The following is a guest post* by Gregory Lewis, a medical doctor and amateur philosopher, in which he looks through a statistical lens at the formation of the Western philosophical canon. You can read more of his writings, including an earlier version of the piece that follows, at his site. Are History’s “Greatest Philosophers” All That Great? by Gregory Lewis Introduction In the canon of western philosophy, generally those regarded as the ‘greatest’ philosophers tend to live far in the past. Consider this example from an informal poll: Plato (428-348 BCE) Aristotle (384-322 BCE) Kant (1724-1804) Hume (1711-1776) Descartes (1596-1650) Socrates (469-399 BCE) Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Locke (1632-1704) Frege (1848-1925) Aquinas (1225-1274) (source: LeiterReports) I take this as fairly representative of consensus opinion—one might argue about some figures versus those left out, or the precise ordering, but most would think (e.g.) Plato and Aristotle should be there, and near the top. All are dead, and only two were alive during the 20th century. But now consider this graph of human population over time (US Census Bureau, via Wikipedia): The world population at 500BCE  is estimated to have been 100 million; in the year 2000, it was 6.1 billion, over sixty times greater. Thus if we randomly selected people from those born since the ‘start’ of western philosophy, they would generally be born close to the present day. Yet when it comes to ‘greatest philosophers’, they were generally born much further in the past than one would expect by chance. Where are the 13 Platos in modern day Attica? Consider this toy example. Let’s pretend that philosophical greatness is a function of philosophical ability, and let’s pretend that philosophical ability is wholly innate. Thus you’d expect philosophical greatness to be a natural lottery, and the greatest philosophers ever to be those fortunate enough to be born with the greatest philosophical ability. The Attican population in the time of Plato is thought to have been 250 to 300 thousand people (most of whom weren’t citizens, but ignore that for now). The population of modern day Attica (admittedly slightly larger geographically than Attica in the time of Plato) is 3.8 million. If we say Plato was the most philosophically able in Attica, that ‘only’ puts him at the 1 in 300,000 … Continue reading Are History’s “Greatest Philosophers” All That Great? (guest post by Gregory Lewis)