There also some decent men in the list. Tom Paine, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, Lord Acton are worthy examples. William Blackstone is better known as a lawyer while Adam Smith is thought of as an economist.
Adolf Hitler
QUOTE
Adolf as the leader of the Nazis became one of the world's most famous politicians. An important point is that his philosophy was derived from the same source as Marx's and also Antonio Gramsci's. They were all influenced by Hegel, a German philosopher who claimed that the State owned the Man. Adolf and Marx were both collectivists just like the Fascists, just like Antonio Gramsci, the leading intellectual of the communists in Italy.
UNQUOTE
Artist, author, soldier, politician, philosopher - a man should be versatile. Adolf was.
Karl Marx
QUOTE
Karl Marx brought us communism. Karl Marx brought us death. Karl Marx brought us destruction. Karl Marx was evil. Karl Marx was a Jew. Karl Marx was influenced by Georg Hegel, a dismal rogue. So was Adolf Hitler. They are a nexus of evil. Marx brought us the Communist Manifesto, a statement of murderous intent.
UNQUOTE
Marx is perhaps better thought of as a Useful Idiot. He was certainly a dangerous fool because he was a plausible fool, whose foul witterings in the Communist Manifesto & Das Kapital brought us over 85 million murders - see The Black Book of Communism on the point.
Friedrich von Hayek
A good economist which makes him a rare beast. He was also influential in economic policy.
Antonio Gramsci
Was a destroyer, vicious and dangerous. He knew full well what Pope Leo XIII had to say about the evils of socialism in Rerum Novarum and decided to destroy the Church. He had huge success too. His recruitment of useful idiots to destroy Western Civilization by their Long March Through The Institutions was highly effective and is going on to this day.
Martin Heidegger
Was a German philosopher, a member of the Nazi party and heavy going. He is, naturally hated by Left Wingers, which is a point in his favour.
Thomas Hobbes
Told as about the need for government without which the life of man is solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
John Stuart Mill
QUOTE
Mill's book, On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. One argument that Mill develops further than any previous philosopher is the harm principle. The harm principle holds that each individual has the right to act as he wants, so long as these actions do not harm others. If the action is self-regarding, that is, if it only directly affects the person undertaking the action, then society has no right to intervene, even if it feels the actor is harming himself. Mill excuses those who are "incapable of self-government" from this principle, such as young children or those living in "backward states of society". It is important to emphasize that Mill did not consider giving offense to constitute "harm"; an action could not be restricted because it violated the conventions or morals of a given society. The idea of 'offense' causing harm and thus being restricted was later developed by Joel Feinberg in his 'offense principle' essentially an extension of J.S. Mill's 'harm principle'.
UNQUOTE
He sounds reasonable to me albeit he wanted women to be given the vote. But you can read his chief book, On Liberty and decide for yourself.
George Orwell
Was a writer, socialist, an honest man and a passionate Englishman. He was hated by left wing subversives for telling the truth about their manipulation. See for example Nineteen Eighty Four
Tom Paine
QUOTE
Thomas Paine (29 January 1737 – 8 June 1809) was an English pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, and intellectual. He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contribution was the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and of The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.Later, he greatly influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), the book advocating deism and arguing against Christian doctrines. In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.
UNQUOTE
Common Sense reads well to this day. Get it from the Gutenberg Project.
Heidegger's Black Notebooks Reviewed
Our man is getting written up because a book about him is coming. Greg Johnson of C is sympathetic.
Martin Heidegger ex Wiki
"Martin Heidegger (German: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]; September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being".[6] Heidegger is known for offering a phenomenological critique of Immanuel Kant. He wrote extensively on Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin in his later career. Heidegger's influence has been far reaching, influencing fields such as philosophy, theology, art, architecture, artificial intelligence, cultural anthropology, design, literary, social theory, political theory, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.[7][8]His best known book, Being and Time, is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.[9] In it and later works, Heidegger maintained that our way of questioning defines our nature. He argued that Western thinking had lost sight of being. Finding ourselves as "always already" moving within ontological presuppositions, we lose touch with our grasp of being and its truth becomes "muddled".[10] As a solution to this condition, Heidegger advocated a change in focus from ontologies based on ontic determinants to the fundamental ontological elucidation of being-in-the-world in general, allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself as concealment.[11]
Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with Nazism prior to 1934, for which he publicly neither apologized nor expressed regret,[12] although in private he called it "the biggest stupidity of his life" (die größte Dummheit seines Lebens).[13] This controversy raises general questions about the relation between Heidegger's thought and his connection to National Socialism.[citation needed]
Overview
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy/ since Plato has misunderstood what it means for something "to be", tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about Being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated Being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more authentic analysis of Being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis of which beings are already understood," or that which underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place (see world disclosure).[14] But since philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of being from which their theories derive, and since they have incorrectly applied those theories universally, they have confused our understanding of being and human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, beginning with Plato, has left its traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we speak to our notions of "common sense", is susceptible to error, to fundamental mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—such as reality, logic, God, consciousness, and presence. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that his writing is 'notoriously difficult', possibly because his thinking was 'original' and clearly on obscure and innovative topics.[15] Heidegger accepted this charge, stating 'Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy', and suggesting that intelligibility is what he is critically trying to examine.[16]
Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, aesthetics of literature, and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Well-known philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss,, Ahmad Fardid, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, William E. Connolly, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.
Heidegger supported National Socialism in 1933 and was a member of the Nazi Party until May 1945.[17] His defenders, notably Hannah Arendt, see this support as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics).[18] Defenders think this error was irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics, such as Emmanuel Levinas[19] and Karl Löwith,[20] and Theodor Adorno claim that Heidegger's support for National Socialism revealed flaws inherent in his thought."