a result of their silence and ineptitude and Chomsky is as much a propagandist tool of the government as anyone. The halls of universities and governments are filled with cowards. There are some brave exceptions, such as Dr. Steven E. Jones, who lost their jobs for the pursuit of truth beyond comfort.
Update: It appears, as of late 2010, that Chomsky is changing his tune about 9-11. He stated in an interview that there is "no evidence Al Queda carried out 911." I am glad that, at 81 years old, Chomsky is still willing to correct himself based on evidence and fact.
Donald Davidson was a philosopher who developed an understanding of what truth is, amongst other linguistic constructs. I have a detailed essay on his theories here.
Richard Dawkins is a philosopher who has recently called, with Christoper Hitchens, for the arrest of the Pope during his visit to the UK. If I have any qualms with Mr. Dawkins, they are now absolved for all future thinking about him. Social and political activism should be practiced by more people who are intelligent.
He has written about evolution and religion and he is an atheist though, in his book The God Delusion, he sympathizes with pantheism. I think his writings about evolution are interesting but his writing about god is rather mundane in that it is not very profound. Perhaps this is because it is meant for the general public.
Rather, I completely agree with his conclusions about the detriments of organized religion and the notion that blind certainty about metaphysical things leads to problems for the world. Also, one must have just as much unreasonable faith in reality as any theist and faith in one's own omniscience in order to be a proper atheist. As you can see from my list on this page, best-seller and best philosopher are not at all equivalent in my mind.
Fred Dretske is a philosopher of mind who I find to be very clear and interesting and who has written extensively on mind, mental causation, perception, and knowledge.
Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who is so bold that he thinks he explained consciousness in his best-selling "Consciousness Explained". No objective science of consciousness is possible, in the deepest sense, though functional descriptions need not be disqualified because of this as I state in my essay here. "Consciousness Explained Away" or "Consciousness Not at All Explained" would have been more accurate.
Consciousness, though it can be correllated to neural events, can never be described fully as such and it can never be scientifically or publically theorized about in a public and deep theoretical sense. Consciousness is not a data structure, symbolically referable, or publically available- only the correllates of consciousness are available and they say nothing about perceptual experience as it is present to us.
I do not see this as a problem but a feature of reality. His other books, like The Mind's I and his work in the philosophy of mind, overall, has greatly helped a popular understanding of computational and functional approaches to the problem of the mind in general. Also, his work has helped people to understand that there is no central thing we can point to that is the self.
Rene' Descartes was a philosopher whose entire formulation of stable knowledge included the assumption that it is only possible because god is good and because it is obvious that god exists. It is not obvious to me as it was not to many of his contemporaries. Though, his method was clear and his reasoning well defined. His assertion of "Cogito Ergo Sum" or, "I think, therefore I am" is one of the most foundational thoughts in western philosophy and his contributions to mathematics and science are many. His philosophy is discussed in more detail here.
Albert Einstein was a philosopher more than a scientist in that, very little of what he studied and worked hard on was based on empirical evidence and he spent more time daydreaming than working hard in a laboratory. Most people are unaware of much of the philosophical work done by Einstein in the form of essays such as "Physics and Reality" (in Language and Experience, Classic Pragmatism, Ed. John W. Oller, Jr. University Press of America, pgs. 3-13, 1989).
Scientists often do not make revolutions in science because they are often unable to remove themselves from the ontological paradigms that they have been taught and carry out experiments in. If all scientists were well versed in the philosophy of science then, perhaps, more would be capable of making fundamental revolutions but it should be noted that the revolutions can not occur without the hard work of scientists in a particular paradigm.
Owen Flanagan is a philosopher of consciousness who is optomistic about solving the problem of consciousness. An analytic solving of this problem is impossible, I think, but it is important to know why- because no amount of description can explain qualitative experience. We can never have a theory of color, for example, that includes a description of a perception of color.
Jerry Fodor is a brilliant philosopher who has worked on theories of mind and on the development of our understanding of concepts. The Modularity of Mind is one of my favorite works and I am also skeptical about whether humans can ever represent the deepest facets of the mind though I am optomistic given technological possibilities that could possibly enhance our conceptual and representational capacities.
Graeme Forbes is a brilliant logician who has advanced our understanding of logic and modal logic.
