The Linguistic Turn was a Wrong Turn.
The 20th century was a calamity for philosophy. It's hard not to have the feeling that there were no great philosophers in the 20th century. There are, to be sure, great minds: Einstein, in my opinion, was the greatest genius of the 20th century, and John Von Neumann is fairly distant second. I revere A. Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Max Planck, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schrödinger, Edward Witten, Richard Feynman, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Juan Maldacena, Rosalind Franklin, Jane Goodall, Frans De Waal, Samuel Beckett, Oliver Sacks, Franz Kafka, William S. Burroughs, Hans Bellmer, Kobo Abe, Iggy Pop, Larry David, and many, many others. But none of of these people are usually classified as philosophers. Perhaps they should be. Perhaps this is only a problem of classification. If we were to classify these people as philosophers, then there would be no doubt in my mind that they are all far superior philosophers to any of the people who are typically listed as t