Who is the father of philosophy?
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( "purse"; 10 September 1839 – 19 April 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.
Philosopher
A philosopher is someone who practices philosophy, which involves rational inquiry into areas that are outside either theology or science. The term "philosopher" comes from the Ancient Greek, ("philosophos"), meaning "lover of wisdom". The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (6th century BC).
Jakob Thomasius
Jakob Thomasius (; 27 August 1622 – 9 September 1684) was a German academic philosopher and jurist. He is now regarded as an important founding figure in the scholarly study of the history of philosophy. His views were eclectic, and were taken up by his son Christian Thomasius.
Plato
Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." In addition to being a foundational figure for Western science, philosophy, and mathematics, Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality.
Epictetus
Early in life, Epictetus acquired a passion for philosophy and, with the permission of his wealthy owner, he studied Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus, which allowed him to rise in respectability as he grew more educated. Somehow, he became crippled. Origen stated that his leg was deliberately broken by his master. Simplicius stated that he had been lame from childhood.
Epictetus obtained his freedom sometime after the death of Nero in 68 A.D., and he began to teach philosophy in Rome. About 93 A.D. Emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from the city, and Epictetus went to Nicopolis in Epirus, Greece, where he founded a philosophical school.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. "Philosophical Investigations" appeared as a book in 1953, and has since come to be recognised as one of the most important works of philosophy in the 20th century. His teacher, Bertrand Russell, described Wittgenstein as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".
British philosophy
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. Smith wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations". The latter, usually abbreviated as "The Wealth of Nations", is considered his "magnum opus" and the first modern work of economics. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.
Archetimus
Still another Archetimus is mentioned as being the father of Celsus, a teacher of philosophy in the 4th century, who was said to have taught philosophy to Roman youths "pro bono".
Early Islamic philosophy
From Spain Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew and Latin, contributing to the development of modern European philosophy. The philosophers Moses Maimonides (a Jew born in Muslim Spain) and Ibn Khaldun (born in modern-day Tunisia), the father of sociology and historiography, were also important philosophers, though the latter did not identify himself as a "falsafa", but rather a "kalam" author.
Baron d'Holbach
D'Holbach's philosophy influenced Marat, Danton, and Camille Desmoulins. According to Faguet: "d'Holbach, more than Voltaire, more than Diderot, is the father of all the philosophy and all the anti-religious polemics at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century."
Science
The early Greek philosophers of the Milesian school, which was founded by Thales of Miletus and later continued by his successors Anaximander and Anaximenes, were the first to attempt to explain natural phenomena without relying on the supernatural. The Pythagoreans developed a complex number philosophy and contributed significantly to the development of mathematical science. The theory of atoms was developed by the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his student Democritus. The Greek doctor Hippocrates established the tradition of systematic medical science and is known as "The Father of Medicine".
Matthew Lipman
Matthew Lipman (August 24, 1923 in Vineland, New Jersey – December 26, 2010 in West Orange, New Jersey) is recognized as the founder of Philosophy for Children. His decision to bring philosophy to young people came from his experience as a professor at Columbia University, where he witnessed underdeveloped reasoning skills in his students. His interest was particularly on developing reasoning skills by teaching logic. The belief that children possess the ability to think abstractly from an early age, led him to the conviction that bringing logic to children's education earlier would help them to improve their reasoning skills.
Attention
Prior to the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline, attention was studied in the field of philosophy. Thus, many of the discoveries in the field of attention were made by philosophers. Psychologist John B. Watson calls Juan Luis Vives the father of modern psychology because, in his book "De Anima et Vita" ("The Soul and Life"), he was the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation. In his work on memory, Vives found that the more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained.
History of Western civilization before AD 500
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BC and continued through the Hellenistic period, at which point Ancient Greece was incorporated into the Roman Empire. It dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, logic, biology, rhetoric, and aesthetics. Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician and writer of philosophical dialogues. He was the founder of the Academy in Athens which was the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Inspired by the admonition of his mentor, Socrates, prior to his unjust execution that "the unexamined life is not worth living", Plato and his student, the political scientist Aristotle, helped lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues.
German philosophy
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was both a philosopher and a mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz also anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or a priori definitions rather than to empirical evidence.
Thomas Aquinas
He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism; of which he argued that reason is found in God. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory. Unlike many currents in the Church of the time, Thomas embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle—whom he called "the Philosopher"—and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity. His best-known works are the "Disputed Questions on Truth" (1256–59), the "Summa contra Gentiles" (1259–65), and the "Summa Theologiae" (1265–74). His commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle also form an important part of his body of work. Furthermore, Thomas is distinguished for his eucharistic hymns, which form a part of the Church's liturgy.
