My Favorites

My favorite poets include Robert Frost, Shakespeare, William Carlos Williams, and(though I'm a fervent atheist): Jesus of Nazareth. My favorite fictional writers are Jonathan Swift(for the great master-piece "Gulliver's Travels,") Kate Chopin(for "The Awakening,") Knut Hamsen for "Hunger," Frank McCourt("Angela's Ashes," etc,) and Herman Hesse, though he was as capable of terrible story-telling as he was of genius. My favorite visual artists include Monet, Keith Haring, and Vincent Van Gogh: (though he was in my opinion an uneducated, ignorant, and even arrogant thinker and writer as reflected in his famous letters to his brother.)

My favorite musicians include Mozart, Vivaldi, and Elliott Smith. My favorite historian is William Durant, though he quite fails as a philosopher. My heroes include Sacagawea, Nancy Pelosi, Charles Darwin, Andre Agassi, and Warren Buffett(for actually giving away the vast majority of his fortune, and for his dedication to the ideal of a social safety net.)

My favorite philosophers include Epicurus, Einstein, Voltaire, Herman Hesse as reflected in "Narcissus and Goldmund," Carl Sagan, Baruch Spinoza, Diagoras and Jean Meslier for risking their necks for simple truth, and Augustus Caesar for the political philosophy of his actions. Other philosophers that interest me are Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, and Seneca. I admire some ideas of Kant that I understand, but feel plain English explanations of his ideas must be inaccurate and even dishonest(to avoid the atheistic slant of his ideas.) Like so many other philosophers, I haven't found the time to read Thomas Paine or Seneca, but from their echoes I suspect I might admire them.