Survival of the Fittest Philosophers

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In my original book on evolutionary philosophy, I conducted a chronological survey of 60 of the most famous philosophers in history to see what they had thought and compare those thoughts to my own beliefs. I organised their beliefs using an evolutionary perspective as to whether I thought their ideas survived, needed to adapt, or had gone extinct.

The organisation of this is in fun. None of the ideas have literally gone extinct because we still know of them. I respect others’ beliefs and their role in history to get us where we are today, but in light of new knowledge, some ideas have certainly become obsolete and dangerous. This framework of mine is a great way to roughly point out which ones. More importantly, the exercise provides a great way to bring up the major philosophical beliefs in history.

The summaries on these pages are certainly filled with gross oversimplifications of many arguments. That's okay because a) this is a website for the general public and not a two-million-word academic volume on all of the philosophers in history, and b) this is surely filled with gross oversimplifications of my own ideas as well. This gets the conversation going, though, and sticks to the rigorous MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) frameworks I want to build. Information on the philosophers and their beliefs is largely taken from Wikipedia where further sources are cited properly.

The pages in this section host links to my original thoughts on these philosophers. More detailed explorations of each thinker were conducted later and can be found at the bottom of the page under "further reading".
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Ancient Philosophy (Pre 450 CE)
Medieval Philosophy (450-1600 CE)
Modern Philosophy (1600-1920 CE)
Contemporary Philosophy (Post 1920 CE)

Further Reading

​Over the course of about a year, I ran weekly blogs about these 60 most famous philosophers in history. Using the objective basis for morality that I discussed in my first peer-reviewed journal article, I analyzed each of the philosophers to see if their major ideas "survive", "need to adapt", or have "gone extinct." Based on these analyses, I made a partly subjective / partly objective ranking of all 60, which placed them into six major categories that you can see in the chart below. To read the short synopsis of these rankings, see my capstone article summarizing my findings. To read more about any individual philosopher, find their ranking below and click on their name or picture for a link to my blog post about them.

​What do you think? Do you have a different ranking? Send me an email to share your thoughts.

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© 2012 Ed Gibney