Ethical Philosophies

  • THALES OF MILETUS
    624 BCE

    THALES OF MILETUS

    He was the founder of the Milesian School of natural philosophy, and the teacher of Anaximander. He was perhaps the first subscriber to Materialist and Naturalism in trying to define the substance or substances of which all material objects were composed, which he identified as water.
  • ANAXIMANDER
    610 BCE

    ANAXIMANDER

    He was an early proponent of science, and is sometimes considered to be the first true scientist, and to have conducted the earliest recorded scientific experiment. He is often considered the founder of astronomy, and he tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe and its origins, and to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. He made important contributions to cosmology, physics, geometry, meteorology and geography as well as to Metaphysics.
  • ANAXIMENES
    585 BCE

    ANAXIMENES

    Anaximenes was the first Greek to differentiate clearly between planets and stars in the physical sciences, and he utilized his concepts to account for many natural occurrences like as thunder and lightning, rainbows, earthquakes, and so on. Anaximenes penned his philosophical ideas in a book that survived far into the Hellenistic period, albeit little survives of it now. Anaximenes' primary goal was to find the single source of all things in the universe (Monism).
  • PYTHAGORAS
    570 BCE

    PYTHAGORAS

    He was the founder of Pythagoreanism, an influential intellectual and religious movement or cult, and he was likely the first individual to proclaim himself a philosopher (or lover of wisdom). Pythagoras (or, in a larger sense, the Pythagoreans) is said to have had a significant impact on Plato's work.
  • SOCRATES OF ATHENS
    470 BCE

    SOCRATES OF ATHENS

    He was an ancient Greek (Athenian) philosopher who is often regarded as one of the founders of Western philosophy and the first moral philosopher in the Western ethical school of thought. He was an enigmatic man who left no writings and is only known from the tales of ancient writers who wrote after his death, notably his students Plato and Xenophon.
  • PLATO
    427 BCE

    PLATO

    He was a Classical Greek philosopher and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is largely regarded as a major figure in the formation of Western philosophy. He adheres to a virtue-based eudaemonistic view of ethics. 
  • ARISTOTLE
    384 BCE

    ARISTOTLE

    He was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist who was born in the northern Greek city of Stagira, Chalkidiki. He is regarded as the "Father of Western Philosophy," along with Plato. He used the word ethics to describe a branch of philosophy founded by his predecessors Socrates and Plato. According to his Nichomachean Ethics, he stressed the influence of habit in behavior.
  • AUGUSTINE
    354 BCE

    AUGUSTINE

    He was a fourth-century Roman African philosopher whose revolutionary theory combined Christian teaching with Neoplatonism. He is also the first Western philosopher to advocate what has come to be known as "the analogy argument" against solipsism. He is well-known for being a unique Catholic theologian as well as for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy.
  • EPICURUS
    341 BCE

    EPICURUS

    Epicurus was a Hellenistic-era Greek philosopher. He founded the ancient Greek philosophical school of Epicureanism, whose fundamental purpose was to achieve a joyful, serene existence free of suffering and fear by cultivating friendship, freedom, and an examined life. His metaphysics was materialistic in general, his epistemology was empiricist, and his ethics were hedonistic.
  • Period: 341 BCE to 270 BCE

    EPICURUS

    Epicurus was a Hellenistic-era Greek philosopher. He founded the ancient Greek philosophical school of Epicureanism, whose fundamental purpose was to achieve a joyful, serene existence free of suffering and fear by cultivating friendship, freedom, and an examined life. His metaphysics was materialistic in general, his epistemology was empiricist, and his ethics were hedonistic.
  • ZENO DI CITIUM
    344

    ZENO DI CITIUM

    He was born around 490 B.C. in the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy. The date is an estimate based on Plato's report of a visit to Athens by Zeno and his teacher Parmenides when Socrates was "a very young man", and Zeno being about 25 years younger than Parmenides. Little is known for certain about Zeno's life. He founded the Hellenistic philosophy in the early 3rd century BC in Athens. with its school known as stoicism.
  • THOMAS AQUINAS
    1225

    THOMAS AQUINAS

    He was a Dominican friar from Italy, a Catholic priest, and a Doctor of the Church. He was a hugely significant philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the Scholasticism school, for which he is also known as the Doctor Angelicus and the Doctor Communis. His moral theory is a synthesis of at least two seemingly different traditions: Aristotelian eudaemonism and Christian theology.
  • IMANUEL KANT

    IMANUEL KANT

    He is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. He made the Kantian ethics which developed as a result of Enlightenment rationalism, is based on the view that the only intrinsically good thing is a good will; an action can only be good if its maxim – the principle behind it – is duty to the moral law.
  • JOHN RAWIS

    JOHN RAWIS

    He was a liberal-minded American moral and political philosopher. A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls in which the author seeks to address the problem of distributive justice (the socially equitable allocation of goods in a society) by employing a form of the well-known social contract technique.
  • JÜRGEN HABERMAS

    JÜRGEN HABERMAS

    He is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. The Theory of Communicative Action (German: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) is a two-volume 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas, in which Habermas continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language", which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967).