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551 BCE
Confucius (Kong Qiu)
Confucius was a Chinese philosopher and politician during the paragon of Chinese sages. Known as the first teacher in China who wanted to make education broadly available and the act of teaching as a vocation. He is widely known for his creation, the way of life known as Confucianism. -
469 BCE
Socrates
A Greek philosopher who founded Western Philosophy. He is the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. He created the well-known Socratic Irony and Socratic Method. -
428 BCE
Plato
Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the classical period in ancient Greece. He is considered the founder of Western Political Philosophy. As a student of Socrates, his theories are incorporated into Socrates' teaching. In ethics and moral psychology, he developed the view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of the soul: reason, spirit, and appetite. -
384 BCE
Aristotle
An ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Plato, who is the founder of Lyceum the Peripatetic school of philosophy. He combines logic with observation to make a general and casual claim. -
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes was an English philosopher also considered as one of the founders of modern political philosophy. He is known for his "Social Contract Theory" which is the method of justifying political principles by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. -
René Descartes
He was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician who invented analytical geometry. His analytical geometry was a tremendous conceptual breakthrough, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. -
David Hume
Hume is a Scottish philosopher who is known today for his influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. According to Hume's theory of the mind, the passions (what we today would call emotions, feelings, and desires) are impressions rather than ideas (original, vivid and lively perceptions that are not copied from other perceptions) -
Immanuel Kant
Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. He argued that the supreme principle of morality is a standard of rationality that he dubbed "Categorical Imperative".
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ -
Jeremy Bentham
Bentham was an English philosopher who founded modern utilitarianism an ethical theory holding that actions are morally right if they tend to promote happiness or pleasure (and morally wrong if they tend to promote unhappiness or pain) among all those affected by them.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeremy-Bentham -
John Stuart Mill (J.S. Mill)
J.S. Mill was an English philosopher, political economist, a former member of Parliament in the UK, and civil servant. He was the most influential English philosopher of the 19th century. His theory of Utilitarianism and its principle which is according to him is the foundation of morals. -
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick was an English philosopher and economist. He was one of the most influential ethical philosophers of the Victorian Era. Best known for his utilitarian treatise--The Methods of Ethics.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sidgwick/ -
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (G.E.M. Anscombe)
Anscombe was a British analytical philosopher of the 20th century. In her article "Modern Moral Philosophy" provoked the development of the virtue of ethics as a replacement to Utilitarianism, Kantian Ethics, and Social Contract theories.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/#Mor -
John Rawls
Rawls was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition. His theory of justice as fairness describes a just and morally acceptable society. His writings on the law of peoples set out a liberal foreign policy that aims to create a permanently peaceful and tolerant international order.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/ -
Derek Parfit
Derek Antony Parfit FBA was a British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
https://g.co/kgs/PrtQ1D