The Most Famous
PHILOSOPHERS from South Africa
This page contains a list of the greatest South African Philosophers. The pantheon dataset contains 1,081 Philosophers, 2 of which were born in South Africa. This makes South Africa the birth place of the 62nd most number of Philosophers behind Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary South African Philosophers of all time. This list of famous South African Philosophers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. John McDowell (1942 - )
With an HPI of 46.90, John McDowell is the most famous South African Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 19 different languages on wikipedia.
John Henry McDowell (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, nature, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy. McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations), which he understands to be a form of philosophical quietism (although he does not consider himself to be a "quietist"). The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual perspicacity. However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while defending major positions and interpretations from major figures in philosophical history, and developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value. In each case, he has tried to resist the influence of what he regards as a scientistic, reductive form of philosophical naturalism that has become very commonplace in our historical moment, while nevertheless defending a form of "Aristotelian naturalism," bolstered by key insights from Hegel, Wittgenstein, and others.
2. David Benatar (1966 - )
With an HPI of 40.55, David Benatar is the 2nd most famous South African Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.
David Benatar (born 8 December 1966) is a South African philosopher, academic, and author. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which he argues that coming into existence is serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings.
Pantheon has 2 people classified as philosophers born between 1942 and 1966. Of these 2, 2 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living philosophers include John McDowell and David Benatar. As of April 2022, 1 new philosophers have been added to Pantheon including David Benatar.
