Oh my, there’s quite a barrel-full of assumptions in this question, Wassan — not least the fact that there are a great many famous philosophers either still alive or in living memory. But I shall take the question in the spirit it was intended, which is to wonder about the decline in philosophy as a discipline more broadly.
When patients start on the latest obesity drugs, they find that their food cravings drop away, and then the pounds do too. But when patients go off the drugs, the gears shift into reverse: The food cravings creep back, and then the pounds do too.
In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.
