Who Are The World's Top Living Geniuses

Do you have a link, pending my “Amazoning” Blackburn, Irving?

I’d strongly dispute Chomsky and Fukuyama on that list. If you’re going to include them, you might as well stick Paris Hilton up there.

In terms of literature you should probably include Brett Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq.

i find this amusing. steven hawking spends a fair amount of time hanging around cambridge (i saw him recently) and simon blackburn, who, by the way is an absolute legend, lectured me on Hume in my first term here back in october for 8 lectures and the theory of knowledge in lent term for 8 lectures. he’s awesome and a great lecturer. if you google him he’s got a website where he puts up all his lecture notes and some other stuff which may be of interest to you if you like him.
sara
xx

Ditto on the Metcalf.

Oh, wait, I meant Donald Metcalf!

For philosophers, I’ll throw in Tu Weiming. The man is a freakin’ genius! Some of the best stuff written since the classics.

No idea what there is on the net, I’ve just recently done a course which included him at uni. He has lots of books, the ones I’ve looked at are Spreading the Word (really about philosophy of language, but with a section on ethics), Essays in Quasi-Realism and Ruling Passions. I’d imagine if you had a look you could find articles online. He does the popularising philosophy thing as well, no idea if those books are any good, I’m really talking about his own theories here.

For anyone that is interested, Quasi-Realism is basically the view that moral judgements aren’t descriptive of features of the world, rather they express attitudes, but rather than taking a standard expressivist line we allow talk of moral truth (what this exactly is for Blackburn depends upon what you read, he starts out with a true moral statement being a member of some completely consistent attitude set, then moves towards saying ‘p is true’ being just equivalent to asserting p with greater emphasis) as well as denying relativism - my moral opinion that women should be educated is superior to a view that they shouldn’t. The disagreement between the 2 viewpoints is at the level of 1st-order ethical commitments i.e. we disagree about a substantive ethical matter, but just because all we have is a clash of attitudes doesn’t stop my attitude being better. What is wrong with the alternative attitude is that it is ignorant of the potential of women, it is based upon prejudice etc. As Blackburn himself says, all of this is to ‘talk in our voice’, but as long as our voice isn’t a voice to be embarassed by this is no problem.

But how many of these breathe the air of the heights?

Yeah. Who says analytics are so great anyway???

/Just sad that Deleuze, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault and Guattari are gone…

I admitted I’m short on many fields. I do put more stock in critical, analytical genius with explanatory power and appeal to the left side of my brain, which is usually the more active. The appeal of postmodernism escapes me. It seems to deny meaning, knowledge and progress. It has a streak of paranoia running through it, asserting claims to truth and progress are tactics of political domination and authentic experience and communication are impossible. I’m not interested in this line of weird thinking, just because it sounds original.

I couldn’t agree more.

What in the world would you know about Chomsky or Fukuyama? Recount to us a line or two about their respective work. I know nothing, zip, about Paris Hilton, and proud of it. The other name is completely new to me. As if you’re familiar with Chomsky’s theory of transformational generative grammar, or have read any of Fukuyama’s neo-liberal accounts of the West’s place in the post-Cold War world. Maybe those were the two only names on the list you even recognized. Stick with the pop culture. You seem up on that.

John Nash, anybody?

He’s finally exposed economics for what it is… what a consolation to all those poor people who never did well in eco.

me

Douglas Hofstadter, especially for his recent book “I am a Strange Loop” which I adore. I’ve been meaning to start a thread on it here, once I get my thoughts together on its philosophy of mind.

Christopher Hitchens!

NO WAY!

Scratch him off that list…
In fact just delete the list altogether…

Who do I think suffers from Genius?

Every childhood perhaps…

Someone once said: If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.

An unfortunate Truth perhaps…but more insightful than any List!

y am i not on the list?

Chomsky is an American anarchist-turned-liberal who made his name with his theory of deep grammar, then he wrote that book about the five filters mass media goes through (I think it was called Manufacturing Consent). He’s a well known critic of US foreign policy in the classic leftist mould. He has recently been sighted fellating Michael Moore in a cubicle in a taco bar toilet in New York.

Fukuyama is a rightwing intellectual who was made famous by The End of History (and the Last Man), an article-turned-book that outlined the theory that liberal capitalist democracy is the best possible form of society and, having triumphed over Soviet Communism, had no real ideological enemy anymore, thus constituted the End of History. He then became a neoconservative and became involved with the current Bush administration, most obviously via PNAC.

His theory of the End of History was roundly rebuffed by poststructuralist Jack Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx. He illustrated how the logic of Fukuyama’s theory was essentially circular, and constituted an ideological confidence trick, i.e. that it succeeds if enough people believe in it, regardless of whether or not it is actually true at the time of writing.

So be it. Personally, I want to write about things in ways that people will understand, admire and be affected by, so I’m perfectly willing to use pop culture as a means to aiding their understanding of what really matters to me. You see, it’s a literary strategy, an application of Darko Suvin’s ideas on formalism, estrangement, ostranenie and so on to the liquid conception of the relation between high and pop culture that Barthes talked about. Then actually applied to the world, with varying success and failure.

But if you want to make a massive series of assumptions about me purely on the basis of me comparing Paris Hilton to Noam Chomsky then go ahead, make my day…

Your assumptions speak volumes for the emotional baggage you are bringing to this conversation. I’ve discussed these very ideas on this very forum…

They were the only two that I recognised with which I took issue. I refuse to discuss Searle, so I didn’t bother mentioning him.

You stick with making massive (and incorrect) assumptions about people with whom you argue. It seems to be the limit of your abilities with language.

You’re right. Hitchens gets editted out.

So you looked up and plagiarized some information on Chomsky and Fukuyama and posted it to mask your ignorance. Ric tells he’s banned, so for now, I’ll just speak for him. Only a weakling would give up and complaign to the administration to get someone banned over a disputed he started and couldn’t finish. And plagiarizing or using ghostwriters to mask your ignorance is transparent and I’m exposing it before leaving this forum to lame brained cheaters like you. As if you know a damn this about cognitive science, philosophy of language or John Searle. Say good bye to you ghost writer and to google.

Ric are you arguing with yourself here? Or did someone steal your pic?

To be honest, this is like a blind man writing a list of the best places to go sight-seeing…

Except for my candidate, Stephen Metcalf.