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Great Thinkers and Visionaries

This is a list of people whose ideas on how and where the world is - and should be - evolving, may be of interest to those who want to understand the frontier of human thought, at least according to my opinion. Originally I created it to give credit to people who influenced my ideas but as it often happens the project took a life of its own. Please enjoy these resources. It would be great if you could support this site or help me improve it. Now you can also take part in the discussions on the Visionaries mailing list or on the Delphi Thinkers Forum
I apologize if my selection of thinkers is not sufficiently balanced. In Russia, reading most of them could get me into Big Trouble. I hope to fix these gaps now - with your help.
You may also want to take part in the efforts that should lead to distribution of visionary ideas based on their merits rather then cute facade or interests of social power structures.

Quick guide to this page:

home page of a thinker

Books by this thinker

Other web pages (live search)

Current usenet discussions

Douglas Hofstadter

Daniel Dennett

Andrey Kolmogorov

Albert Einstein

Isaac Newton

Natasha Vita More

Leonardo Da Vinci

Stephen Hawking

Terence McKenna

Robert Anton Wilson

Robert A. Heinlein

Bruce Sterling

Arthur C. Clarke

Alvin Toffler

Ayn Rand

Isaac Asimov

FAQ

John McCarthy

Robin Hanson

Timothy Leary

Peter Russell

Vernor Vinge

Buckminster Fuller

FAQ

Marvin Minsky

Linus Pauling

Hans Moravec

Francis Heylighen

Alexander Chislenko

Stanislaw Lem

George Gilder

Eric Drexler

Howard Bloom

Stuart Kauffman

Richard Dawkins

Kevin Kelly

U.G. Krishnamurti

Ilya Prigogine

Carl Sagan

Max More

Richard Feynman

Marshall McLuhan

Friedrich Hayek

Alan Turing

Galileo Galilei

Nicholas Copernicus

Charles Darwin

Rupert Sheldrake

Teilhard de Chardin

Hypatia

Vladimir Vernadsky

Christian de Duve

Kurt Gödel

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Candidates to the list

Here are some people I am considering adding to the list of Thinkers, while I am learning more about their work and the impact of their ideas and activities, and trying to find time to include them, and their books, into the list. I would probably have to redesign the site (see ideas below) before I expand it any further, as this page already takes too long to load.

Visionary Scientists

David Friedman - anarchist-anachronist-economist -- books
Wolfgang Pauli
Friedrich Nietzsche -- books
John Von Neumann-- books
Claude Shannon - the father of information theory-- books
Carl Friedrich Gauss-- books
Henri Poincare-- books
Alfred Korzybski - General Semantics -- books
Bernhard Riemann
Jean Piaget -- books
Ray J. Solomonoff - author of algoritmic complexity and probability theories.-- books
Alexander Shulgin -- books

Modern Visionary Technocrats

Visionary Philosophers

Bertrand Russell -- books
Martin Heidegger -- books
Ludwig Wittgenstein -- books
David Bohm -- books
C. S. Peirce (American philosopher, pragmatist)
Rene Descartes
Jean-Paul Sartre
Blaise Pascal
John Dewey
Thomas More
Claude Levy-Strauss
Alan Watts

Visionary Leaders and Activists

Alexander the Great
L. Neil Smith (libertarian)
Mahatma Gandhi
Dalai Lama
Flemming A. Funch
Bill Wilson - founder of Alcoholics Anonymous

Visionary Writers

Aldous Huxley
George Orwell
I had a privilege of starting 1984 on the eve of 1984, hiding it from the Russian Thought Police and being scared of torture...
Ken Wilber Taken with a grain of salt, mystical wordlviews present an inspiring intellectual dish... ;-) Don't consume too much on an empty mind - makes you dizzy and disoriented.
William Gibson
Greg Egan
Philip K. Dick
Ursula K. Le Guin
H.G.Wells
Jules Verne
Omar Khayyam
David Brin
Charles Platt

Visionary Inventors

Also (partly classified, advice welcome)

Edward DeBono -- books
Freeman Dyson -- books
David Deutsch -- books
Giordano Bruno -- books
Lao Tzu -- books
Sri Aurobindo -- books
Gerard O'Neill -- books
Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock (Gaia theorists) -- books
J. Willard Gibbs -- books
Patrik Gunkel - author of ideonomics
Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, early memeticist) -- books
Dewey B. Larson -- books
Olaf Stapledon -- books
Stafford Beer -- books
Gerald F. Joyce
Joseph Campbell -- books
Howard Scott
Michael Tippett - composer and humanist philosopher
Malthus

Famous Non-visionaries

I am opening this section to answer multiple requests to include some people that I subbornly refuse to consider visionaries.
If you have good arguments to the contrary, I'd gladly listen to them.

