I like Jean-Paul Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Camus a lot. Kant is also pretty interesting even tho his works can be very confusing. Who do you guys like?
I study philosophy in college, so I tend to veer away from existentialist philosophy and am more focused on analytic philosophy - Frege, Wittgenstein, Kripke, etc. I think my favorite to study would have to be Wittgenstein.
why did u stop reading about Neitzche ? everyone i talk to dislikes him i never really asked why untill now.. Why ?
Nietzsche had a very confrontational style of writing and a penchant for dramatic aphorisms (ie "Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman"), which alienates some people and does indeed imbue his writing with a sense of total self-confidence more appropriate to an adolescent than a philosopher. I'm really no expert but what little of him I have read did seem reasonable once you got past the vehement denunciations of just about everything. In what I read, he talked a lot about Christianity and how morality exists as a system to manage potentially-destructive passions or desires- only the approach adopted by traditional Christian morality hasn't been to ask how to channel a passion in a healthy, spiritual, and productive way, but how to extinguish it. It would have seemed radical and wild back in the 1870's but frankly that sounds like a good observation from a modern thinker to me. I dunno, perhaps the rest of his work is garbage and I got the one good essay he wrote.
Wittgenstein and his language games eh? I had an exam on religious language last Friday but wrote about St Dionysius, Paul Tilich, St Thomas Aquinas and AJ Ayer instead, though Wittgenstein made some interesting points on the topic. The question was on the via negativa being the best way to talk about God though, so I didn't think olde Ludwig was relevant. If you like analytic philosophy you'd like Ayer though, he was a logical positivist and believed any statement that couldn't be empirically proven was meaningless. My favourite Philosopher is St Thomas Aquinas, he wrote on such a large scale of topics and his design argument for the existence of God is what causes me to believe in His existence. His cosmological argument is also fairly convincing. Natural Law is a good ethical theory but the only thing I dislike about his work is his theory on sexual ethics, which prohibits sex outside of marriage and indeed masturbation. His work on Just War Theory is good too. Other than him, Socrates was very interesting. His work on the euthypro dilema (is x good because God loves it? Or does God love x because it is good?) is highly interesting and he was just generally an extremely wise and knowledgable man.
plato is awesome just cause hes plato, and im really digging his style machiavelli is good, locke is like next level good