Who is the greatest genius of all time?
Out of all these well-known options, which do you think held the greatest intellect in history and why?
If you have a legitimate alternative to those listed above, please expound. The poll would only let me enter so many options.
FDR, the one-time economical savior of the entire U.S.A. and the only Socialist president (he claimed to be a Democrat) in our country’s history.
Wil E. Coyote
-Imp
Heraclitus.
“Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.”
How does the New Deal qualify a man as the greatest genius of all time? Especially over the most prolific inventors, scientists and philosophers? How was he more of a genius than the man whose name gives people purpose in life and who leads billions of followers to happiness (and war)?
Your reasoning is clouded.
Wil E. Coyote 1) has no qualifications and 2) isn’t a legitimate answer because he is the creation of a cartoonist and a writer.
Not just the New Deal, the bank holiday, the guy practically invented the Social Security system!!! I mean, the most prolific inventors, scientists and philosophers were all extremely intelligent people, but how many of them saved an entire country?
I’d also like to add that your statement is overly argumentative, you have named types of people, but for me to consider your point please give me one person more genius than FDR and I would be willing to compare.
Thank you.
The one-liners are getting a little stale, Imp. Enigmatic irrelevancy is totally out now, didn’t you hear?
I don’t follow trends…
-Imp
As a rule?
That’s quite a list of luminaries, and it would be difficult to choose which one is possessed the greatest genius.
Leonardo da Vinci was definately brilliant- he was a great artist and scientist, anticipating many later inventions.
I have a soft spot for Nietszche; he was very insightful and one of the finest writers of his century.
Mozart was a composer of almost unimaginable genius. He wrote enduring masterpeices in every style of the day, and was among the greatest opera composers the world has ever known.
Newton was brilliant as well, laying the groundwork for our current understanding of the universe.
Plato was clever, but managed to lead the world down the garden path to such a degree it still hasn’t gotten out.
Aristotle managed to take Platonic ideas and make them even worse.
Galileo was astonishing- it’s hard to imagine where we’d be if he’d never been born.
Shakespeare has had a profound effect on Western literature, probably greater than anyone since Homer.
Pythagoras had some flakey ideas about the universe (ie “music of the spheres”) but was brilliant.
IMOHO, the greatest was Mozart, with Nietszche the runner up. But only of the ones you listed.
Nicely done, Phaedrus. The first real post in the thread if I do say so.
An interesting post guys…
All of the mentioned were definately highly intelligent - but how to qualify inteligence and genius?
Is it sheer insight? thinking beyond ones socio-historic context in order to arrive at unconventioal insights about traditional morality and custom? This is definately a type of brilliance to which a few of these thinkiers fit into…Socrates and Nietszche among them…
But there seems also to be another genius more on par with einstein, galileo, newton, copernicus who deinately went beyond convetional truths and produced startling insights, but in a more analytically intelectcual way?
Am i fooling myself? are these two facets of genius the same? can one make this distinction?
Da Vinci is tops on my list. Everyone on the list and mentioned are people that I would be honored to meet.
But, Da Vinci would turn me into a fauning stuttering school girl.
The man was by far and large so very learned in many subjects. He not only invented and created for the future, he inspires people to this day. Not just artists but, engineers , scientists, writers, doctors, teachers, students etc… he has been a light in humanities darknessess.
If a humanity has a super hero Da Vinci is it.
I thought dhjtnergb’s answer was very “witty” 
Beyond that, I love looking at familiar terms in different ways. Here the term genius caries with it several ancient associations. The genius started out as a spirit. I have seen it called a guardian spirit and elsewhere a generative spirit. Each man had his genius and each woman had the equivalent in her juno.
Returning to the question at hand we could ask who had the greatest creative spirit.
Leonardo da Vinci helped to create greater arts and sciences.
Jesús helped to create the dignity and divinity of all people.
Nietszche helped to create greater self creations, but his work remains largely inaccessible
Mozart helped to created greater beauty and emotional expression in music
Newton helped to create the function of the universe
Plato helped to create a world beyond the control of the gods
Aristotle helped to create nature as we now it know
Galileo helped to create the galaxy
Shakespeare helped to create humanity as we now it know
Pythagoras helped to create mysticism, as far as we can tell from the tiny fragments that remain of his work
…not nearly as good as:
Get it? “Witty”. You know…like the first four letters in his name.
Yeah I get it dude.
See the difference between an impicism and a witticism is that Imp does it all the time, while Xanderman once in a great while. Not that Imp’s aren’t funny, of course.
Still, I thought for sure Impenitent woulda beat Xanderman to it.
See the cool thing with having “dhjtnergb” as my name is that it forces you all to copy and paste it…when you want to head a post to me or talk to me in general.
None of you could ever possibly memorize that name and just type it. So, you can thank me for making your posting experience that much more of a hassle.
Respectfully,
dhjtnergb
Who is the greatest genius of all time?
God has my vote.
Ehh, I think that we can’t really ever have a ‘greatest’ genius. We can objectively state who has the most original ideas or who showed a lot of creativity, but it’s very hard to compare unlike things and individual human beings; also, one should take into an account how much effort each individual gave relative to his economic/social/political position; for example, in basketball, it’s hardly fair to pit a small person versus a tall person. Who’s the greater competitor there? It seems totally unfair to compare them and kind of useless; the authors of great ideas have no ownership of the ideas they found but rather have discovered that which is public domain. Venerate the ideas and give props to the great thinkers, but I think that comparing them is fruitless.
Jesus. I mean, whoever made him up.