One problem with the recent rash of "Vote for the Greatest Canadian/American/Brit/etc." contests is that the masses don't always give you the result you expect. Here we had Don Cherry and Wayne Gretzky make the top ten Canadians, and down south they had Elvis Presley, Lance Armstrong, Muhammed Ali, Oprah Winfrey, and Bob Hope on their top 25.
The Greatest Philosopher vote had less room for personality cults (there being few philosphers in entertainment and professional sports) but still the people overwhelmingly chose the most controversial candidate on the list. The greatest philosopher, according to the BBC's audience, is the politically incorrect Karl Marx. I'm not enough of a philosophy expert to comment intelligently on Marx, but, as much as I am a socialist (feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, tax the rich, collectivize utilities, that sort of thing), when I went through the descriptions on the Greatest Philosopher website, Marx didn't come out as a particularly important philosopher, in the grand scheme of things. My top picks were Aquinas, Plato, Socrates, Kant, and Kierkegaard (in that order), and all but Kierkegaard made the top ten. Here are the numbers:
1. Karl Marx, 27.93%
2. David Hume, 12.67%
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 6.80%
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, 6.49%
5. Plato, 5.65%
6. Immanuel Kant, 5.61%
7. St. Thomas Aquinas, 4.83%
8. Socrates, 4.82%
9. Aristotle, 4.52%
10. Karl Popper, 4.20%
