Are History’s “Greatest Philosophers” All That Great?
Honestly, I don&#x27;t think this is the right path for inquiry. Philosophy isn&#x27;t just the accumulation of arguments and scholarship; it&#x27;s a discipline, and by that measure, some folks are better or worse, absolutely.<p>When it comes to Plato specifically, I did a lot of pre-Socratic and later Plato work in my philosophy degree, and you can basically watch Plato go from reiterating Socrates to becoming a truly great philosopher in his own right. He does it by learning, as we all must, to do good philosophy: to take seriously his forebears on their own terms, and then communicate carefully and thoroughly what&#x27;s inadequate.<p>It&#x27;s funny, because the tools he has are very weak. Logic isn&#x27;t well developed; they just started grappling with basic concepts like what-is and what-is-not. But eventually, as any truly great philosopher must, Plato builds out his own positive program. The Parmenides is a great example; he finds a way to reconcile the paradoxes the pre-Socratics were obsessed with, and comes out with a richer toolkit and a stronger ontology as a result. Oh, and it&#x27;s just as rigorous as any modern work of philosophy.<p>This article, though, seems kinda narrowly concerned about impact and exposure and all that stuff. Like in tech, you don&#x27;t get to decide your impact, but you can become a really great philosopher by doing just what Plato did back then.