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Originally Posted by MartinParish
I have to say my favorite philosopher (assuming you agree he should be categorized as such) was always Karl Marx with the Communist Manifesto. Strong on fire and rhetoric, weak on details...my kind of philosophy. (Reminds me of a great Napoleon Bonaparte quote: "A good constitution should be short and obscure.")
Are philosophers from past ages still relevant today? I think that's a really great question. To some degree, advances in science and our understanding of the natural world have probably made certain questions that philosophers argued for centuries virtually irrelevant; consciousness, for example, is now generally recognized to be an emergent property of the brain that has its origins in biochemistry, so the old philosophical debate over the nature of consciousness is now a moot point. Whether the philosophy of past ages remains relevant also depends on the philosopher - in some cases more so than in others. Seneca is one of the ones worth keeping IMHO, together with the other Stoics like Marcus Aurelius; unlike Plato, who spent most of his time worrying about abstract questions that seem trivial or unimportant to us today, the Stoics recognized one of the basic problems that we all face in life - how to react when circumstances are beyond your control(which may be much of the time).
Ultimately, though, I think a few of the great philosophers of the past may be worth reading regardless of whether they remain relevant or not. Reading their work can be a great way to connect with someone who, centuries apart from you though they may have been, faced some of the same kinds of problems that we all face in life and came up with their own unique solutions - a little chapter of the human experience that enriches our understanding of what it means to be human in this strange and often lonely little world.
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I think the philosophers of the past are well worth reading, especially as regards their ethical arguments. The science of the ancients may have been shaky, but what they said on how to treat other human beings remains worthy of consideration.
As to Marx and his system, I think of what G.K. Chesterton said about Christianity in
What's Wrong with the World (1910): "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried." In like manner, Marx certainly didn't envision leaders like Stalin when he formulated his system, and most certainly have his ideas not produced the worker's utopia for which he hoped. Perhaps the truth is that people aren't so constructed so as to make communism viable. In any case, what remains of value in Marx is his critique of capitalism. Had it not been for the deplorable conditions under which factory workers labored in the early 20th century, and the great disparity in wealth between the robber barons and the common man; the communist message would have never managed to gain a foothold. As the earning differences today between the workers and the CEOs—the haves and the have-nots—are even greater than they were 100 years ago, I fear modern society may in for an even greater upheaval when some charismatic leader comes along offering a new remedy to the present state of affairs.