Dead philosopher society

Remember the Dead Poets Society? It was a movie starring Robin Williams as a maverick teacher who causes ructions at an ultra-conservative American prep school when he uses his unauthodox methods to engage and inspire his students. It was a heart warming movie, and if you could get past Williams' emetic impersonations, it had a strong message for educators everywhere: dare to take a few risks. The fact that one of William's young charges commits suicide in the film is a bit of a dampener, but there is some interesting underlying philosophy in the screen play. Hmmm... philosophy...

Are you interested in philosophy and have a Twitter account? If the answer to those questions is 'yes', it so happens that Twitter has its own Dead Philosophers Society. Yes, there are famous philosophers on Twitter - alive and tweeting. The accounts are all fake, obviously, but if you want a daily dose of philosophy to make you think, ponder life or something to quote to irritate your friends, colleagues or family, your favourite sage is probably out there somewhere, just waiting for you to follow them. Many of the accounts simply tweet unadulterated quotes from published works or well trodden aphorisms from their late authors, but one or two may engage in dialogue with their followers. Here are a few of Twitter's philosopher accounts I have stumbled across (and occasionally retweeted) in the past few days. Explore for yourself ... and follow whom you will:

Mikhail Bakhtin
Roland Barthes
Pierre Bourdieu (in French)
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
Jacques Lacan
Friedrich Nietzsche
Claude Levi-Strauss
Susan Sontag
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you know of any other dead philosophers who are still alive and tweeting, and want to recommend them, please add their links in the comments box below.

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Dead philosopher society by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.