A Nobel Prize in Philosophy?

"Let's face it: there are no Nobel prizes in philosophy and there shouldn't be."--Hilary Putnam https://books.google.com/books?id=NsRJCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA39

But suppose there were? Who would some of the winners be? (Probably Putnam himself would be one.) I can see a lot of (mainly Anglophone) analytical philosophers angry about some of the likely Continental (and Third World) winners. Howard Robinson writes in *The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy,* "It would be disingenuous not to say clearly that analytic philosophers, on the whole, think continental philosophy is plain bad philosophy and lacking the basic standards of philosophical argument and even intellectual integrity, at least in some of its most recent forms." https://books.google.com/books?id=qQ-_AQAAQBAJ&pg=PT685 (Robinson sees the rot as beginning not with Derrida or Heidegger or even Hegel, but with Kant.) In particular, if Derrida gets a Nobel, we are likely to see the same kind of protest as when he was awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. ("Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university." http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/varia/Derrida_Letter.htm Not all these protestors, incidentally, were Anglo-Saxon or even analytical philosophers, certainly not in the sense of scorning all modern non-Vienna-school continental philosophy; Barry Smith for example is an expert on Husserl.)

For an argument that there should be such a prize, see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-08/blackford-should-there-be-a-nobel-prize-for-philosophy/6837526

Some philosophers did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in OTL--Bertrand Russell and (though he turned it down) Jean-Paul Sartre. (One could also consider Camus a philosopher.) Russell, Sartre, and Camus of course were all involved with political issues, and one can see some political figures winning the Nobel in Philosophy: Vaclav Havel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Václav_Havel and Leopold Senghor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léopold_Sédar_Senghor and if you consider him "political" John Paul II. And maybe this is how Gandhi, who never got the Nobel Peace Prize in OTL, could get a Nobel after all...
 
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Ooh nice, namedropping.
Ludwig Wittgenstein definitely deserves it.
Kurt Goedel and Tarski, Turing and Searle.
Personal favorite: John Gray.
Non-anglo-saxon or Viennese schools: Fouceault and maybe also Edward Said
Also controversial: Steiner or another educationreformer and Martin Heidegger. (For all their faults, they are still influential. )
 
"Let's face it: there are no Nobel prizes in philosophy and there shouldn't be."--Hilary Putnam https://books.google.com/books?id=NsRJCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA39

But suppose there were? Who would some of the winners be? (Probably Putnam himself would be one.) I can see a lot of (mainly Anglophone) analytical philosophers angry about some of the likely Continental (and Third World) winners. Howard Robinson writes in *The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy,* "It would be disingenuous not to say clearly that analytic philosophers, on the whole, think continental philosophy is plain bad philosophy and lacking the basic standards of philosophical argument and even intellectual integrity, at least in some of its most recent forms." https://books.google.com/books?id=qQ-_AQAAQBAJ&pg=PT685 (Robinson sees the rot as beginning not with Derrida or Heidegger or even Hegel, but with Kant.) In particular, if Derrida gets a Nobel, we are likely to see the same kind of protest as when he was awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. ("Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university. http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/varia/Derrida_Letter.htm Not all these protestors, incidentally, were Anglo-Saxon or even analytical philosophers, certainly not in the sense of scorning all modern non-Vienna-school continental philosophy; Barry Smith for example is an expert on Husserl.)

For an argument that there should be such a prize, see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-08/blackford-should-there-be-a-nobel-prize-for-philosophy/6837526

Some philosophers did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in OTL--Bertrand Russell and (though he turned it down) Jean-Paul Sartre. (One could also consider Camus a philosopher.) Russell, Sartre, and Camus of course were all involved with political issues, and one can see some political figures winning the Nobel in Philosophy: Vaclav Havel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Václav_Havel and Leopold Senghor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léopold_Sédar_Senghor and if you consider him "political" John Paul II. And maybe this is how Gandhi, who never got the Nobel Peace Prize in OTL, could get a Nobel after all...
Ooh nice, namedropping.
Ludwig Wittgenstein definitely deserves it.
Kurt Goedel and Tarski, Turing and Searle.
Personal favorite: John Gray.
Non-anglo-saxon or Viennese schools: Fouceault and maybe also Edward Said
Also controversial: Steiner or another educationreformer and Martin Heidegger. (For all their faults, they are still influential. )

Ayn Rand.
- runs off stage dodging tomatoes.
 
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I think this book by Jonathan Glover from around 1978 is the best book on moral philosophy and ethics that I've read, especially the last two or three chapters.
 
If it's given to relatively young men or women (like even in their 40s and 50s), it might actually hurt philosophy because nothing is more freezing than the idea and feeling that you have to keep living up to an impossibly high standard! :p

If it's given like many Nobel Prizes some twenty-five years or so after the actual accomplishments, it might bring philosophy some extra attention and do some good
 
Why not merging it with Literature? maybe Nobel think both are related and a great achivement in Literature and/or Philosophy?
 
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