Philosophy matters, but does academic philosophy have more impact than philosophy done outside the academy? A list of historically influential philosophers:
Academic | Non-academic |
Plato | Socrates |
Aristotle | Locke |
Aquinas | Descartes |
Galileo | Spinoza |
Smith | Hume |
Kant | Kierkegaard |
Hegel | Marx |
Russell | Mill |
Heidegger | Rand |
Popper | Sartre |
Split: Nietzsche was an academic early in his career and then quit for a non-academic intellectual career.