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Confucius was born in 559 BCE and died in 479 BCE. He is also known as "Master Kong". Over thousands of years, his message of knowledge, benevolence, loyalty, and virtue guided China's philosophy. "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." - Confucius -
Socrates was born in c. 470 BCE and died in c. 399 BCE. He was the first person to emphasize morals and theory from a down-to-earth and political perspective. "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing" - Socrates -
He was born in 428 BCE and died in 348 BCE. He was a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. The contents of his writings covered justice, beauty, and equality, as well as aesthetics, politics philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and language philosophy. "Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom" - Plato -
He was born in 348 BCE and died in 322 BCE. He studied at Plato's Academy in Athens for 20 years, but did not agree with all of Plato's philosophical claims. He was one of the founders of Western philosophy. Interacting with objects can lead to the acquisition of knowledge, according to him. "All human actions have one or more of these seven cause: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire." - Aristotle -
He was born in 1724 and died in 1804.His moral philosophy is the philosophy of freedom. Without human freedom, Kant argued that moral judgment and moral responsibility were impossible. Additionally, he holds that each and every person is born with a conscience that serves as a reminder that the moral code governs their lives. He refers this as a "fact of reason" which he refers to the basis for the belief in human freedom. “We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”-Kant -
He was born in 1748 and died in 1832. He was a consultant to the British Parliament in the late-eighteenth century. Much of Bentham's theory can be found in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). According to him, hedonic calculus - the Greek word for pleasure - is a mechanism for measuring the degree of pleasure versus pain associated with moral choices. "Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure." - Jeremy Bentham -
He was born in 1806 and died in 1843. He introduced the no-harm rule in his most influential work on political freedoms, On Liberty (1859). According to Mill, no individual should be denied their right to act in any manner, even if it is self-destructive, as long as it does not physically harm other people. “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury." - John Stuart Mill -
He was born in 1921 and died in 2002. His ethics, which he described as "justice as fairness," were something he worked on for almost his whole life. It was explicitly outlined in 1971 with the release of his treatise A Theory of Justice, which was more than 550 pages long. Rawls considered himself as an utilitarian and to complement his philosophies even further, he added a bit of deontology on it. "The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.” - John Rawls