Michael Foucalt was a philosopher of human society and I think his studies of insanity and criminal justice are very interesting. His linguistic studies of power and how it shapes thought are also very novel and, I think, important. Though, I will admit that much of deconstructionist philosophy is rather impossibly subjective and, as such, is principally impenetrable.
But, he was not the worst of these and, in my opinion, his work utilizes an analysis of meaning related to power that works because it is in relation to society's concept of what is mentally sound and socially acceptable in terms of crime and punishment.
Bas Van Fraassen is a philosopher who has written extremely insightfully about the limits of explanation and on science and logic.
F.L.G. Frege was an important mathematician and logician though I think that in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein points to many of the problems of Russell and Frege's projects.
Kurt Godel was a logician whose theorums showed that no system can be proven to be complete using axioms internal to that system. This was critical in undermining Hilbert's program to found mathematics and Bertrand Russel's and Alfred Whitehead's attempt to ground mathematics and logic.
G.W.F. Hegel was a philosopher who wrote a book called the Phenomenology of Spirit that was about god becoming through all existence. If we presuppose that god is to be, then, perhaps he was right. But, this is religion and literature and the imaginings of a theist. While it may be true or about something which we can agree, there is no way to test it, refute it, or interpret it as something real.
What Hegel was doing was not so much philosophy but theological artwork like Michaelangelo, except with a pen and not a brush. But to confuse religion and philosophy and art is madness. All this being said, his madness is very interesting in that it posits reality as a consciousness coming to be through evolution of spirit. I worry that this is religion and not philosophy, but where was the distinction at all until recently?
Martin Heidegger was a philosopher who was focused on the ontological layout of reality and utilized the term "dasein" in order to express being as that particular instance of being for which being is an issue. It is difficult to formally define "dasein", but, generally, it can be translated as "being-there". Dasein must be foundational, according to Heidegger, for if anything is to exist there must first be this being that allows for the possibility of further beings to arise. This page is a summary of my initial reaction to Heidegger, given my admiration of clarity and, perhaps, my inability to initially see Heidegger's ontological project apart from his personal shortcomings.
His thinking that humans are to be placed on a podium, apart from the rest of being, as they are unique in how they stand in relation to their being, is one of his assumptions that I do not think can be made without utilizing some form of observation and a theory of mind. Also, assumptions must be made about the internal lives of animals, plants, and things. These empirical observations, I think, may be capable of undermining his project because he is attempting to show what is given in Being and largely, he is critical of empiricism.
I have problems with his interpretations and negativity about technology. Without technology, humanity is at the whim of the cosmos. At first, we brush our teeth with technology. Then, we, perhaps, fend off asteroids. Yes, there are problems but with all knowledge comes power.
Thomas Hobbes wrote a book called Leviathian and in it he taxonimizes much of human existence and emotion and lays out various political concepts and why governments tend towards power and injustice.
David Hume was a rigorous skeptic who pointed out problems in the nature of human epistemology among other things. Hume is discussed in more detail here.
Edmund Husserl was a philosopher who attempted to scientifically study subjective experience in his Phenomenology. We can not have a science of non-empirical things, it is a contradiction, in principle, to think we can. However, analytically minded philosophers have made some attempts at explaining or utilizing phenomeological principles though I am skeptical of their use in analysis but not so skeptical of their use in a kind of artistic exploration of existential philosophy. Doing philosophy about what is present to us should be understood as resting on a fundamentally different way of thinking and I do not yet claim to know about its importance or relevance but only that it is interesting perhaps more in the same way art is interesting.
Peter van Inwagen is a philosopher who has written about metaphysics and free will and who has concentrated on the problem of evil.
Immanuel Kant was a compendious and ambitious philosopher who attempted to study and taxonimize reason. I think there are some inconsistencies in his work but his notions on the roots of reason, categories, and the sublime are certainly great achievements. That he began his philosophical writing in his mid 50's is inspiring.
Jaegwon Kim is a philosopher who has worked on theories of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology in ways that I find very clear and interesting.
Saul Kripke is a philosopher who has advanced our understanding of logic, language, metaphysics, and epistemology.
Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher of science who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Keith Lehrer is a philosopher who has worked extensively on theories of justification in epistemology. This is perhaps one of the hardest things to accomplish and justification is, for me, very difficult to achieve.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a mathematical genius and philosopher who closely examined the nature of substance and developed the concept of the monad. Very strange but extremely rigorous and well thought out ideas. I, like Voltaire, however, think that the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds is difficult to accept. I understand the context for this assertion is more complicated than this, but the conclusion, nonetheless, is hard to swallow. I am not saying that it is not possible, though, because free will allows for great suffering. Being free and suffering is better than not being free and being happy. This may be an aesthetic distinction though, and not a necessary one.
