The Philosopher Tier List

Today, we're talking about philosophers and putting them in a tier list. The format is a little silly, but it is an efficient way for me to talk about a lot of philosophers and give you my opinions about them.

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00:00 - Start
00:19 - Epicurus
01:58 - Brilliant
03:05 - Plato
04:54 - Aristotle
06:57 - Epictetus
08:36 - Marcus Aurelius
09:59 - Plotinus
11:20 - Augustine
15:01 - Aquinas
16:12 - Descartes
17:13 - Pascal
18:06 - Spinoza
19:29 - Hume
20:46 - Kant
22:06 - Hegel
23:01 - Kierkegaard
24:14 - Marx
26:33 - Mill
27:58 - Nietzsche
29:27 - Back to Hegel
29:43 - Frege
31:01 - Heidegger
32:13 - Rand
35:12 - Albert Camus
36:30 - Butler
38:19 - Peterson
38:58 - Singer

[_jared]

If I remade the video, I'd bump Aristotle to S tier.

[pippen]

Hegel is only S because nobody has understood anything he wrote yet

[jameskeener]

You have made my life more difficult. And you should be proud. I'm 80 and might make it to 81, but not 82. So time, as I understand time, is a big deal. And you put so many wonderful things in front of me that I come closest to regret when I consider what I want to learn than for any other reason. Thank you.

[duncanclarke]

I welcome you to the world of humanities meme-format content

[GreyHorton-lejs]

You can’t begin a discussion of philosophy without Socrates.

[nicwhitbread]

The exclusion of Russel and Wittgenstein is criminal

[davidbockoven]

If Jared ever makes a sequel to this, the people not on the list I'd be most curious about include Montaigne, Leibniz, Rousseau, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Benjamin, Adorno, Deleuze, Habermas, and Nussbaum. I think it's kind of sad Jared doesn't discuss any philosophers outside the Western tradition. I have a special affinity for Zhuangzi. I really love Jared's videos. The recent one he did on the six central issues surrounding higher ed were spot on. (I'm an adjunct instructor in writing at three different colleges.)

[jordanknox]

seeing Aquinas next to Peter Singer just killed off a part of my soul.

[huugosorsselsson]

As Camus himself clarified, he wasn't an existentialist. It's more than mere quibbling that made him disavow the label; I think we should be charitable enough to consider the possible reasons (just as we should charitably consider, e.g., Derrida's rejection of the labels 'postmodern' and 'poststructuralist').

[kiloub]

where's zizik and so on and so on

[evanrayswenson]

If we were to compare someone like Rand and Max Stirner in their egoism, Stirner always comes out on top. Rand made individualism an almost psychopathic kind of self-indulgence, whereas Stirner still acknowledged that it was better to be a good person since being good to others can make you feel good as well, which forms a bond. Rand just bastardized egoism to mean something far grosser and harmful.

[winichskorn]

Would love to see where you place Russell, Wittgenstein, de Beauvoir, Adorno, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Zizek, Badiou, Byung-Chul Han, and Bruno Latour as well

[Tmesis___]

The Aristotle take is so wild to me. Saying that basically the grandfather of science as he’s often characterised should go from S to A tier because of his science work for which he is at least in scientific and analytic circles most revered for is crazy to me. I don’t think the outdated nature of his work makes it less impressive, perhaps only more of a niche interest for history of science types. I guess if ur ranking them for what the viewer should read it could make sense. Anyway it’s your opinion, great video! I am enjoying all your content quite a lot, thx for making videos

[Asuki]

My mother understands very little English, and I do not believe she cares much for philosophy. I just put your video up on the television while I'm getting ready, and she thinks you have a fantastic voice! She doesn't know what you're talking about, but she still likes to listen to you 😊

[codycummins]

Ok Jared but when will you put yourself on the list?!

[lukecash]

Nothing but the claim over Aristotle not being in the same tier as Plato seemed contestable to me.

For the obvious reasons, just the blunt ones. The guy helped to spur on systematics and stratification into fields. His works were copied and written commentaries in the margins of for over a thousand years.

Disagree or agree with him, he covered so much that it made a backdrop for people doing their own philosophy.

Aristotle asked many questions. And we won.

[padmeasmr]

I love Pascal, he was so ahead of his time, he was my first philosophical crush when I was a teen lol and i still read it from time to time, he still speaks to me. He had such existentialistic thoughts and beautifully written.

[ofbooksandthings]

I did my undergraduate thesis on Plotinus’ Enneads and.. man.. that is a crazy sophisticated highly complex metaphysics. It was a delight to spend so much time with those writings

[katakuriop]

Where is Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein? :(

[BuffyandClyro]

For Butler, I highly recommend Giving an Account of Oneself. That book is, I think, at the core of their thinking and extrapolates out from Althusser’s writing on subjectivity, which I believe is central to understanding Butler’s work on gender, violence, and politics.