A Philosopher's Book of Lists and Anecdotes

Chapter 1 Philosophers Lead Sheltered Lives.

That’s the title of the memoirs of an American philosophy professor. The man knew his subject: how Socrates was made to drink poison, Hypatia was dismembered by a Christian mob, Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, and a roster of thinkers lost their jobs and were put to flight, imprisoned, hanged or shot by Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and others in his own century. "Sheltered lives" was not meant to be a description of all time, except maybe ironically, but mostly of the author himself and even then, no doubt, with some tongue-in-cheek.

But if most philosophers today do "lead sheltered lives," it was not always so, and it still is not in some parts of the world. To the extent that philosophers –and others dealing in ideas– live sheltered lives it is in large measure because many of their predecessors did not. Philosophers as a tribe might ask the significance of the fact that powerful people have often seen them as dangerous. Again, they can be proud of the dangers their predecessors have undergone. As a tribe, the lives of philosophers are not a record of sheltered individuals. Their actions are as interesting or as dull as most groups you could name. But those most famous martyrs: Socrates, Hypatia and a few others, are just the tip of an iceberg of thought, action and passion that this book echoes some soundings of.

Another image of philosophy is out there: that its whole history has been confined to DWEM: "dead white European males." This says its story ignores whole continents: the Buddha, Confucius and Gandhi in the East, William James, John Dewey, the late W. V. O. Quine in the West, with Avicenna and Averroes in the middle. Whole races? but Alain Locke and Martin Luther King, Jr. must have a niche somewhere. A whole gender? Simone De Beauvoir and some living specimens: Susan Haack and Martha Nussbaum, for starters. The DWEM image is a caricature – or a bad joke.

This book is a roundup of lists and anecdotes about matters philosophical and individuals who are called philosophers, East and West, and a lot of others who have philosophized more non-professionally. The impressive name "philosopher" is even less clear to most readers than "nuclear physicist." That is partly because it takes in many inquiries. That is, it is not only a "deep" subject, as rumored, but wide as well. The lists of persons are broad, including poets, popes, politicians and physicists. They all philosophized in some important examples.

The designation (W) indicates a woman philosopher. The date is the year of birth unless otherwise specified.

G. Mayil Hirwadi-20th Century
M. I. Muballigh-20th Century
A. G. Ravan Farhadi-20th Century

African Philosophers

As Prof. Kyame Gyeke says, ("African Philosophy" in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, NY,1995), pre-literate African philosophy traces to no individuals. Known names will be listed by nationality.

Cotton Mather-1663
Cadwallader Colden-1688 (Irish b.)
Samuel Johnson-1696
Jonathan Edwards-1703
Benjamin Franklin-1706
Joseph Priestley-1733 (English b.)
Thomas Paine-1737 (English b.)
Ethan Allen-1738
Thomas Jefferson-1743
Benjamin Rush-1745
Thomas Cooper-1759
Elihu Palmer-1764
William Ellery Channing-1780
Alexander Bryan Johnson-1786 (English b.)
Francis Wayland-1796
Laurens Perseus Hickok-1798
Amos Bronson Alcott-1799
Orestes Augustus Brownson-1803
Ralph Waldo Emerson-1803
Asa Gray-1810
Margaret Fuller Ossoli-1810 (W)
Theodore Parker-1819
Henry James, Sr.-1811
James McCosh-1811 (Scottish b.)
Noah Porter-1811
Henry David Thoreau-1817
Henry Lewis Morgan-1818
Joseph Weydemeyer-1818 (German b.)
John Bernard Stallo-1823 (German b.)
Chauncey Wright-1830
George Holmes Howison-1834
William Torrey Harris-1835
Edmund Duncan Montgomery-1835
Francis Ellingwood Abbot-1836
Charles Sanders Peirce-1839
George Sylvester Morris-1840
William Graham Sumner-1840
Oliver Wendell Holmes II-1841
John Fiske-1842
William James-1842
George Trumbull Ladd-1842
George Herbert Palmer-1842
Borden Parker Bowne-1847
Christine Ladd Franklin-1847 (W)
Paul Carus-1852 (German b.)
Josiah Royce-1855
Thorstein Veblen-1857
John Dewey-1859
George Fullerton-1859 (Indian b.)
Jacques Loeb-1859 (German b.)
James Mark Baldwin-1861
James Edwin Creighton-1861 (Canadian b.)
Alfred North Whitehead-1861 (English b.)
Charles Augustus Strong-1862
Mary Whiton Calkins-1863 (W)
Rufus Jones-1863
George Herbert Mead-1863
Hugo Muensterberg-1863 (German b.)

Chapter 18

When you think of philosophers and sex, two opposite pictures might occur. One is of a bearded or a female sage too cereberal and too old to have much of a positive interest in the subject or the practice. The other is of a libertine who, when not talking about the subject is practicing it – or perhaps who doesn’t rule out doing both at the same time. Plato and Kant surely match the first, though Kant was at one time ready to marry and just took too long to ask the lady, who had by then married someone else. A temptation to let Epicurus epitomize the second picture is a historical error, since the Garden of Epicurus was strictly for the avoidance of pain and worry and for enjoyment of intellectual pleasures. Biographies of Sartre furnish a much likelier candidate. Philosophers are a varied lot and this in- cludes their sexual ideas and practices. The large number of clergy in their ranks skews the picture considerably. I simply omit celibate clergy from lists and anecdotes unless some anomaly stands out. From the lists, as from most lists above, I also omit living philosophers. Many ancients and several moderns are no doubt omitted for lack of data. Lists are by birth year.