Wikipedia has Nietzsche on the list of famous teetotalers. (Is this right?) Also Isaac Asimov and Bruce Lee but I guess they don't count. I'd say Pythagoras was a philosopher and he wouldn't even eat beans much less take a drink.

List of teetotalers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also Vid mentioned Aquinas though in a different context. He's definitely a philosopher but I think I recall Aquinas having a reputation as quite a drinker at least in his youth. But in those days though it was often safer to drink the mead than the water.

List of well-known people who are now teetotal or were during their lifetime. Note that some have abstained their entire lives, but others have only abstained after prolonged alcohol use. [emphasis added]

The Philosopher's Song (Monty Python)

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!

An important part of the article at your link:



If a philosopher drank and came up with his or her philosophical ideas, and then stopped both drinking and coming up with anything new, that would not in any way be a sign that not all philosophers drink. In fact, if that were always the case, it might be suspected that there was a connection between drinking and philosophy.

It is interesting that of all the people in the list there, there is only one who is mentioned as a philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche. I do not know enough about his life to know when he came up with his ideas, and whether he drank during that period of time or not.

However, most people appear not to have paid attention to the first sentence of the initial post. I expected to get things like:

MONTY PYTHON - THE PHILOSOPHERS SONG LYRICS

And perhaps a theory that because alcohol is known to kill brain cells, that it was useful to drink the right amount (as Aristotle would say, the mean between the extremes), so as to kill the weak cells that are impeding thought, leaving the strongest to survive and enable one to more clearly contemplate deep philosophical ideas.

Certainly, though, the philosophers who have generally been regarded as the greatest of all time liked to drink.

I think that some place in Thucydides he tells of a group of people in Asia Minor he visited who, when they had to make a group decision, would first get drunk and make it; then examine it when dober; and if the decisions tallied, it would be ratified. I don't think that Thucydides reports how many decisions were ratified that way, though.