John Locke was a rigorous philosopher who examined the mind and its relation to the world as well as developed much in political philosophy. Locke is discussed in more detail here.
Paul Lodge is one of the most careful thinkers and well-thought out skeptical philsophers I have ever come across. His interpretations of historical philosophical thinkers has been very illuminating for the world.
Erik Mack preaches the self-centered Ayn Rand nonsense about the now bankrupt and discredited Libertarian economic philosophy. Ethics is not all about the self. Ethics is about how we should treat each other. That being said, I do not support communism but a balanced approach between greed and helping others. There are some decent lessons about individual rights to be learned from libertarian philosophy, but economic freedom soon becomes economic subjugation as far as I can see. We need regulations and mechanisms to curb human greed and mind control, not let these things loose.
Karl Marx was a political philosopher who, with Engels, developed the foundations for communism. I give him credit for egalitarian thinking, as I do all communists, but I dock him and all communists for their lack of understanding of human nature. Communism is great for bees and ants but not us. That being said, the idea that the polar opposite of communism, free-market capitalism or anarcho-capitalism, is somehow a better alternative is also a very flawed position in my estimation of how humans interact and how human psychology works.
Balance between human greed and human charity, between work and stagnation, between market fluidity and the quality of human life, between dynamic entrepreneurship and state planning, between personal liberty and the government's role in protecting its citizens, between taxation and wealth accumulation, between freedom and restraint, between privacy and public affairs, all must be taken into account.
Thus, I arrived at libertarian socialism, which can at first glance appear a quite contradictory position but is a wholly sound and compatible political and economic standpoint that offers balance above all else. I do not think any system is perfect as this would require some form of human perfection and this is one feature of reality that I find completely absent. We are flawed and beautiful creatures, but no system of cooperation we make or try will ever be perfect. Perfection is an illusion and it is why heaven seems a strangely absurd place to me for without the troughs of loss and depression how could we enjoy such heights and elation?
I do think communism is preferable to serfdom, slavery, and oppression of the many by the few powerful. However, most communist states and attempts end in subjugation of the masses by the dictatorial and not-so-equal leaders who take power. Russia, China, North Korea, and other instances are examples of the abject failure of communism while some places like Cuba may have worked to some meager degree. In America and other highly capitalist countries, we see empire and media propaganda by the rich reach absurd proportions and the people are literally attacked, as on 9-11, by their own government secret intelligence and military institutions.
In both highly capitalist and highly communist states, most people are screwed by either the rich in one instance or the political rulers in another. Humans can not simply "cooperate" without someone leading or directing and who this person or people are is usually determined by brute force through militant usurping in communism or takeovers of industry, media, and government by those with the most wealth in capitalism.
Colin McGinn is a philosopher that has focused on the impossibility of understanding how consciousness arises from material substance. I think the problem is actually more simple in that we simply can not describe qualitative experience using symbols and no one can prove what's in their Wittgensteinian "box". We can not have a theory of consciousness because theories are about things we can observe together.
Thomas Nagel is a philosopher who wrote a book called The View From Nowhere and an essay called "What is it like to be a bat?". His insights into the nature of the mind-body problem are extensive and well presented.
Issac Newton was a natural philosopher, amongst other things, who developed understandings of force and nature. Simply because he may have had a mystical, private side is no flaw at all. He knew the difference between science and his studies of possible codes in the bible. Though I do not think there is any reason to assume that there is any such code in the bible anymore than code can be found in all arrangements of intelligent symbols if one looks in certain ways.
Frederick Nietzsche was a literary philosopher and critic of contemporary philosophy, morals and ethics. He is, perhaps, one of my favorite philosophical figure though I find him extremely disturbing. I have read almost everything that is available by him. He plays with nihilism and many of his ideas and writings are dark, depressing, and borderline insane. It is not so much for his rigor but his darkness, his honesty, and his extraordinary ability as a writer that I like his work. Beyond Good and Evil is, perhaps, the best work of philosophy I have ever read.
