Reply #10: Eh. Some thinkers are so time-bound or require context to [View All]

[Igel]

be "great".

Sartre had his school of thought, and most don't much care any more. We don't study Erasmus, and in 50 years won't study Sartre, unless his ideas stay popular. Derrida will also likely be history in a hundred years, much like we study Herzen and Dobroliubov in Russian literary criticism, or Berdyaev in philosophy.

Others are "great", but hopelessly wrong, and unless their thinking begets a school of reasoning, or they enabled a set of scholars, they're ignored. We can put Margaret Mead in that group.

Newton was real close, and Leibnitz no slouch; but we get through their contributions in AP calculus and physics. They established branches of knowledge, so we pay them lipservice--but who now reads the Principia? Saussure did really fantastic work, but few read his writings. And while I personally think that Wöhler triggered a huge paradigm shift, I've never read his report (he synthesized urea). Their contributions are summarized, credit given in footnotes or as a nicety.

Others are too contextualized, field-specific. Grimm, Verner, and Brugmann were fantastic scholars; but Grimm is more famous for his (and his brother's) fairy tales than his linguistics, and Brugmann's Grundriss is read by a very few number of scholars. Few people read anything by any Bernoulli. Or Panini.

It's gotten harder in the last 50 years to retain knowledge of great scholars. Readers of Derrida are unlikely to follow both Liadov and Cavalli-Sforza, and have no use for Prince and McCarthy.