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551 BCE
Confucius (551 - 479 BCE)
Advocated for the importance of strong family bonds, including respect for the elder, veneration of one’s ancestors, and marital loyalty and believed in the value of achieving ethical harmony through skilled judgment rather than knowledge of rules, denoting that one should achieve morality through self-cultivation -
470 BCE
Socrates (470–399 BCE)
He attributed the statement “I know that I know nothing,” to denote an awareness of his ignorance, and in general, the limitations of human knowledge and argued that Athenians were wrong-headed in their emphasis on families, careers, and politics at the expense of the welfare of their souls -
428 BCE
Plato (428–348 BCE)
Expressed the view, often referred to as Platonism, that those whose beliefs are limited only to perception are failing to achieve a higher level of perception, one available only to those who can see beyond the material world and in his account, it is still possible that one might be courageous just for its own sake while at the same time believing courage is also reliably linked to happiness -
427 BCE
Thrasymachus (427 BCE )
In ethics, Thrasymachus’ ideas have often been seen as the first fundamental critique of moral values and argues that justice is the advantage of the more powerful and holds that justice is a social practice set up by the powerful -
341 BCE
Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Epicurus presents a sustained argument that pleasure, correctly understood, will coincide with virtue and holds that pleasure is the sole intrinsic good and pain is what is intrinsically bad for humans
and virtue is the only means to achieve happiness, where happiness is understood as a continuous experience of the pleasure that comes from freedom from pain and from mental distress -
354
Saint Augustine (AD 354-430)
He believes that time is not infinite because God “created” it and believes reason to be a uniquely human cognitive capacity that comprehends deductive truths and logical necessity and he adopts a subjective view of time and says that time is nothing in reality but exists only in the human mind’s apprehension of reality -
384
Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
The moral theory of Aristotle, like that of Plato, focuses on virtue, recommending the virtuous way of life by its relation to happiness and Aristotle argued that virtues are good habits that we acquire, which regulate our emotions -
1225
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
Adhered to the Platonic/Aristotelian principle of realism, which holds that certain absolutes exist in the universe, including the existence of the universe itself and follows Aristotle in thinking that an act is good or bad depending on wether it contributes to or deters us from our proper human end -
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679)
Hobbes explained that if individuals within a society continually lived by their own self interests, they would continue to hurt each other and be stuck in a "state of war." If the members of a society were made to live within certain bounds which made it impossible for them to harm each other, the members of that society would be in a "state of peace" and Hobbes’ moral positivism anticipates the chaotic outcome if laws are not abided -
John Locke (1632–1704)
Established the method of introspection, focusing on one’s own emotions and behaviors in search of a better understanding of the self and coined the term 'tabula rasa' (blank slate) to denote that the human mind is born unformed, and the ideas and rules are only enforced through experience -
David Hume (1711-177)
Articulated the “problem of induction,” suggesting we cannot rationally justify our belief in causality, that our perception only allows us to experience events that are typically conjoined, and that causality cannot be empirically asserted as the connecting force in that relationship -
Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804)
Asserted that the concepts of time and space, as well as cause and effect, are essential to the human experience, and that our understanding of the world is conveyed only by our senses and not necessarily by the underlying (and likely unseen) causes of the phenomena we observe -
John Stuart Mill, (1806–1873)
Stated the need for a system of “constitutional checks” on state authority as a way of protecting political liberties and other ideas found in Mill’s works have been essential to providing rhetorical basis for social justice, anti-poverty, and human rights -
John Rawls, (1921–2002)
He labeled his ethics to be “justice as fairness,” and he developed it over nearly a lifetime and he actually advocated was an at-least minimal distribution of material goods and services to everyone, regardless of what inheritance he or she might come by or what work he or she might engage in
