Top 5 most damaging philosophies?

I agree that extremism is a danger, but I feel that philosophy has the potential to be widely accepted and damaging simultaniously. Obviously philosophy in itself is not damaging but the affect of them are. I'm thinking of the Aztec philosophy that required human sacrifice as one example. It may seem extreme to us now but I doubt that it seemed extreme to them at the time.

But let's take your example of Aztec sacrificial killings. This 'philosophy' that humans must be sacrificed to appeased the Gods is still immensely popular around the world in the form of Christianity, where one man is sacrificed for everyone's sins. The theory is essentially the same, the Aztecs were simply more extreme.

I wouldn't apply the word philosophy to either example. Philosophy can occur within the framework of certain religions, as often happens with eastern philosophy, but that doesn't make religious rites and beliefs philosophy unto itself.

How is it that we can say religious beliefs are not a philosophy and then celibrate Augustine and Aquinas as philosophers?

1) Capitalism (self evident as to why)
2) Christianity, as taught to the masses (God as an 'external only' phenomenon)
3) Democracy that 'sees' corporations as a 'legal person'.
4) Pre-determinism without free will (avoidance of responsibility for one's actions)
5) Trying to get answers for test questions on the internet.

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I'd say that belief in the possibility of 'truth' is the most damaging philosophy.

Dang, this is a difficult topic for me. I'm not sure what to put to down as a deleterious philosophy, since the very idea of what is deleterious presupposes yet another philosophy. The most obvious candidate for me is "Naziism," if one can call that a philosophy. Yet to say that Naziism is harmful is already to have in mind a definition of "harmful," which in turn rests upon an assumption of what is beneficial. Destroying an entire race of people is probably an evil thing to do--most if not all of us would agree on this point. But does our agreement rest on philosophical grounds? In other words, do we know that genocide is bad? Or do we merely believe that it is bad because our common culture tells us as much?


The same thing goes for racism and the philosophies that justify it. Is racism bad? Very likely it is. But do we know that it is bad, or are we just as ignorant as those who defend it and participate in it? If the proposition "racism is bad" is true, then our faith in this proposition is a true belief. However, while it appears self-evident that true beliefs are better than false beliefs, if we are entrenched in either kind, we have no way of knowing which is which.

It would seem, then, that the judgement of particular philosophies can only be made from the standpoint of a meta-philosophy. But how can we determine which philosophy transcends all others, and thus is truly meta?

Ok, you've given one example, though it's hard to say that this results from a 'philosophy of truth' per se, as opposed to just premature closure on an evidence-based epistemology.

My "TOP 3" :

1. Christianity (has killed Roman empire & antique innocence )
2. Nazism (Holocaust and war crimes in Eastern Europe)
3. Communism (Destruction of economy and culture of Russia)

Those are not philosophies. The first is a religion (and and ideology).
The other two are political movements (and ideologies).

1. Philosophies of "National exclusiveness"
2. Hitler's racial theory
3. Marx's economic theory

So????????....................

It were attempts to construct paradise on the Earth. The best philosophy is free development. Sense of history of our Era this expectation of the Second Coming. We should save simply status quo. :Glasses: