were there any famouse philosophers that were solipsists??

Question

if so which ones.


also if there werent any then why not? why is ti such a refuted theory?

Answer 1

I am skeptical of the suggestion that anybody has ever really been a true solipsist at heart. Just think of what it requires:

If you truly believe nothing outside yourself exists, then all non-mental efforts are pointless, if not completely illusory. Why bother talking or associating with people? You're just babbling to yourself! Why bother eating food or taking care of yourself? You're just supporting untrue delusional states.

An honest solipsist would seem to be constrained to only withering away and dying within days. Which would tend, I think, to discourage solipsism as a practice.

Of course, there's no short supply of people who like to think they're one thing but aren't even vaguely in practice. If you're not too stringent about what it takes to really be a solipsist, I'm sure you can find them under all kinds of rocks. I would tend to put such folk in a different catergory, myself.

The sophist Gorgias is supposed to have written a work which espoused solipsist ideas, but since this work is lost it is hard to say exactly what it really was intended to do. Many think it was more rhetoric than philosophy, intended to refute ideas of other philosophers at the time rather than seriously put forward any... indeed, some argue that it is the overt absurdity of the solipsist conclusions that make it such a telling point!

Me, I like Locke's refutation of the whole concept: "...if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination."

Answer 2

Only me.

Greek philosopher Gorgias is the first and most famous (But to whom?) solipsist that I have imagined to have existed.

Answer 3

None are really famous. Primarily because of Plato and his students.