Church Fathers
Augustine (354–430), Bishop of Hippo, was a philosopher and theologian. Augustine, a Latin Father and Doctor of the Church, is one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity. In his early life, Augustine read widely in Greco-Roman rhetoric and philosophy, including the works of Platonists such as Plotinus. He framed the concepts of original sin and just war as they are understood in the West. When Rome fell and the faith of many Christians was shaken, Augustine wrote "The City of God", in which he defended Christianity from pagan critics and developed the concept of the Church as a spiritual City of God, distinct from the material City of Man. Augustine's work defined the start of the medieval worldview, an outlook that would later be firmly established by Pope Gregory the Great.
Platonic idealism
Platonism is an ancient school of philosophy, founded by Plato; at the beginning, this school had a physical existence at a site just outside the walls of Athens called the Academy, as well as the intellectual unity of a shared approach to philosophizing.
Ulama
The early Muslim conquests brought about Arab Muslim rule over large parts of the Hellenistic world. During the time of the Umayyad Caliphate, at latest, the scholars of the emerging Islamic society had become familiar with the classical philosophical and scientific traditions of the world they had conquered. The collection of classical works and their translation into the Arabian language initiated a period which is known today as the Islamic Golden Age. According to Hourani (1991), the works of the classical scholars of antiquity were met with considerable intellectual curiosity by Islamic scholars. Hourani quotes al-Kindi (c. 801–873 AD), "the father of Islamic philosophy", as follows:
"We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself."
The works of Aristotle, in particular his "Nicomachean Ethics", had a profound influence on the Islamic scholars of the Golden Age like Al-Farabi (870–950 AD), Abu al-Hassan al-Amiri (d. 992 AD) and Ibn Sīnā (ca. 980–1037 AD). In general, the Islamic philosophers saw no contradiction between philosophy and the religion of Islam. However, according to Hourani, al-Farabi also wrote that philosophy in its pure form was reserved for an intellectual elite, and that ordinary people should rely for guidance on the "sharia". The distinction between a scholarly elite and the less educated masses "was to become a commonplace of Islamic thought". As exemplified by the works of al-Razi (854–925 AD), during later times, philosophy "was carried on as a private activity, largely by medical men, pursued with discretion, and often met with suspicion".
History of science
The earliest Greek philosophers, known as the pre-Socratics, provided competing answers to the question found in the myths of their neighbors: "How did the ordered cosmos in which we live come to be?" The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales (640–546 BC), dubbed the "father of science", was the first to postulate non-supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. For example, that land floats on water and that earthquakes are caused by the agitation of the water upon which the land floats, rather than the god Poseidon. Thales' student Pythagoras of Samos founded the Pythagorean school, which investigated mathematics for its own sake, and was the first to postulate that the Earth is spherical in shape. Leucippus (5th century BC) introduced atomism, the theory that all matter is made of indivisible, imperishable units called atoms. This was greatly expanded on by his pupil Democritus and later Epicurus.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book "Leviathan", which expounded an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, ethics, and general philosophy.
Plato
George Karamanolis notes thatNumenius accepted both Pythagoras and Plato as the two authorities one should follow in philosophy, but he regarded Plato's authority as subordinate to that of Pythagoras, whom he considered to be the source of all true philosophy—including Plato's own. For Numenius it is just that Plato wrote so many philosophical works, whereas Pythagoras' views were originally passed on only orally.
Sallustius of Emesa
Sallustius' father Basilides was a Syrian; his mother Theoclea a native of Emesa, where probably Sallustius was born, and where he lived during the earlier part of his life. He applied himself first to the study of jurisprudence, and studied the art of oratory under the tuition of Eunoius at Emesa. He subsequently abandoned his forensic studies, and took up the profession of a sophist. He directed his attention especially to the Attic orators, and learnt all the orations of Demosthenes by heart. His own compositions were deemed not unworthy of the great models whom he imitated. Finding the instructions of Eunoius no longer of service to him, Sallustius travelled to Athens, and also to Alexandria, (in the company of Isidore of Alexandria), studying in the schools of Rhetoric. He subsequently gained a taste for philosophy, and after studying under the Neoplatonists, he took up with the doctrines of the Cynics, which he maintained thenceforward with great ardour. Simplicius tells us how Sallustius would "lay a red-hot coal upon his thigh, and blow the fire, to try to see how long he was able to undergo the pain." He assailed the philosophers of his time with considerable vehemence, to which his powers of ridicule gave additional effect. He pronounced philosophy to be an impossibility, and dissuaded the young men from resorting to the teachers of it. He employed his eloquence and wit in attacking the follies or vices of his contemporaries, and he managed to quarrel with Proclus himself. According to Photius, he pretended to a sort of divination or fortune-telling, professing to be able to tell from the appearance of a person's eyes what kind of death he would die. Sallustius was suspected of holding somewhat impious opinions regarding the gods. He seems at least to have been unsparing in his attacks upon the theology of the Neoplatonists.
