What contemporary thinkers have most influenced you?

March 29, 2018 8:59 PM

What contemporary thinkers have most influenced you and why? I want to familiarize myself with the contemporary intellectual landscape. Bonus for book, video, or podcast recommendations.
posted by xammerboy to Education (12 answers total)

I don't know if "influenced" is the right word, maybe "impressed" is better, but I'd say Christopher Hitchens. It is really something to be made to realize that you cannot really even speak your own native tongue by seeing Hitchens wield it with such incredible proficiency and ease. You might or might not agree with him, but man could that guy speak and write.
posted by smcameron at 9:52 PM on March 29, 2018

Sara Ahmed! She has a blog. Her most famous book is Differences That Matter, but Cultural Politics of Emotion is great as well.
posted by typify at 10:44 PM on March 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch is intellectually brilliant, novel and challenging all at once. As smcameron puts it impressed is probably a better term than influenced in this case; his thesis is unboundedly optimistic about the potential of human knowledge creation, but on such a cosmic level that it becomes hard to keep hold of the positive, let alone find a way to act upon it, when you lift your head up from the book and return to our here and now.

I've not yet read the recently released Enlightenment Now, by Stephen Pinker, but it appears to be a more focused angle on the same argument about the power of human rationality. I have taken a lot from Pinker's more narrowly linguistic works in the past; his recent move to writing on human nature in general has, however, been pretty divisive e.g. previously on the blue.
posted by protorp at 4:51 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Christopher Alexander provides an entirely new way of thinking about architecture and social dynamics in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction and other works. His work has been extended into other areas, such as computers and education, but these treatments are somewhat more technical and quite a bit less eye-opening than Alexander's work.
posted by ubiquity at 6:19 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't know if he counts as contemporary, as he's dead, but reading Thomas Schelling did more to teach me to how to think than any other intellectual experience. He's often described as a game theorist, but his work is both broader and less technical than that suggests. A nice brief appreciation is here; more at his Nobel page.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:29 AM on March 30, 2018

Venkatesh Rao's blog Ribbonfarm, starting with the famous Gervais Principle, has been a big influence on me. It's a little hard to sum up what he's about, and truthfully the influence may not be his thinking per se, so much as exposure to a much wider intellectual universe. I haven't really been keeping up with the blog lately, as he's added guest editors and writers; the shear volume of writing got to be a bit much for me. His Now Reading page may give you some idea of what interests him.
posted by Bron at 8:35 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Stephen Greenblatt completely changed the way I read Renaissance literature and literature in general. Start with Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
posted by FencingGal at 8:57 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Donna Haraway's latest book Staying with the Trouble, helped me think through what an era of climate change could be like, and the value of making "odd kin." Here's a lecture she did on the book.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:57 PM on March 30, 2018

Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing" is the best thing I read last year, I think. Because nothing is everything.

"Blew my mind in grad school" award goes to Jack Halberstam and Jose Munoz and the rest of the Bully Bloggers.

For more like "21st century continential philosophy", Jacques Ranciere. Because Disagreement is part of Democracy.

I also really like the work of Liz Grosz (if you can stand the Deleuze references) and Erin Manning (ditto, actually), because they are trying to talk about things which cannot be talked about.
posted by athirstforsalt at 6:17 AM on April 1, 2018

Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Related - the Hidden Brain podcast

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
posted by BeHereNow at 9:49 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Seconding Rorty. I'm fairly Catholic both theologically and philosophically, so he's an interesting counterpoint (or harmony, depending on how one defines "Catholic". Helpful, even! And a much more kind writer than most philosophers....

My basic takeaway from him was that sometimes it's OK not to have to delve into the angels-on-pinhead / runaway-trolley type questions but instead to ask things like "Does this... work?"

I occasionally reread Philosophy and Social Work for pleasure, unlike most of the other stuff that sits on my shelf.
posted by tivalasvegas at 9:38 PM on April 12, 2018

Also (not quite contemporary anymore, but): Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry.

A lot of the things we've made have become systems that get used in ways that hurt our life together, and/or in ways that hurt our planet. We need to figure out ways to fix that.
posted by tivalasvegas at 9:47 PM on April 12, 2018