Noam Chomsky His older works on formal grammars were revolutionary, but his recent theories of "Language Organ" seem unsubstantiated and his political criticism, while undoubtedly guided by good intentions, doesn't seem grounded. I attended his talk once and listening to rather dull list of somewhat exaggerated criticisms of corporations, without understanding of their absolutely essential role in the modern society (how can you run a complex system without aggregating agents into task-specific groups and allocating resources for their activities - every other system, from ecosystems to organisms to computer programs does that!), and he refused to either suggest any scenarios of the future, or offer any suggestions how to fix the situation. Some visionary...
You can read his books and make your own conclusions.

Villains and Kooks

There are many people wose ideas about the future are reasonable or respected but who are misguided about the subjects of methods of their visions.
Even though they may not lead to constructive results, erroneous visions deserve a special study.
Here is a modest initial selection:

Karl Marx - his main mistakes, in my opinion, were the seductively misleading idea that complex social processes may be explained and governed by a simple set of rules, similarly to those suggested by Newton for mechanical systems, and undue extrapolation of social trends of his time. Something we could learn from now...
Adolf Hitler One of the most successful proponents of nationalism in history, Hitler gave us some very good lessons. We paid too much for these lessons not to learn from them.
Vladimir Lenin did the same thing for communist ideas.
Nostradamus - an author of a set of vast, vague, and unsubstantiated claims about the future, which were less unexcusable in his time than in ours.
Jeremy Rifkin. - In the words of Charles Platt, "I believe Rifkin is the commentator who poses the greatest threat to attempts to transcend limitations of the human condition." Godling's Glossary defines Rifkin's kind of theories as Disasturbation
All religious thinkers that ever lived, for mistaking emotionally charged metaphors for the objective reality?

If you have any opinion on these people and URLs of their pages, or have other candidates who you think should be listed here, please mail them to me! (I do not promise to include them, however. They may be wonderful people, but I may not understand - or agree with - their work, or think that they belong more to Great Scientists or Activists than Visionaries, etc.)

Please do not suggest me to represent more women or other physiological groups. This is a page about minds, not flesh! If you have a candidate, please mail me the name, URL, and why you think the ideas of this person are so crucial for understanding the progress of the Universe today.

The selection process is getting more and more difficult for me, as the amount of suggestions I receive has outgrown both my knowledge of important people and the amount of "free" time I can devote to maintaining this page.

I am working on a formal set of criteria for accepting and classifying nominations, and would like to turn this page - already with about 60,000 visitors a year - can turn into an objective public resource. For that, I would need assistance and funding. Please let me know if you can help in any way. Meanwhile, you can at least click on a few ads on this site, to add a few cents to its development.
If you are interested please read the the draft proposal for the Thinkers site development and suggest your comments.

I have absolutely no time to answer criticisms of the current state of the site coming from people who haven't read the proposal, and are not suggesting any help. Sorry.

Other Lists of Great people

Halcyon List of thinkers

Estimated IQs of some of the greatest geniuses

InforSeek list of Internet Celebrities

Celebrities in Cognitive Science

Dave Krieger's list of Exceptional people

Warped People page

Glass Bead Game - Biographies of great people

Eric's Treasure Trove of Scientific Biography

Scientists: biographies

UTNE Reader list of Visionaries They can't tell the difference between thinkers, dreamers, executives, and social activists, and the choice is somewhat mainstream (not extreme like mine ;-) ) but some people there are interesting.

Great Mathematicians

Prominent Anarchists and Left-Libertarians

Great Writers and Poets

Prominent sociologists

Great Canadian Scientists

Celebrity Atheist List and Famous Dead Non-theists - people who have advocated living life without deference to a higher power.

Major Western Philosophers

Some people whose example you may not want to follow:

Kooks museum

The best way to understand great thinkers is to join them!
If you are an aspiring visionary, you may find the following Web resources useful:
Self-Publishing solution from BookNooks
Anders Transhuman Page
Nobel Foundation, Nobel Prize Internet Archive
World Future Society (Greater Boston Chapter)
Frontier Organizations on the Web
Best mailing lists on the Net
The Great Books of Western Civilization Cafe

Upcoming visionary events

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