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1889 BCE
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951 CE)
"The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things."
A philosopher from Austria who focused on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Some people see of him as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. -
1844 BCE
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900 CE)
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
One of the most significant modern intellectuals, he is a German philosopher. His work to reveal the motives that drive traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy has had a significant impact on generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. What's Nietzsche's philosophy distilled down to? Most often, "existentialism" is used to describe his thought. -
1748 BCE
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832 CE)
"Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good."
He is the father of contemporary utilitarianism and a philosopher, economist, lawyer, and legal reformer. a philosophical theory that says actions are ethically correct if they tend to make everyone they come into contact with happier or more content, and morally wrong if they tend to make people unhappy or hurt. -
1596 BCE
René Descartes (1596–1650 CE)
“Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am.)”
A very creative mathematician, an important scientist, and a pioneering metaphysician. Throughout his life, he was primarily a mathematician, followed by a natural scientist or "natural philosopher" and a metaphysician. Added to that, he created analytical geometry and declared skepticism to be a crucial component of the scientific method. -
1588 BCE
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679 CE)
"In the state of nature profit is the measure of right."
The currency of idiots is money; the counters of intelligent men are words.
Born in Westport, Wiltshire, England on April 5, 1588, Thomas Hobbes passed away in Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, on December 4, 1679. He was an English philosopher, physicist, and historian who is most renowned for his political theory, which is particularly well-expressed in his book Leviathan (1651). -
1225 BCE
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 CE)
“The things that we love tell us what we are.”
One of the finest Scholastic thinkers prior was Thomas Aquinas. He produced a complete synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology that had a significant influence on Roman Catholic teaching and was recognized as the official philosophy of the church in 1917. -
551 BCE
Confucius (551-479 BCE)
“You are what you think.”
Instead of using abstract norms to define good and wrong in order to promote societal peace, Confucian political thought stressed dispute resolution through mediation. He was both a philosopher and a teacher. His students documented his views, the most important of which is the Lunyu. Confucianism stresses ancestor worship in addition to human-centered qualities for harmonious life. -
470 BCE
Socrates (470-399 BCE)
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
Socrates was a Greek philosopher who lived in Athens in the fifth century BCE and is considered to be one of the three most significant philosophers in the early history of Western philosophy, together with Plato and Aristotle. He is both the most admirable and the most peculiar of the Greek thinkers. -
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804 CE)
"Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild."
Act in a way that respects humanity, whether it is in your own person or in the person of anybody else, as an aim in and of itself rather than as a means to an end. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment. The "critical philosophy" he introduced is human autonomy. -
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”
Mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual from the United Kingdom. He had a significant impact on a variety of fields of analytic philosophy, including the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. He also had an impact on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and other fields.