He is honest about being Machiavellian. To his credit, he was very vocal in his opposition to the growing anti-semitism in Germany in the late 1800s. It can not be denied that his writings on power and the abolishion of contemporary morality underpinned many of the Nazi's philosophical beliefs though I would suspect that he would have found such uses of his ideas blasphemous. HIs falling out with Wagner is notable.
It is important to look at Nietzsche not as someone we should strive to be or emulate but rather someone who described nihilistic power structures. It is good to know how power and evil work and Nietzsche was, perhaps, one of the most outspoken proponents of unbridled power.
He himself was a vile person, lost in self-absorption and arrogance. But in describing such a dark and creepy mind he allows us to see that humans are not necessarily all that benevolent. This is why we must have transparency and openness in government and politics and science because the dark nothing can take over all people as it did him.
Nietzsche is like the devil giving us a complete mental map of his thinking and his justification. This is why I can not be blamed for not liking Heidegger. Nietzsche is way darker than Heidegger. Heidegger was just a lowly babbler, Nietzsche did not lie about his evil heart. He celebrated it.
William of Ockham (or Occam) was a philosopher who posited that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the most plausable or reasonable. The voracity of Occam's razor is not, in my opinion, great, but it gives us a way to navigate infinite possibility. And, all things being equal, I think he was right. The question is whether or not all things can ever be considered equal.
Steven Pinker is a linguistic and cognitive scientist who has written about how the mind works. His writing is clear and filled with examples from a cognitive psychological approach. Perhaps his greatest achievement is bringing complex theory to the general public.
Plato was a philosopher who wrote about Socrates and about the ideal realm of form. Without Plato, we would know much less about Socrates. I have an essay examining the cave in Plato's Republic here.
Karl Popper was a philosopher of science who made attempts to explain induction and define scientific theory as falsifiable, amongst other qualities.
Hillary Putnam was a philosopher who has written extensively in the philosophy of mind, science, and language.
W.V.O. Quine was a philosopher who worked largely in logic and language. He developed theories of meaning amongst other useful and important analyses.
Ayn Rand was a terrrible philosopher and an even worse writer of fiction. "Existence exists"? "Oversimplified, underdeveloped, egomaniacal philosophy exists and it was written by Ayn Rand". I can certainly sympathize that her family and wealth were taken by a violent communist revolution. But, this is no excuse for an egotistical philosophy that makes the individual vastly more important than his or her society. This is the kind of thinking and the kind of potential disparity-inducing social philosophy that precisely leads to revolution. Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians everywhere love Ayn Rand.
Her philosophy was shoved down my throat in several academic environments and it was only much later than I came to the full understanding that billionaires fund the study of Ayn Rand in order to keep their wealth. I have read The Fountainhead twice and it is crap. It is propaganda for the rich to oppress the poor.
John Rawls is a political and social philosopher that has developed interesting ideas about economic justice and fairness but I do not see how his system is different than a kind of perpetual pseudo-communism. Maybe psuedo-communism is possible and good but I am not this far to the left. Perhaps a conservative reading of his theory would allow for just enough disparity for their to be balance. I find him exceptional in that his ideas may be the key to a better society.
Bertrand Russell went to prison for opposing nuclear weapons and wrote an essay called "Why I am not a Christian". If he did nothing else, I would still recommend him but his work across diverse areas in mathematics and various areas of philosophy make him one of the most accessible and worthwhile figures to study.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a literary existential philosopher who attempted to create various questionably valid concepts, such as "bad faith" in order to express some degree of moral philosophy. How much can be derived from the contrast of being and nothingness is questionable. The term "essence" does not make more clear anything, in my opinion. The essence of something is whatever it is argued to be. I do not mean that "essence" is meaningless but that it is unclear how we could come to an agreement or validate the essence of anything.
Deconstruction in a nutshell: Let's use reason and logic and concepts to undermine and destroy those concepts so that my philosophy can become an experience but, not, precisely, in any way, meaningful. I want to destroy meaning to convey the meaning of meaning. I want to show you what can not be shown. I want to do the impossible.
Sartre, however, was completely and ultimately correct when he said, "Hell is other people".
Arthur Schopenhauer was an extremely bright philosopher who studied the limits of human knowledge in a way that is clear, precise, well-developed and still exciting to me. His writing is some of the best I have encountered in terms of the balance between clarity and style.
Bryan Magee's The Philosophy of Schopenhauer is one of the best explications of a philosopher I have yet read. All this being said, his negative views about women and his depressing assertions about the futility of human existence can detract from his better points.
