A while back I felt inspired to pen some of my thoughts on a selection of philosophers from the Western canon. It's one half [Russell's *History of Western Philosophy*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy) and the other half [Nabokov's thoughts on other writers](http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations). I focused mainly on philosophers studied in the analytic tradition, since, for better or worse, due to my Oxford education, that's what I was "brought up with." --- **Socrates:** a mythic figure, and rightly so. The gadfly grandfather of philosophy. Champion of the ethical life, refusal of sophism, and intellectual humility. Few have risen to his heights. **Plato:** his prose is near-perfect; his metaphysics disastrous—his politics half-revolutionary, half-reactionary; he (rightly) taught us to love mathematics and strive to see it clearly, and thereby see the world clearly through it, but perhaps could not see it clearly for himself, and mistook the hand pointing at the moon for the moon. The root of many of philosophy’s sins and salvations, in equal parts. **Aristotle:** the opposite of Plato in nearly every respect—a better scientist, but still wrong—revolutionized logic and then left it stagnant for literal millennia; politically the inverse of his teacher: defender of slavery and subjugation of women, but clearer-eyed about political realities. His teleological metaphysics and ethics has moments of brilliance but at the same time planted unforgivable seeds in the soil of Western civilization. **Descartes:** the foil for all modern philosophy, perhaps unfairly so. A deep thinker who dragged modernity kicking and screaming out of the clutches of scholasticism and Aristotelian dogma, but built in its stead an edifice of solipsistic chauvinism. Would that he had been a Buddhist, rather than a Christian. His contribution to mathematics is especially commendable. **Spinoza:** “the noblest and most lovable of all philosophers” is an understatement. Has few equals in depth of insight, especially in the realm of ethics, but also saw remarkably clearly in realms such as metaphysics and politics despite the broadly Cartesian framework he was operating within. Among the canon of early modern philosophers, he reigns supreme. **Leibniz:** a supreme intellect, but that bears mixed fruit (where Spinoza saw through the Cartesian frame despite working within it, sometimes Leibniz became too preoccupied with its epicycles). Made an even greater contribution to mathematics than Descartes (already a high bar), and despite the controversy, had a better notation for calculus than Newton. **Hume:** a gadfly for modern philosophy rivaled only by Socrates. The prince of skepticism, icon of atheism. His earlier work (the *Treatise* in particular) at times rivals Spinoza in depth of insight, although his later works become more staid and pedestrian. His conservatism arguably held him back from drawing the more radical conclusions his philosophy deserved. **Kant:** surpasses Descartes in sheer influence on the subsequent course of philosophy (deservedly so, in my opinion), for better or worse. His Copernican turn is genuinely inspired and revolutionary, but his elaboration of it is mixed. Some of it is great, and his appreciation for logic as a fulcrum of our ability to structure reality is commendable, though he perhaps lacked the technical mastery to really follow that conclusion through (would that Kant had been a Leibniz; would that Leibniz had been a Kant). In equal parts more and less radical than Hume—more liberal, but less willing to give up on causes and absolute moral authority. **Hegel:** the mad king of modernity. A mystic wearing a professor’s coat. His insights profound, his expression at-times muddled, a visionary reaching for truths the world had not yet found language or formalisms to even express (it took the invention of category theory and a plucky Marxist logician named Lawvere for mathematical formalism to even begin to catch up). Not without failings other than expression, either—retained Kant’s absolutism even as he upended his solipsistic frame. **Frege:** a tragic genius; his echoes are still felt in our logic, and in the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debates about sense and reference that reverberate in the halls of analytic philosophy departments to this day. A reactionary accidentally forced into the role of revolutionary by his own brilliance. **Russell:** as a logician, an inheritor of many of Frege’s failings, and regrettably few of his deepest insights. As a political/ethical philosopher, a champion of 20th-century liberalism, with all the good and bad associated therewith. Commendable for his actions, his principles, and his heroic efforts, however flawed, to save logic from its own self-immolation, but ultimately lacking the true genius to see it through. **Wittgenstein:** a philosopher for a different age. An iconoclastic genius who should have been the end of (analytic) philosophy twice-over. Not a builder like Spinoza, but an unparalleled wielder of the sledgehammer of clear-eyed insight and brutal intellectual honesty (the true inheritor of the Socratic legacy, in this regard); philosophy should have died and been born anew in his wake. Instead, it has kept shambling on, propelled in part by those who claim to be his followers (ordinary language philosophers, etc.) They do his name a disservice. **Carnap:** arguably one of the few rivals to Spinoza for the title of “noblest and most lovable of all philosophers," though not on the same level in depth of insight. His logical liberalism is commendable, but his inability to meet the challenges posed by the likes of Quine, etc., arguably was the death knell of any hope for analytic philosophy to salvage itself from its slide into neo-scholasticism. **Quine:** a walking contradiction who ultimately did more harm than good for the development of philosophy. His philosophy of science is at times beautiful; his philosophies of logic and mathematics did irreparable harm to their respective fields; how one and the same man could speak of a “web of belief” always open to revision in light of novel experience, yet in the same breath defend first-order logic as the one true logic and set theory as the only game in town still baffles me. His reduction of ontology to quantification paved the way for a rehabilitation of metaphysics (modal realism, etc.) that would have been horrifying to him, and rightly so. **Kripke:** a decent logician; a second-rate philosopher. Inherited the dregs of Frege’s logical confusion from the legacy of Russell et al, and was crowned prince of analytic metaphysics for “solving” them by adding modal epicycles, from which he was able to replicate all the worst failings of modern philosophy (Cartesian dualism, essentialism, armchair appeals to intuition, etc.)