Who do you consider the great thinkers are who have influenced the way you think today and why?
As in France, the educational system is totally french-centered, my favourite thinker are almost all french. Anyway I'm surprised french thinkers people like Baudrillard or René Girard are known outside of France, because they are far to be the more known here! But both are in my favorite thinkers anyway!
Then, there is a list, unordered, of the thinker I like to read and why. I will list only 20, then I won't speak about the more known like Freud, Hegel, spinoza, Kant, Descartes, Marx, Nietzche, Plato, Aristote, Pascal, Camus, Bergson, Leibniz, Heidegger, Sartre ...
There we go :
1) Emile Durkheim : French father of the modern sociology. His thought about religion, moral, knowledge, suicide and crimes are very revolutionnary for his time.
2) Auguste Comte : French, father of the positivist branch in sociology. He's famous fot the law of three stages.
3) Nicolas de Condorcet : French theorician of the voting system, and father of the copyright. He's famous for the voting paradox and the Condorcet method.
4) Mikhail Bakunin : Russian, theorician of anarchism. His whole work is very interessant, especially about the concept of State.
5) Gaston Bachelard : French rationalist epistemologist. He's famous for the invention of the concept of epistemological obstacle.One work to not miss : "The New Scientific Spirit"
6) René Girard : French philosopher. Very known for his work on the violence, the sacred the mimetic desire and the scapegoat.
7) Jean Baudrillard : French post-marxist philosopher and sociologist. His thought about mass media and postmodernism are worldwide known now.
8) Léon Brunschvicg : French platonician idealist, friend of Marcel Proust, He centered the discernement in the center of the scientific method. It's called "reflexiv method"
9) Guy Debord : French marxist thinker, founder of the Letterist International. His main book "The Society of the Spectacle" conceptualize the sociopolitic notion of "Spectacle"
10) Georges Canguilhem : French philosopher and doctor. He was searching about the notion of normality in the scientific fields and about the institutionalization of the scientific knoledge. His main book "The Normal and the Pathological", is still today fundamental for the medical anthropology.
11) Edgar Morin : French philosopher and sociologist. One of the two on this list who's not dead. Father of the "complex thinking" with Henri Laborit. His main work "The method" is a must-to-read.
12) Bertrand Russell : Welsh philosopher, logician and mathematician. Personnally, it's the logician part I'm fond of. His Principiae Mathematica are still today a reference. Very known for the Russell paradox.
13) Maurice Blanchot : French thinker. His work is centered about death. With Heidegger, he think at the concept of philosopher's death. His work between the link between writing/reading is very interressant too.
14) Jacques Derrida : French philosopher. Inventor of the methodology of the deconstruction.
15) Michel Foucault : French philosopher. The more known writer in social science in the academic world. Unknown outside. His work is about the links between power and knowledge. Very interresting, but very hard!
16) Bernard Stiegler : French philosopher. Second of the list who is living. His work is axed on the current political, psychological, economic and sociological mutations in the world due to the technological changes, especially numerical one.
17) Montesquieu : French political thinker of the Lumières. His work is precursor of sociology. One of the first thinker to fight slavery.
18) Félix Ravaisson : French spiritualist philosopher and archeologue. Master of Bergson.
19) Maurice Merleau-Ponty : French phenomenological philosopher. His main work is "Phenomenology of Perception"
20) Gilles Deleuze : French philosopher. My prefered one! Every single word of this philosopher enter direct in my brain and my heart.