John Searle is a philosopher who wrote an argument about understanding in the Chinese Room. I think it espouses causational voodoo in that biological matter has some amazing property other types of matter do not.
I don't think that any of us understand anything in the way he suggests we do and it could easily be said that the Chinese Room itself understands fully. For all we know, the room could be as conscious as we are and anything to the contrary is just ignorant assumptions about that which we have no justification for.
Socrates was a philosopher who wrote nothing and challenged everyone to demonstrate how they really knew nothing. I have begun a page on Socrates here.
Baruch Spinoza developed an axiomatic method that explored various metaphysical conclusions that were divergent from contemporary thought. Spinoza is discussed in more detail here.
Alfred Tarski was a prolific mathematician and logician who worked in diverse areas related to truth and models.
Alan Turing was a mathematician and philosopher who gave us, amongst other things, the idea of the Universal Turing Machine, which is an extremely useful and interesting concept in computational analysis and philosophical investigations of mind and memory. We should not forget his tragic end and the injustices of prejudice.
Lao-tzu was a historical figure and contemporary of Confucious. We know almost nothing about him, but the Tao Te Ching is one of the most important works of philosophy of all time. I think it is not religion but philosophy and it does a wonderful job of contrasting being and nothingness, as well as pointing out how so much confusion has arisen from the naming and conceptual division of things.
There is a deep importance to being. One could say that understanding being as unindividuated whole can be a sublime experience. I think Eastern philosophers have done a much better job at this type of insight than western existentialists, but my opinion remains open on that which I don't fully claim to understand.
Ken Wilber is a philosopher towards whom my initial reaction was rather bad because I don't know how we can know, necessarily (other than through private voyages), about many of the ontological aspects of his work. But, it is now interesting to me because it seems like it fits some kind of deistic computational scheme.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a brilliant critical and skeptical philosopher who worked in diverse areas like logic and color. His style of numbered, related thoughts in a semi-stream-of-consciousness format (but actually very much edited) is perhaps my favorite of any philosopher.
Wittgenstein studied language as a game and said that so many things we typically talk about we should not and can not speak of. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is one of my favorite works in philosophy (though I am aware of its shortcomings), Wittgenstein explains how logic can tell us nothing about the propositions it acts upon. In other words, logic has nothing to say about the state of the world but is only a way in which we arrange and manage propositions.
I am aware and in agreement with Wittgenstein's later recanting about the possibilities of logical completeness and the critiques of Whitehead are salient. Logical positivism is a failure of sight of the whole picture as is deconstruction and any attempt to throw out the lofty metaphysical games we have created and find a ground is doomed, in my humble opinion. But, to say there is neither any ground nor any sensible airspace nor anything meaningful in this world that can not be destroyed through a proper verbal tyrade is also an extreme that mistakes and unbalances our metaphysical paradigm.
"The world is all that is the case" says Wittgenstein in the opening line of the Tractatus and he is mistaken but only in part. The world is much more than this, but all that is the case is an important part of it. What is the case for all possible beings is so much more and the possibilities of what exists and can not be spoken about are limitless.
Howard Zinn was a historian who wrote a book called A People's History of the United States that tells the entire history of America from the perspective of the disenfranchised, poor, and subjugated masses. He has been beaten and jailed and risked his career and safety to be part of the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam war, as well as a myriad of other social causes.
No, he was not a philosopher, but his philosophical-minded turning of the historical tables is extremely important. History has always been the history of the rulers and we can now say that we have begun a history of the people. He was a great American.
If one wants to know why I have such disdain for academia, one need only look to the refusal of the Harvard Book Review to look at Dr. Zinn's American History Book from the perspective of the poor and disenfranchised. It is a telling sign of the disdain for justice and equality at such places. The poor are cannon fodder and rightly so to so many in these lush, catered halls. It is unfortunate that the Ivy Leaugue is the place where all of our leaders hail, given that the poor and suffering are almost non-existent in the psyches of such institutions.
And, should anyone fret not finishing at one of these prestigious places, like Harvard, well you'll just end up in the gutter like that poor, forgotten, dropout, Bill Gates. But, much good can also come from an academic education when we stay away from business schools and pay some attention to justice, truth, beauty, art, science, philosophy, or any of the other myriad subjects that enlighten us rather than have us become money. In America, the rich believe in a green god and that god is good to them because the peons worship it too. The green god needs no faith but only a calculator.
