I would vote for myself, actually, if I had a chance.
Plato
Descartes
Kant
Sartre
Russell
Never met any of them!....
I would vote for myself, actually, if I had a chance.
Male:By a million miles shakespeare.
Female:ISIS,then Nel Noddings.
Kant has enabled me to present some kind of argument to my athiest friends. His allusion to the eye as being not aware of itself without a brain... Infinately applicable towards the ultimate realization of some unknowable self. Like him and Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer is an atheist. Your friends should present his argument to you.
Kant is not necessarily an argument against atheism. In fact you say he can be used for as the 'thing in itself' must still be a thing. and 'god' is no such thing. Anyway,Kant be bothered with philosophy anymore. It just a way out of the fly bottle. Maybe its better not to enter the bottle in the first place.
Kant was a man with an extremely funny seriousness of which he was totally unawared.
There are many who I could declare stooges of reason, Aristotle being the first, however elementary and full of gases. But here is a conversation between three possible ones having achieved a little more Protagorian sophistication.
George Berkely- My dear fellows, lovers of reason, all of the aspects of perception are in reality the ideas present in a person's mind. The observer doesn't make objects exist out there, but rather the certainty of their existence is introduced in him directly by God. What God doesn't give him makes him divinely ignorant.
Immanuel Kant- Not only that, George. The basic principles of science are strictly based on the structure of the mind much more than on the external world. Take heed that because of a favor God has granted us, we know with absolute certainty that 2+2 = 4 a-priori. Those who admit not knowing why it is so are the ones that accept ultimate truth and describe it without being able to explain it.
Albert Einstein- God didn't play die with us. It is so. I can only describe it; cannot explain it. He who flies faster in vaccuo gets fatter, denser, and lives longer. It's like a miracle that requires a lot of imagination and not much of any particular knowledge.
George Berkeley- Then, dear Albert, I haven't the slightest of doubt that being thin causes premature death. It's a paradox. We should fly faster and reach for heaven the earliest. Thus fat, dense, and pinkish, we could get there like cherubins, not like the boring seraphins that usually accompany us.
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I like Mary Wollstonecraft and Baruch Spinoza.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
Every philosopher in history,even the top three Nietzsche,all zennists and Wittgenstein,were really comedians,court jesters and bufoons. The thing is the aformetioned three were aware of this defect. The entire canon of philosophical wisdom,east and west,could probably be written in a couple of pages.
Søren Kierkegaard!!
He is the genius.