Jason asked:

Who is the most widely read philosopher? Does this popularity have any correlation with the
truthfulness of their ideas?

I think that possibly Plato is the most read philosopher, yet he hated democracy mainly because he
was sceptical that the majority know best. Was he right?

As a science student, I was also wondering that because philosophers seem to disagree a lot (which
is very important for the subject), how does a philosophy Ph.D. student graduate when the examiners
may have very different opinions of the integrity of the thesis? Science papers are less subjective
because of the power of experimental data. Therefore is science the only reliable way to understand
the world since it seems easier to convince other scientists of theories?

I seem to have millions of original philosophical ideas, please tell me how can I find out if they are
good or rubbish? The majority say rubbish.

============

If Plato was right in thinking that the majority do not always know best, then it does not follow from the
fact that Plato is the most popular or most read philosopher that his ideas are any more true than the
ideas of less popular and less read philosophers.

Of course, the reverse doesn't follow either. Just because a philosophy is popular doesn't mean that it
can't be true. Sometimes the majority areright.

I am assuming for the sake of discussion that a philosopher is more popular or widely read in
proportion to the number of people who believethat his/her ideas are true. That is not always the
case either. To give one controversial example, I would think that more people read Nietzsche
because of the brilliance of his writing and the provocativeness of his questions than because they
believe that he was right in the answers he gave to those questions.

You say that the majority say that your ideas are rubbish. They may be right. Or they may be wrong.
The question is, How do you find out either way?

To determine whether or not a philosophical idea is 'true', you don't simply take a vote: “I think it is
rubbish”, “I think it is brilliant”, “I can't make up my mind”. You test it out. You argue your case. At the
end of the day, youare the one that's got to make the decision. You might succeed in persuading the
majority, but one lone voice of criticism succeeds in sparking doubts in your own mind, and you end
up abandoning your idea. Or you might find that you are making no headway in persuading others to
accept your idea, but none of the others succeed in providing arguments which persuade you to
abandon it.

That may not seem much comfort to the philosophy PhD student facing a hostile panel of examiners.
I feel sorry for PhD students — and I am sure there are more than a few — who feel that they are
obliged tailor their ideas and theories to what they believe the examiners will find agreeable. For that
is not the standard for academic success or failure. The standard is not whether a thesis is thought to
be true, but whether a case has been made,whether the ideas are sufficiently original, and whether
the arguments put forward in support of those ideas are sufficiently strong, to be worthy of debate.

However, the notion of what is or is not 'worthy of debate' raises a more troubling issue. The heart of
your question concerns the vivid contrast between a thesis, say, in chemistry or physics, which in
arguing its case has to account for the experimental data, and a thesis in philosophy where there are
no experimental data. Philosophical ideas which do not fit in with current academic fashions are more
vulnerable to being extinguished simply because there is nothing to fall back on.

I don't agree with you that science is 'the only reliable way to understand the world' because I would
argue that the difference between the influence of subjective factors in science and their influence in
philosophy is only relative, not absolute. It is a crude misunderstanding of the reality of scientific
research to suppose that the production of experimental data is, in itself, a proof of objectivity. I
suggest you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutionsand Feyerabend's Against Method, to get
a flavour of the case against the view that scientific method is a guarantee of 'objective' or 'reliable'
knowledge.

Geoffrey Klempner