Leiter Reports

When someone is comfortable dismissing extremely influential thinkers because they "don't remember and had a feeling it was dumb", they aren't engaged in a serious conversation, and they aren't a serious thinker. This isn't how actual philosophy works. Your intellectual laziness isn't my problem.

Feyerabend is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century. This is not controversial. These are not crackpots, unless you think that the entire field of academic philosophy is composed of crackpots. Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if you did.

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/most-significant-philosophers-of-science-of-the-20th-century-the-results.html

https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/feyerabend/

As far as your "useful result," one example of the man's influence is right here, on a highlighted section on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend#Outside_philosophy

Your arrogant attitude here is very anti-science and very anti-curiosity. Dismissing someone that clearly is considered an expert in their field because they seemed "devoid of merit" is both lazy and ignorant. Again, you may disagree with Feyerabend (or with anyone else), but your lack of knowledge on something is not equivalent to a counterargument. A counterargument requires knowledge of the argument – which you neither have nor are interested in acquiring.

If you want to actually write something of value on the philosophy of science,…

You're quite wrong on that first point. He's discussed that very issue many times. Here is another:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/chomsky-on-libertarianism-and-its-meaning.html

"The term "libertarian" has an idiosyncratic usage in the US and Canada, reflecting, I suppose, the unusual power of business in these societies. In the European tradition, "libertarian socialism" ("socialisme libertaire") was the anti-state branch of the socialist movement: anarchism (in the European, not the US sense).

I use the term in the traditional sense, not the US sense."

The farmer is indeed damned if he doesn't. Monsanto crushes him because he can't compete in the market. Did you not hear of the mass suicides among farmers in India, where they took 95% of the seed market?

Monstanto has been very successful in executing the equivalent of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" in the seed market, and now enjoy an 80% - 90% monopoly on seeds depending on the crop. It's now difficult to purchase non-patent-encumbered seeds even if you want to, and if you do so, you're at a severe disadvantage.

Seeds. Think about that for a moment. That small piece of biomatter, the source of life, which grows into staple crops for feeding our planet. This and all future generations of it are patent encumbered, and controlled by a large corporation. To equate this with liberty is hilarious. Laissez-faire capitalism leads only to tyranny, not liberty. Even Greenspan finally figured this out. Too bad…

Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups).

He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lackey-What-are-the-modern-classics.pdf) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".

An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?

They had no problem finding debaters for "Stay", but you'd argue that something external is needed to argue for "Leave"? That is essentially supporting the authors thesis, that political ideology motivates academic output and at this time the academy is overwhelmingly liberal.

The more sinister read on topic could be that there are professors who would argue "Leave" but recognize it would be career suicide to do so. For examples, see attacks on professors who are not adequately anti-racist[1]

I also want to cite Brian Leiter[2] who while I find his tone childish at times (calling Republicans repugnicans, imagine the blowback if a conservative professor used libtards[3]) but nevertheless he tends to be a staunch supporter of academic freedom

[1]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/princeton-president-asks-board-to-fire-tenured-classics-professor-citing-sexual-misconduct-investigation-11653013224?mod=mhp

[2]
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/

[3]
I realize this term is uniquely offensive by it's use of a slur of people with handicaps, but I would argue that that isn't the main thing

There's quite a bit of further discussion (including explanations of a number of the questions) scattered across a couple different LessWrong threads.

Explanations of many of the questions:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/

What do professional philosophers believe, and why?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professional_philosophers_believe_and_why/

Here's a list of links to more discussions: http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=420 I haven't actually gone through these, though.

You might also want to check out:

Survey of eating habits among philosophers:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-eating-ethics-a-discussion-of-the-poll-results.html

Survey of beliefs among economists:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-agree.html

They also don't have Kripke, Putnam or Fodor. I dare say that going by relative prestige in their philosophical cultures, Kripke is a more startling omission than any of the three you mentioned (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/most-important-anglophone-philosophers-1945-2000-the-top-20.html). That's not a point about merit, btw, just about who people would write about if personal articles showed favoritism.

I wonder if there's a tendency to not write articles on living philosophers (as opposed to some particular aspect of their work).

Still, I do suspect there is less work on 20th century Continental philosophy (so far as that's a well defined thing).