Myself. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. While i appreciate all wise thoughts from any source, it is my process of reflection i enjoy most. Too often we make God's of mere mortals while neglecting the divinity within ourselves.

Not at all easy to answer, but the most meaningful of the relatively recent bunch that touches on current-age problems without having insane caveats is most likely Albert Camus, as he touches upon the question on why live at all, which is a question I'd say every thinking man or woman will have to face in their lives.

Roger Scrouton is also a very worthy current candidate, though on different subjects.

Alan Watts. No one has done a better job of transmitting Eastern wisdom to Western minds.

Aristotle.

I consider Aristotle to be the bedrock of the Western traditions of logic, natural science, and individual liberty. I would put in his debt virtually every comprehensible Western philosopher, in particular St. Thomas Aquinas, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand.

In contrast I consider Plato to be the origin of much evil and confusion. I am similarly critical of many Plato-aligned thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.

Outside of the West, I think Daoism is generally the most insightful philosophic/religious movement, so I would have to praise highly Lao Tzu (if there was such a man) and Zuangzhi.

Been getting deeper in to Stoic philosophy which is great! Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epiticus “you become what you give your attention to” - epiticus

What I love about the Stoics is it emphasizes the power of what you can control - which is yourself. Hold yourself to high standard but be gentle with others and always work to become a better person.

Also love Joseph Campbells works - power of myth, hero with a thousand faces - many great thought provoking nuggets proving the emotional challenges of the human existence have persisted and we have always sought answers. I love how he uses expanded across cultures that really to me - show the interconnectedness for the human experience

Guy Debord for his radical criticisms of ordinary modern life as inauthentic existence

Soren Kierkegaard for his belief in God as a solution to the modern human condition

Gautama Buddha

God

Augustine, because of his doctrine of rightly ordered love.

Martin Buber: "All Real Living Is Meeting". After years of working as a social worker, i found a perfect match with his insights about human life finding its meaningfulness in relationships. Although I am also a big fan of Heidegger...

Current is Alexandre Dugin. Why? He (or at least translator Michael Millerman) explained something I've wondered about for decades: why writers from early church to Enlightenment were so concerned about Nominalism. They seemed to regard it as a heresy leading straight to a chaotic hell.

For Medieval writers, the question was if God is "good", does "good" have an objective meaning? Or do we just label whatever God does as "good". More abstractly, do categories objectively exist, or are they arbitrary and subjective?

"Wokeness" is Nominalism taken to logical conclusions never before seen. Male and female and not objective categories, but arbitrary labels. Human and non-human is a subjective distinction. "Rights" are arbitrary permissions granted by those in power and subject to change on a literal whim. "Pray I do not alter the deal any further." And - it is leading to a chaotic hell right before our eyes.

Now I am pondering a Dugin interview purporting to explain why Putin calls Western elites (WEF, US Deep State,etc) "Satanic". https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/alexander-dugin-satanism-putting-matter-spirit

The one sentence summary seems to be, "because they put matter over spirit". But that doesn't make sense to me. I always thought of Satanism as rebellion against whatever God says. If God says, "be fruitful and multiply", then be childless and depopulate. If God says, "let man rule over the Earth", then let Earth rule over man. More recently, if God "created them male and female", then do your best to alter that reality.

A better summary after a reading might be "putting creature over creator". And from that fundamental beginning, reversing all of created order. Dugin says, "virtues are immutable, vices are always progressing". This is the basic nature of Western "Progress" - as C.S. Lewis put it, "I've seen progress in an egg, we call it going bad." Thus Dugin later states, "Satanism must be understood strictly as a strategy of decay, the will to decay, the elevation of decay to an ideology."

Stefan Molyneux

He was my first contact to philosophy and opened up a topic I thought was inaccessible.

Diogenes, he was the Siddhartha of the West in a sense. Diogenes was responsible for debasing the currency and, similar to Jesus in the temple, made it his mission to deface the fiat and overturn the money changers. He went on to live a life of asceticism. #₿

Deutsch. I never realized how philosophy and mathematics are tied to the physics of our particular universe. In another universe, they would be different.

There is no second best philosopher.

Would Murray Rothbard count as a philosopher? I know he was an economist and historian but I have found his anarcho-capitalist thought very influential on my own thinking.

"Jesus Christ, because He changed my life."

–George W. Bush