A short, CRITICAL History of Philosophy (Chapter 52)

Benjamin Franklin: A Philosophical Genius?

If you asked someone in London or Paris in the 1760s, who the greatest living philosopher was, there’s a good chance they would have said Benjamin Franklin.

This is largely a function of semantics. In those days, there was still little distinction between “natural philosophy,” meaning science, and metaphysics, and, as we all know, Franklin was a great scientist and inventor. But that he would have been identified as a philosopher is not exclusively a function of the change in word meaning.

To some degree it reflects the decadence into which philosophy has fallen, one in which its real subject, wisdom, has been scorned and replaced with regard for esoteric thinking, often of the most pointless kind. That was not Franklin’s concern. He was as educated as almost any man of his day, but this learning was not acquired in the fashion that academics adulate.

I am reminded of a story about Clark Gable and his stepdaughter, Joan Spreckels. Trying to pick a boarding school to attend, she asked which he had gone to. He answered: “The school of hard knocks.” When Spreckels’ mother told her that it did not exist, she informed the actor about this. He responded, “Oh, yes, it does, as you’ll eventually find out.”