Columbia Graduate student and skeptic Richard Carrier has made an amazing claim, namely, that he is "no less a philosopher than Aristotle or Hume," and that his credentials "match theirs in every relevant respect." Wood responds in "Richard Carrier: Equal to Aristotle?"

Richard Carrier: Equal to Aristotle?

An Analysis of Richard’s Claim to Be among the Greatest Philosophers Ever

By David Wood

“For you cannot be successful in anything of importance if you have a poor or even incorrect grasp of yourself . . .”

~Richard Carrier

“He who thinks himself worthy of great things, being unworthy of them, is vain.”

~Aristotle

People occasionally think they’re more important than they really are. Who can forget the day Michael Jackson stepped up to the podium and proudly accepted his “Artist of the Millennium” award, which was really nothing of the sort—just a meaningless plastic trophy and a birthday cake? Percy Shelley, in his poem “Ozymandias,” tells the story of a traveler who finds a statue of an ancient king crumbling in the desert. The inscription on the statue reads, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But that’s all that remained. The king’s “works” had been completely forgotten!

Similarly, people often imagine that their abilities are far beyond their genuine levels. The aging and mentally deteriorating Nietzsche, for instance, although he had been brilliant for much of his life, seemed no less guilty of overstatement in his last book, which included chapters titled “Why I am So Wise,” “Why I am So Clever,” “Why I write Such Good Books,” and “Why I am a Destiny.” Even more apt for this essay, however, is a scene from The Princess Bride, in which the villainous Vizzini brags about his tremendous intellect to the hero Westley:

Vizzini: I can’t compete with you physically, and you’re no match for my brains.

Westley: You’re that smart?

Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?

Westley: Yes.

Vizzini: Morons.

While Vizzini truly had a “dizzying intellect,” to compare himself to Plato and Aristotle was bordering on delusional (which is what made his boasting so comical). Yet, amazingly, Richard Carrier recently made a similar claim. But before we examine Richard’s comment, perhaps a little background is in order. Though he is a graduate student in history, Richard also claims to be a philosopher. In my review of his book Sense and Goodness without God, I called him to account for this claim, arguing that he bears none of the marks of a true philosopher. (To read my comments, click here.) However, instead of simply defending his status as a self-proclaimed philosopher, he took the extraordinary leap of claiming to be on par with Aristotle and Hume! Here’s what he said:

In "Is Richard a Philosopher?" Wood yet again misrepresents what I say about the nature of philosophy and what it means to be a philosopher, and his lies will be wholly exposed by anyone who actually reads my chapter on this subject (pp. 23-26). At the very least, Wood cannot argue against the fact that I am no less a philosopher than Aristotle or Hume. My knowledge, education, and qualifications certainly match theirs in every relevant respect. If he expects more than that before allowing someone to proclaim conclusions on philosophical subjects, then Wood himself must bow out of the arena and concede that he, too, cannot assert any philosophical conclusions. If I am not qualified to judge a worldview true, he cannot be qualified to judge a worldview true either. That would certainly end the debate, wouldn't it? ("On the Deceptions of David Wood")

I’m simply baffled by the fact that anyone in the world (let alone a graduate student in history) would claim to be “no less a philosopher than Aristotle or Hume.” I’m just as perplexed by Richard’s proclamation that his qualifications “match theirs in every relevant respect.” (For a discussion of an alternate, albeit mistaken, interpretation of Richard's claims, see the appendix.) Yet while I am appalled that Richard declares himself to be equal to Hume, I will leave it to the skeptics to judge this comparison for themselves.  Hume is arguably the greatest and most philosophically influential skeptic ever, so any serious student of philosophy should be fuming right now. However, Aristotle is arguably the greatest philosopher of all time, so I will focus my critique on this comparison. Let us begin with a short description of an amazing individual.

Aristotle: A Brief History

Aristotle was born in Macedonia in 384 B.C. His father had been court physician to the King of Macedon, and it is thought that Aristotle must have learned something of the medical field in his youth. At age 17, he moved to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy, the world’s first institute of higher learning, where he studied philosophy and other topics for approximately twenty years. Aristotle quickly became the Academy’s greatest student (Plato called him “the mind of the school”), but his philosophical views were not in line with those of Plato. When the latter died in 347 B.C., Aristotle accepted an invitation by the king of Atarneus and Assos to carry on researches in Asia Minor. While in that region, Aristotle performed biological studies for three years, before being called on by King Philip of Macedon. Philip had chosen Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander, better known to us as Alexander the Great.

