Plato heads poll despite book being 'wrong on almost every point' while Sartre fails to make top 10

They are the sort of findings which could keep great minds arguing for millennia. Plato's The Republic has been voted the greatest work of philosophy ever written despite the fact that most modern thinkers would rubbish almost all of what he said.

But what is really puzzling is that a survey of more than 1,000 philosophers, academics and students by the authoritative Philosophers' Magazine, placed Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species as the third most important tract on the human condition.

Ted Honderich, author of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and Philosopher: A Kind of Life, branded the choice "mad" and blamed Darwin's inclusion on the plague of "retired Nobel prize winning scientists now poking about in philosophy".

He said: "You see them trying to peer at the nature of time and consciousness - things they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near - through the greater mess of quantum theory. They simply don't have the logic to do it. It was probably people like them who skewed the results.

"Something has gone badly wrong. Darwin was a splendid fellow but it is always a disaster when scientists turn their minds to something which philosophers should claim as their natural right. I blame philosophers for vacating the ground to people who have no sense of logic."

That Wittgenstein, who taught at Cambridge, should also be on the list "was monstrous, but to think that he comes before Aristotle, Hume and Aquinas shows we live in a culturally degraded society".

Professor Honderich said the list was representative of the great thinkers, if too heavily weighted in favour of philosophy written in English.

Anglophonic prejudice against continental thinking also kept Marx, Heidegger, Sartre and Hegel out of the top 10, while Derrida did not make the top 50. The dashing Bernard-Henri Levy did not even figure, nor did Jean Baudrillard, the man who insisted the Gulf war did not happen.

The editor of Philosophers' Magazine, Julian Baggini, however, argued that the list showed the gulf between European, British and US thought was closing, though he dismissed Levy as "someone only taken seriously by the media".

He too, though, was surprised that Darwin was in the list. "Overall, this is not a maverick list. Everyone who you would expect to be in there is, because you are talking with an informed group of people. But the fact that so many of them opted for Darwin is very odd. I could offer you possible explanations, but I admit they would only be fairly wild extrapolations."

He said the influence of Darwin's ideas on natural selection and the survival of the fittest had a clear influence on political and economic ideas, but no obvious effect on philosophy.

Plato's topping of the poll was less of a surprise since he is the father of western philosophy, though he is hardly the oracle he used to be. Few great minds now take very seriously ideas such as transmigration of the soul or that the world should be run by autocratic philosopher princes. Nor was he much of a feminist.

The British thinker Alfred North Whitehead may have once claimed that "philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato", but Baggini said that "you will be hard pressed to find a philosopher working today who will agree with more than 5% of it".

He added: "Although The Republic was wrong on almost every point, the questions it raises and the methods it uses are essential to the western tradition of philosophy. Without it we might not have philosophy as we know it."

Karl Popper, who was 32nd on the list, was one of Plato's most vociferous critics, claiming that the authoritarian ethos he preached to the Athenians at the turn of the 4th century BC led directly to the concentration camps.

Plato's rival and student, Aristotle, who set up the lyceum to compete with his master's academy, also figures twice in the top 10, while there is no place at all for Jeremy Bentham, Mrs Thatcher's favourite thinker, who now sits stuffed in a glass case in University College London.

But Baggini said that just because only four of the top 50 were still living did not mean that philosophy was in a parlous state.

"We were also a bit depressed at first. But it does require the test of time for greatness to shine through, and when you look at the huge amount of literature philosophers have produced down the ages, it is quite good actually."

Sages of reason - philosophy's top 10

The 10 greatest philosophical works

1 Plato, The Republic



An ideal world would be run by philosopher aristocrats and lesser beings would know their place

2 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason



The human mind can never arrive, by pure thought, at truths about concepts such as God, human freedom, or immortality of which it has no experience

3 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species



The theory of how life evolved slowly through natural selection

4 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics



Plato's student wrote two books of ethics which are still clear guides on how to lead a "good life"

5 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy



Tried to prove that mind and body were distinct

6 Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations)



Wittgenstein posed these complex questions: "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? - Or is the use its life"

7 Aristotle, Metaphysics



The most difficult, and said to be the most important, of his books, it contains the philosopher's theory of being

8 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding



Arguably the greatest British thinker ever, Hume, a Scot, attempted to define the principles of human knowledge and to discover how rationality worked

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil



A book of 296 aphorisms and poems with which he hoped would help create a "free spirit"

10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica



The philosopher-saint tried to present Christian belief as clearly as possible by explaining God's existence through questions and tightly argued responses