Aristoteles ve Immanuel Kant’ın neden bu kadar ünlü olduğuyla ilgili kısa bir (ingilizce) alıntı:

Aristoteles:

Magee: Perhaps the best way to start is by your quickly drawing a sketch-map for us of the ground covered by Aristotle’s output as a whole.

Nussbaum: We have here a philosophical achievement of tremendous range and complexity. We have fundamental work in logic and all the sciences of his day, including especially the science of biology, where his contribution was unmatched for a thousand years. Then work on the general foundations of scientific explanation; work in general philosophy of nature; work in metaphysics, including the questions of substance, identity, and continuity; work on life and the mental faculties. And finally we have terrific work in ethics and political theory, and work in rhetoric and the theory of literature.

It is an amazing fact that over this incomparable range he was regarded as the authority for hundreds of years during the Middle Ages. In fact the greatest philosopher of the late Medieval Ages, Thomas Aquinas, used to refer to him simply as ‘the philosopher’.

Immanuel Kant

Magee: I referred at the beginning to the fact that [Immanuel Kant] is widely regarded by serious students of philosophy as the greatest philosopher since the ancient Greeks. Why does his reputation stand at quite such a pinnacle?

Warnock: I think I would mention chiefly two qualities as entitling him to his pinnacle of fame. I think he was quite exceptionally penetrating, in the sense that he was able to see an intellectual problem in something which had previously been taken for granted as not worth much attention. He had an extraordinary capacity to see where the problems were – and that’s one of the greatest, most fundamental philosophical gifts – to be able to see that there is a problem where everybody else is going along quite happily, not thinking about it much. Then I think the other thing – and this connects perhaps with his academic professionalism – is that he was extremely good at seeing how the whole compass of his arguments fitted together – how what he says on this topic or that might repercuss, so to speak, on what he’s said somewhere else or in some other connection. He was very self-conscious, and professionally methodical, in that sort of way; there was absolutely nothing piecemeal, or makeshift, or hand-to-mouth about his way of going to work. One has the feeling that the whole huge enterprise is firmly under control. He does, I must say, make writers like Locke and Berkeley, and indeed Hume, excellent though they are, look to me rather like amateurs.

Bryan Magee. 1987. The Great Philosophers. oxford university press (2000)