[jolux]

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

[andagainagain]

Name me two.

And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

[jfarmer]

You might like American Pragmatism: CS Peirce, FP Ramsey, CI Lewis, William James, John Dewey, etc.

Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...

[User23]

Peirce also, along with Frege, independently discovered the existential and universal quantifiers, to name just one major contribution. His existential graphs[1] are extremely cool too. Peirce is grossly underappreciated largely due to the efforts of his less gifted but more politically astute childhood "friend" Simon Newcomb to obliterate his career and legacy. The Peirce gateway is full of great stuff[2][3]. This[4] is the companion paper to How To Make Our Ideas Clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph

[2] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/

[3] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM

[4] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/f...

[yesenadam]

Also Richard Rorty. I seem to never agree with anything he says—he always goes too far—but have all his books and find him very stimulating. Hilary Putnam talks in his books about their disagreements, and Putnam always seems to take the more sensible side. Putnam is a very clear and stimulating writer—his Realism with a Human Face is perhaps his best and a good place to start, filled with remarkably good essays.

p.s. Dewey's Art as Experience changed my life. I'm a musician/artist and philosophy student, and it solved all my problems concerning art, which each further book of analytic philosophy of art had only multiplied.

[andagainagain]

Thanks, I'll save that for later reading.

[jolux]

Two what?

I'm also curious what defines your standard for clear thinking. Philosophy is at a level of abstraction higher than any other intellectual discipline, and to a certain extent it's not possible to discuss philosophy in the way we discuss engineering, for example. It's the difference between relying on assumptions to communicate effectively and attempting to analyze the assumptions themselves.

[keiferski]

I find Nietzsche to be an extremely clear writer, but only if you have an understanding of his background and the topics he’s engaging with.

Kierkegaard plays a lot of games in his writings, but I think his ideas themselves are very straightforward.

[ebruchez]

For amazing clarity, read Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

[bionhoward]

Marcus Aurelius and Seneca

[arolihas]

What of his work have you read that was so unclear?

[andagainagain]

I read about half of "The Republic". I would pull out the book again to find a good example, but I think I donated the book a few months ago.