I got several good ideas for blog posts while I was away last weekend, so I’ll slowly post them over this week.

Last week I somewhat facetiously claimed that the most important characteristic of a philosophy department were its thirty-something faculty members. I suggested by that criteria Cornell was #2 in the world, though several people have insisted since then that #1 would have been a better ranking. Whatever one thinks of the ranking, how important are the 30-ers.

John Doris suggested a nice test for this. Look back over the (recent) history of philosophy and find out which age group has produced the best work. To a first approximation, we can look at the best work published by philosophers in 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, and see which group does best. (This is approximate because books don’t get written overnight. But it’s a decent approximation.) To kick off, here are some books published by people in their 30s.

G. E. Moore – Principia Ethica
Bertrand Russell – Principia Mathematica[1]
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Saul Kripke – Naming and Necessity[2]
David Lewis – Counterfactuals
David Chalmers – The Conscious Mind[3]

We thirty-somethings miss out by one day on having _Ulysses_ in the list, but some people might question the _philosophical_ importance of _Ulysses_.

If we started listing papers, there would be plenty more to include, including most of David Lewis’s best work. Of course the interest here is in the comparative, so we’d have to note how much good work has been produced by philosophers of other ages to make a real comparison. But I’ll leave that to commentators.

fn1. I know Whitehead co-authored Principia, and I know only vol. 1 was published before Russell’s 40th birthday. So this is a bit of a cheat.

fn2. I’m taking the initial publication in the Harman & Davidson volume to be the important one here, not the re-issue in book form.

fn3. I’m guessing that Dave was 30 when Conscious Mind was published, though for all I know he was younger than that.