Yet even if one enrolls under the tutelage of any of the said 900 persons, one will be studying the philosophical approaches of key figures within the language of logical debate, so the OP is moot.
Like I said:
I am simply challenging the validity of your statistics insofar as you use them to support what you are saying, even if what you are saying does indeed have some merit all by itself.
IOW one difference between philosophy and science that you perhaps haven't picked up is that it doesn't require funding in order to be valid.
Actually, you seemed to be implying that because the philosophers who were surveyed were teachers that it necessarily demonstrated that they weren't of the same caliber as the greats throughout history. I gleaned this from your assertion that science teachers couldn't be compared to the key figures in the various branches of science.
IOW your notion that funding lends credibility to a discipline of knowledge is certainly a contentious philosophical/ethical point at the onset.
That wasn't my notion. It seemed to be yours. In my post I went on to point out that there is no reason to believe that we don't have philosophers alive today who are just as brilliant and insightful as the greats throughout history. Obviously I know that most of them are university teachers, so how does it make sense to interpret my comments to suggest that I think that the number of philosophers who have obtained funding for research is in any way indicative of how credible the discipline is? I was saying the opposite.
The problem is that you just used the word "supernatural" in an attempt to minimalize the position of philosophy that is discordant with your values ... which, btw, is a philosophical problem
What are you even talking about? It was a joke.
If they are yet to make a distinguishable contribution to society, why place them in the same category as those persons who already have (regardless whether they are a scientist or a philosopher)?
Science is a perfect illustrative example. Most of the big discoveries that have radically altered our understanding of reality have already been made: the earth is round, it revolves around the sun, how gravity works, everything is made of atoms, atoms are made of still more fundamental stuff, the laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism, the true nature of light, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics... the list goes on. But even though the fabric of reality becomes more fundamental the deeper we probe into it, the mathematical framework that is required to make sense of it becomes much more complex and the calculations required so lengthy that we have hundreds of people working on the problem and are becoming increasingly reliant on computers to do much of the work for us.
I'm not saying that there are no big discoveries left to make, but it is increasingly likely that such discoveries will be collaborative efforts. So we might not end up with too many big household names like Newton or Einstein anymore, but rather lists of names. But those people wont necessarily be any less brilliant. They are simply dealing with more complex problems.
Philosophy is somewhat different I know. But similarly, because so much philosophy has already been hashed out over the centuries, almost everything ends up being a derivation or an extension of something else. All the major questions have already been tackled exhaustively. But there are indeed many great minds at work today who are continuing the tradition by refining and extending upon the knowledge that we've already gained. Occasionally someone finds a new and interesting application or devises a fresh approach, but it's still all mostly derivative. But it would be insulting to suggest that this is because there's just no-one alive today who possesses a mind that it as brilliant as those who have come before us.