What to vote?

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O ΚΑΙΡΟC ΓΑΡ ΕΓΓΥC+

Aristotle.

His only weakness was that he never declared himself a prophet and his teachings divine. Because his works dwarf anything that any other man has brought humanity, and to think we lost most of it to boot.

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"I have been made victorious through terror" ~ the profit mohammed (Bukhari 4:52:220)

The truth hurts, but not as bad as a being beheaded.

I cant answer the question, but, IRL, poor Aristotle was rooted in his own time; for a person to be considered in this sense their views must be such as to survive, appreciably, the passage of their own temporal, momentary culture.

Im with Russell in consideration of Aristotle's estimation of what constitutes the 'magnanimous man' - a boor, nothing short of that.....yuck!

And much of his 'genius' is mere consistent, plodding, common sense - ok, so he teased it out and wrote-it-down. Champion, for that? Thats why no religion could be born of his utterances - there was no divine spark (and even his mates, living in his own day, knew this).

Give me a raving nutter who stumbles upon truth as he/she writhes in the passion of their being, any day, over this. Blake comes to mind, as just such a nutter, inspired of a divine essence (but dont quote me on that)

Get thee behind me, Aristotle!

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Obviously, I don't agree.

The fact that so much of Aristotle's work is now considered "common sense" in the Western sphere speaks to his influence. In fact, your sentiments really express the self-evident (intentional irony) position of Aristotle as the father of Western Civilization.

He was wrong on a number of issues, no fault in that. Michael Jordan missed a lot of baskets in his life too. Point being when you play the game you're going to fail at times. In Aristotles case it was his logic that laid the ideological and intellectual groundwork for future challengers to confront his errors in assumptions. A distinct aspect of Western Civilization and her penchant for progress that we owe an enormous debt to Aristotle for, above all others, imo.

Who did you vote for?

rgds

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"I have been made victorious through terror" ~ the profit mohammed (Bukhari 4:52:220)

The truth hurts, but not as bad as a being beheaded.

Keeping in mind that the smartest women were for millennia typically kept from publicly using their intelligence, the smartest person on historical record, in my opinion, is Leonardo da Vinci. There have been many geniuses who mastered only one field, but da Vinci, among other things, was one of the greatest painters, sculptors and architects of all time, a brilliant engineer, far ahead of his time in anatomy and he anticipated, in his famous notebooks, the construction of helicopters, submarines, mechanical computers and humanoid robots as well. He also thought that a projectile could orbit the earth and so was thinking along the same lines as Kepler and Newton and he would have invented the telescope had not some ignorant people destroyed the mirrors he was building in the belief that they captured souls. If versatile genius is the measure of cleverness, then there is no one on record comparable with Leonardo da Vinci. He even composed a piece of music (based on the sample I heard, a very good one).

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"Some people complain about the system. The system is not good, so they can't do anything. It's an excuse. Freedom is in your heart." (Jin Xing)

I don't have any idea, but I suspect he was probably mute.

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt

An equal of da Vinci is in my opinion Leibniz. He made so many contributions to a wide array of disciplines - math, physics, biology, engineering, philosophy, politics, law, and many others. But for some reason, Leibniz is largely forgotten by history. One example, he developed calculus simultaneously with, but independent of, Newton. We even use the integral symbol invented by Leibniz in mathematical notation, yet full credit for developing calculus generally goes to Newton.

I didnt vote for anyone, IRL. Cant get my head around it! I take your point(s) concerning Aristotle, and I do appreciate his cultural/philosophical impact, but is that such a mark in his favour as you suggest? If our world is so much the inherited sum of his philosophical effects.....look at the state of the bloody world!

And Leibniz...no doubt much overlooked, and all you say about him is true. But perhaps he was just a wee bit too clever? Jayzus, any man who sat around imagining a pre-existent state of warring essences, all in a state of conflict, one with the other, to test their relative existential 'compossibility', to see which sets would earn the right to break into future existence......this poor fella obviously had too little to occupy his mind....and it wandered.

Sorry to shoot down these great men without offering any alternatives. I have a fondness for Einstein, Socrates and more that are not on the list, but there are different types of 'clever'.....

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

A Platonic type of clever.

Great fun though.

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

Newton was pretty clever. Quite nasty by most accounts but definitely clever.

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Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Marx (G.)

Its not the Platonic cleverness which makes me fond of Socrates, its the character behind it. Though all of what we may glean of even that is channelled through Plato's authorship, (this is understood).

Socrates' courage and consistency in the face of death, his calm concern rather for his friends than for himself; Boethius is another example of the same.

And wherein is the genesis of Socratic beauty or cleverness - is it the Socratic-Plato that is the beautiful soul, and the Platonic-Socrates that is diligently clever?

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."