[jackdied]

You are too kind. Two of the names he listed, Freud and Marx, were wrong. His third "forgotten man" is Hegel and while you can't call a philosophy wrong he certainly is harder to read than similar alternatives.

The author might have had more luck finding Marx if he hadn't been looking for him in the Economics Dept.

[mlinsey]

Agreed with the rest of the replies here about Marx and Freud, but what's with the detraction of Hegel because he's "hard to read"? Lisp is pretty hard to read too when you've only read C-style syntax before.

And I think you can most definitely call a philosophy wrong, philosophers do it routinely! At its core philosophy is simply making good arguments, something that HN posters should be striving for. And while it's hard to "prove" a philosophy wrong in the sense one can prove that an algorithm doesn't work, you can certainly prove its arguments to be unsound.

There is the ongoing strict separation between "Continental" and "Analytic" philosophy, which is both relatively new and quite tragic. I will say that in a discipline like philosophy, which when it is at its best treasures subversiveness and independence just as much as entrepreneurs do, it's all the more important to read thinkers from different schools of thought. Hegel is not just any "Continental" philosopher but one of the most important pillars of the field

[IsaacSchlueter]

you can't call a philosophy wrong

Sure you can. Philosophers do it all the time.