When Alexander moved on to conquering the world, Aristotle continued conquering all that could be known. He returned to Athens in 335 B.C. and founded his own school, the Lyceum (sponsored by none other than Alexander himself). The Lyceum was the world’s first school of philosophical and scientific research:

Here there were rooms fitted up for teaching and research, and a library. . . . Aristotle not only taught, but carried out scientific research (including dissections) and amassed a huge library. . . . The sciences of observation were encouraged, and pupils were set to preparing the basic collections of material on which the inductive method could be practiced. Aristotle himself had amassed an enormous amount, and his notebooks would be at the disposal of others undertaking particular lines of research.[1]

Aristotle taught at the Lyceum for twelve years. When Alexander died, the anger of the Athenians was directed at anyone who had been associated with him, including Aristotle. Faced with growing discontent, the Philosopher left Athens and died a year later.

It is practically impossible to overestimate Aristotle’s importance to Western learning. Wallace Matson writes:

No one ever founded and advanced so many fields of science and learning as did Aristotle—‘The Philosopher,’ as he was unambiguously referred to in the Middle Ages. He created formal logic from the beginning and left it so complete that no major renovation was made for more than two thousand years. Darwin honored him as the greatest biologist of all time. He wrote the first systematic treatise on ethics, a book that holds its own with the latest contributions to the field today. His Poetics is a parallel contribution to literary criticism. Only now is the fundamental rightness of his conception of the mind coming to be properly recognized. His metaphysics, that is, his scheme of conceptualization and explanation, was for centuries the skeleton of Western thought; many of the bones are still in place and likely to remain. He wrote the first scientific study of comparative politics.[2]

To this list we may add even more contributions. For instance, Aristotle invented the syllogism, and he gave us the “square of opposition,” two laws of thought (the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of excluded middle), and the notions of act and potency. The use of letters to stand as variables in logic (and later in algebra), such as in “All A are B,” though it seems obvious to us because we are accustomed to it, was invented by Aristotle. To Aristotle we also owe philosophical and scientific concepts such as substance and essence, matter and form. The Philosopher had the first library (in the modern sense) and came up with a cosmological argument for the existence of God that served as the basis for the proofs of Thomas Aquinas. (For a discussion of Aristotle’s cosmological argument, click here.)

Although only a fifth of Aristotle’s writings have survived, we know that he composed no less than 150 works, including, among other things, the Nicomachean Ethics, On Memory and Reminiscence, On Dreams, On Magnets, Olympic Victors, Proverbs, On the Nile River, Definitions, Lectures on Political Theory, On Justice, On the Poets, On Wealth, On the Good, Gryllus, On Forms, Eudemus, Protrepticus, De Philosophia, Symposium, Politicus, Sophistes, Menexenus, On the Soul, On Pleasure, On the Sciences, On Species and Genus, Deductions, the Art of Rhetoric, On the Pythagoreans, On the Generation of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, the History of Animals, On Plants, On Motion, On Astronomy, Homeric Problems, and On Rhetoric.

Jonathan Barnes describes the content of these writings:

There are works on logic and on language; on the arts; on ethics and politics and law; on constitutional history and on intellectual history; on psychology and physiology, on natural history—zoology, biology, botany; on chemistry, astronomy, mechanics, mathematics; on the philosophy of science and on the nature of motion and space and time; on metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. Choose a field of research, and Aristotle laboured in it; pick an area of human endeavour, and Aristotle discoursed upon it.[3]

With all of this in mind, we can see why the poet Dante referred to Aristotle as the “Master of Those Who Know.” While it is true that much of Aristotle’s science was overruled by later investigations and advances in technology, the amount of information he was able to gather was simply astounding. But even if he had contributed nothing to the sciences, his work in logic and philosophy alone would have earned him a title as one of our greatest philosophers.

Richard vs. Aristotle

To support his claim that he is “no less a philosopher than Aristotle,” Richard argues that his (1) knowledge, (2) education, and (3) qualifications match Aristotle’s “in every relevant respect.” Let’s take these in turn.

