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"Man is the measure of all things" PROTAGORAS is one of the most important sophists and exerted considerable influence in fifth-century intellectual basis. He presented himself as an heir to Greek paideia as one of the great masters, or better as the educator capable of imparting teachings suited to the needs of the new world of the polis -
"I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing" Socrates is one of the few individuals whom one could say has so-shaped the cultural and intellectual development of the world that, without him, history would be profoundly different. He is best known for his association with the Socratic method of question and answer. -
"Truth is the beginning of every good to the Gods, and every good to man" Plato was a student of Socrates and later taught Aristotle. He founded the Academy, an academic program which many consider to be the first Western university. His most famous work is the Republic, which details a wise society run by a philosopher. He is also famous for his dialogues (early, middle, and late), which showcase his metaphysical theory of forms—something else he is well known for. -
"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them" Aristotle is among the greatest philosophers of all time. He is extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description. -
"God what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt" Augustine was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. The impact of his views on sin, grace, freedom and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be overrated. His most famous work, the Confessiones, is unique in the ancient literary tradition but greatly influenced the modern tradition of autobiography -
"The just man is most free from disturbance, while the unjust is full of the utmost disturbance" Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and sage who founded Epicureanism, a highly influential school of philosophy. He was born on the Greek island of Samos to Athenian parents. He regarded the unacknowledged fear of death and punishment as the primary cause of anxiety among human beings, and anxiety in turn as the source of extreme and irrational desires. -
"The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine" He is the greatest figure of thirteenth-century Europe in the two preeminent sciences of the era, philosophy and theology, he epitomizes the scholastic method of the newly founded universities. His efforts at a systematic reworking of Aristotelianism reshaped Western philosophy and provoked countless elaborations and disputations among later medieval and modern philosophers. -
"A state is a perfect body of free men, united together to enjoy common rights and advantages" He was a towering figure in philosophy, political theory, law and associated fields during the seventeenth century and for hundreds of years afterwards. His work ranged over a wide array of topics, though he is best known to philosophers today for his contributions to the natural law theories of normativity which emerged in the later medieval and early modern periods. -
"It is not wisdom but authority that makes a law" Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. -
"It is possible for the same thing both to be and not to be" David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. He is also well known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works. -
"Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination" Immanuel Kant is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant’s “critical philosophy -
"Education is the art of making man ethical" Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is aGerman philosopher who developed a dialectical scheme that emphasized the progress of history and of ideas from thesis to antithesis and thence to a synthesis. He is well-known for his teleological account of history, an account that was taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of a historical development culminating in communism. -
"A great artist is always before his time or behind it" George Edward Moore was one of the trinity of philosophers at Trinity College Cambridge (the others were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein) who made Cambridge one of centres of what we now call ‘analytical philosophy’, But his work embraced themes and concerns that reach well beyond any single philosophical programme. -
"Without music, life would be a mistake" was a German philosopher and cultural critic who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Many of these criticisms rely on psychological diagnoses that expose false consciousness infecting people’s received ideas. -
"The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance" John Bordley Rawls was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. He argued that only under a "veil of ignorance" could human beings reach a fair and impartial agreement (contract) as true equals not biased by their place in society. They would have to rely only on the human powers of reason to choose principles of social justice for their society.