Freud was a Marketing genius who was able to repackage Philosophy as Medicine. His bigoted and idiotic theories on psychosexual development and mental disease causation are rightly widely mocked today. His fanciful 3-part division of the psyche is a poetic metaphor at best. But he did do a great deal to popularize and stereotype the way of the "talking cure," and that's something.
Marx was also a Marketing genius. He repackaged Philosophy as Economics. As many have pointed out, Marx's belief in a predictable, inexorable historical dialectic was more doctrine than theory, more secular religion than science or even philosophy. But there can be no doubt that by brewing up and ballyhooing his own heady "opiate for the proletariat," Marx had an enormous impact on the course of history: people bought into it big time. A certain class of people felt the desperate need for something other than the entrenched belief systems to believe in, and Marx provided them a classy new ethos and mythos to kill and die for. His bearded specter exhorted and cajoled hordes of innocent idealists and their by-definition-reactionary victims down a gore-strewn path, headlong always onward towards the glories of the ever-receding dream of collective weal.
Everyone these days likes to say that Philosophy has died out. Look a little closer: it just took a bath and changed clothes. With the death of ethical absolutes, Philosophy was forced to look elsewhere for its validity. It had to redefine the game by inventing new absolutes, loosely and speciously tied to more respectable disciplines. It had to be repurposed as "Science." Don't you be fooled. Any "Science" whose principles are not grounded in theory and experimentation, with claims of certainty validated by reproducible results, is just Philosophy with a costume-shop lab coat on.
Darwin was less a philosopher and more what used to be called a "natural philosopher" - which is to say, he was a scientist. His theories have only grown in prestige and acceptance over the past 150 years. Today, only the most struthious of disputants can fail to see natural selection's undeniable impact on the development and speciation of organisms.
All three of these men had beards.
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