First, does Richard’s knowledge match Aristotle’s knowledge? Richard obviously has factual information in mind. His reasoning apparently goes something like this: “I know the equation for the law of gravity. I know the correct model of the solar system. I know facts gleaned from more than two thousand years of research that took place after Aristotle died. Thus, I know more than Aristotle, which means that I’m no less a philosopher than he was.”

Of course, if simply knowing some additional facts is the mark of a superior philosopher, then anyone who watches "Sesame Street" could claim to be greater than Aristotle, since they would all know certain facts that weren't available to the Philosopher.  But this would be ridiculous.  In the modern world, knowledge is given to us.  We're all beggars receiving handouts.  Aristotle didn't have his knowledge handed to him; he had to go figure things out for himself.  To illustrate, consider Aristotle's description of the octopus: 

The octopus uses its tentacles both as feet and as hands: it draws in food with the two that are placed over its mouth; and the last of its tentacles, which is very pointed and the only one of them which is whitish and bifurcated at the tip (it uncoils towards the rhachis—the rhachis is the smooth surface on the opposite side from the suckers)—this it uses for copulation. In front of the sac and above the tentacles it has a hollow tube by which it discharges the sea-water which gets into the sac whenever it takes anything in with its mouth. It moves this tube to right and to left; and it discharges milt through it. It swims obliquely in the direction of the so-called head, stretching out its feet; and when it swims in this way it can see forwards (since its eyes are on top) and has its mouth at the rear.[4]

He says more about the octopus, but the important thing to note is that his discussion is almost completely accurate. (Barnes also notes that the facts reported by Aristotle weren’t rediscovered until the nineteenth century). How did Aristotle come about this information? He had to go out and do the research. How would you or I come about the same information? We’d hear it in biology class. It’s hardly reasonable to say that we’re better philosophers than Aristotle because we just happened to be born more than two millennia later.

Nevertheless, even if we grant Richard all the handouts we’ve received, I’m still not convinced that Richard, even with his modern education, knows more than Aristotle knew. For example, I doubt Richard knows as much about the octopus as Aristotle, or about many other topics. Does Richard know about the constitutions of all the Greek city-states, or the details of the Nile River? If we’re judging simply based on the raw amount of information each has stored, I seriously doubt Richard could compete with the Master of Those Who Know.

Additionally, we must keep in mind that Richard is claiming to be as great a philosopher as Aristotle, which means that we must compare their knowledge of philosophy. Having read Richard’s book, I’ve concluded that he knows very little about the history of philosophy. Thus, two thousand years worth of advances in philosophy doesn’t help him, for he hasn’t studied these advances (except those that are useful in his attacks against Christianity). Moreover, we know that Aristotle was aware of practically everything that had been philosophized about up to his time. Indeed, much of our knowledge of pre-Socratic philosophy comes from quotes preserved in Aristotle’s writings. Most of the corpus of ancient philosophy has been lost. But Aristotle knew it, and philosophized on the same topics, and wrote books on these topics, and did it far more systematically than his predecessors. While Richard may know a few bare facts about philosophy that weren’t available to the ancients because they hadn’t yet come to pass, this in no way suggests that Richard’s knowledge of philosophy matches that of Aristotle.

Second, does Richard’s education match Aristotle’s education “in every relevant respect”? Keep in mind the fact that we’re talking about philosophical education. When we turn to Aristotle, we find that he spent nearly two decades studying under Plato, who was then the greatest philosopher in the world (and Aristotle’s only serious rival as far as his impact on Western philosophy), and who had himself studied under Socrates. After twenty years with Plato, Aristotle went out and did his own researches, sometimes scientific, sometimes philosophical (there wasn’t a clear distinction between the two back then). Finally, Aristotle founded his own school, where he and his students spent more than a decade studying science and philosophy, and where he gave his lectures on ethics, metaphysics, politics, etc., which is practically all that remains of his work.

Richard has a B.A. in history, an M.A. in ancient history, and an M.Phil. in ancient history. These are certainly notable credentials. However, I’m not sure how anyone in the universe could hold that these history degrees give one as good an education in philosophy as one might receive while studying for two decades at the feet of Plato.

Third, do Richard’s qualifications match those of Aristotle? Let’s review Aristotle’s qualifications:

1. Studied for nearly twenty years at the world’s first center of higher learning, under one of the greatest philosophical minds of all time.

2. Became the prize student of the Academy.

3. Tutored Alexander the Great.

4. Founded the world’s second center of higher learning.

5. Only person in history to found two independent fields of knowledge (logic and biology).

6. Wrote more than 150 works on practically every subject imaginable.

7. Became the foundation for both Medieval and Arabic philosophy.

8. Writings still taught and debated more than two thousand years later.

9. One of the most influential people in history.

Now for Richard’s qualifications:

1. Graduate student in history.

2. Three degrees, received from Berkeley and Columbia.

3. Served two years in the United States Coast Guard.

4. Taught classes as a graduate student.

5. Wrote Sense and Goodness without God and a number of articles for various atheist websites and other venues.

This isn’t meant to downplay the importance of Richard’s achievements, which are laudable in themselves. The point is that his qualifications as a philosopher (as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any) are nothing compared to Aristotle’s (which are impeccable). Now, Richard could make the following argument: “Yes, Aristotle achieved all those things. But if I had been in his place, I would have achieved them too, and much more as well!” Yet after reading his book, I see no reason to think that Richard would have accomplished anything of the sort. 

Indeed, based on what I know of Richard’s arguments, I think it’s safe to say that he would have been among Aristotle’s opponents—the Sophists. To the people of ancient Athens, there was no apparent difference between the philosophers and the Sophists (just as Richard’s fans don’t see why he’s not a philosopher). Both seemed to be using similar arguments. Yet there was a tremendous difference between these two groups. Whereas the primary aim of the philosopher is truth, the main goal of the sophist is winning the argument. Thus, the philosopher proceeds with caution, making sure that his reasoning is free from errors. The sophist is free to be sloppy, as long as he sways the crowd in the process.

Richard’s sophistry can even be seen in the lone paragraph I cited from his work. Notice that he is supposedly addressing my objection to his status as a philosopher. After making his outrageous claim, he suddenly (and obviously quite deliberately) changes my argument:

If he expects more than that before allowing someone to proclaim conclusions on philosophical subjects, then Wood himself must bow out of the arena and concede that he, too, cannot assert any philosophical conclusions. If I am not qualified to judge a worldview true, he cannot be qualified to judge a worldview true either. That would certainly end the debate, wouldn't it?

What was my argument? That Richard has no right to call himself a philosopher. Yet he responds as if I had claimed that he has no right to come to philosophical conclusions, and that he has no right to judge a worldview true, which are things I would never say. (If Richard were a philosopher, he would have caught himself building a “straw man”—his favorite fallacy next to inconsistency.) We all come to philosophical conclusions, whether we know it or not. When I assume that there are real people around me and that I’m not simply imagining them, I’ve come to a philosophical conclusion. When a person becomes a Christian, or an agnostic, or anything else, he is judging that worldview true. Nevertheless, the fact that we come to philosophical conclusions doesn’t mean that we’re all philosophers, any more than concluding that the law of gravity is true makes us all physicists. 

In his book, Richard appears to have the highest respect for philosophy. I suggest that he has a horribly low opinion of it. He would never say that a person who comes to historical conclusions (e.g. that J.F.K. was assassinated) is automatically a historian. Why? Because he knows that there is far more to being a historian than making a simple judgment about history. Similarly, Richard would never call me a mathematician simply because I come to mathematical conclusions (e.g. 2+2=4). Why? Because he knows that there is much more to being a mathematician than this. Yet when we come to philosophy, Richard equates being a philosopher with coming to philosophical conclusions. Since we all come to philosophical conclusions, we must all be philosophers, which means that the term “philosopher,” in Richard’s dictionary, is utterly meaningless. Interestingly, after he destroys the meaning of this term by implicitly applying it universally, he then claims to be one! (This reminds me of Elaine Pagels, who tries to expand the meaning of “Christian” to include just about anyone, then says that she is a Christian, as if the term carries a specific meaning.)

When we consider the fact that Richard’s arguments are full of holes and that his work as a whole is dreadfully inconsistent, it’s amazing to think that he has the audacity to suggest that he is among history’s greatest philosophers. His belief that he is as great as Aristotle is reminiscent of a person who attends a couple of karate classes and suddenly thinks he’s Bruce Lee (“Okay, grab my arm . . . no, the other arm . . . wait I wasn’t ready . . . okay let go . . . Owww!”). If he continues to make such outrageous claims, I am convinced that he will soon become a liability to atheism. Fantasies of boundless grandeur are for children, not philosophers.