Phaedrus the Epicurean
Phaedrus (; ; 138 – 70/69 BC) was an Epicurean philosopher. He was the head ("scholarch") of the Epicurean school in Athens after the death of Zeno of Sidon around 75 BC, until his own death in 70 or 69 BC. He was a contemporary of Cicero, who became acquainted with him in his youth at Rome. During his residence in Athens (80 BC) Cicero renewed his acquaintance with him. Phaedrus was at that time an old man, and was already a leading figure of the Epicurean school. He was also on terms of friendship with Velleius, whom Cicero introduces as the defender of the Epicurean tenets in the "De Natura Deorum", and especially with Atticus. Cicero especially praises his agreeable manners. He had a son named Lysiadas. Phaedrus was succeeded by Patro.
Speusippus
Speusippus (; ; c. 408 – 339/8 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, c.348 BC, Speusippus inherited the Academy, near age 60, and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, Speusippus frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimate "principle", Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to have satisfactory knowledge of any thing without knowing all the differences by which it is separated from everything else.
Archelaus (philosopher)
Archelaus was a philosopher of the Ionian School, called "Physicus" from having been the first to teach natural philosophy at Athens. This statement of Diogenes Laërtius, is contradicted by Clement of Alexandria, but the two may be reconciled by supposing that Archelaus was the first Athenian who did so. According to Simplicius, who probably got his information from Theophrastus, Archelaus was a native of Athens, even though Diogenes Laërtius says he was born in Miletus. He was the son of Apollodorus, or as some say, of Mydon, Midon, or Myson; was a pupil of Anaxagoras; and is said to have taught at Lampsacus before he established himself at Athens. He is commonly reported to have taught Socrates and Euripides. If he was the instructor of Socrates, he is never mentioned by Xenophon, Plato, or Aristotle, and this story may have been an attempt to connect Socrates with the Ionian School. However, Diogenes Laërtius does report, on the authority of Ion of Chios, a contemporary of Socrates, that Socrates went with Archelaus on a trip to Samos. Also, some scholars have seen in Socrates' "autobiographical" sketch in Plato's "Phaedo" a reference to Archelaus' theory about the generation and nourishment of the first animals. The tradition which connects Archelaus with Euripides may have arisen from a confusion with Euripides' patron, Archelaus, king of Macedonia.
Plato
Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy. Plato appears to have been the founder of Western political philosophy, with his "Republic", and "Laws" among other dialogues, providing some of the earliest extant treatments of political questions from a philosophical perspective. Plato's own most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Pythagoras, although few of his predecessors' works remain extant and much of what we know about these figures today derives from Plato himself.
Classics
The earliest surviving philosophy from ancient Greece dates back to the 6th century BC, when according to Aristotle Thales of Miletus was considered to have been the first Greek philosopher. Other influential pre-Socratic philosophers include Pythagoras and Heraclitus. The most famous and significant figures in classical Athenian philosophy, from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BC, are Socrates, his student Plato, and Aristotle, who studied at Plato's Academy before founding his own school, known as the Lyceum. Later Greek schools of philosophy, including the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans, continued to be influential after the Roman annexation of Greece, and into the post-Classical world.
Hermias (philosopher)
Hermias (; "Hermeias ek Phoinikes") was a Neoplatonist philosopher who was born in Alexandria c. 410 AD. He went to Athens and studied philosophy under Syrianus. He married Aedesia, who was a relative of Syrianus, and who had originally been betrothed to Proclus, but Proclus broke the engagement off after receiving a divine warning. Hermias brought Syrianus' teachings back to Alexandria, where he lectured in the school of Horapollo, receiving an income from the state. He died c. 450 AD, at a time when his children, Ammonius and Heliodorus, were still small. Aedesia, however, continued to receive an income from the state, in order to raise the children, enabling them to become philosophers.
Dietrich Tiedemann
Dietrich Tiedemann (3 April 1748, Bremervörde – 24 May 1803, Marburg) was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy born in Bremervörde. He was father to physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861).
Al-Kindi
Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (; ; ; c. 801–873 AD) was an Arab Muslim philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physician and musician. Al-Kindi was the first of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers, and is unanimously hailed as the "father of Arab philosophy" for his synthesis, adaptation and promotion of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy in the Muslim world.
Thales Academy
The Pre-K-12 college preparatory school was named for the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, often credited as the father of Greek Philosophy.
George Holmes Howison
George Holmes Howison was born on November 29, 1834, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and died in Berkeley, California on December 31, 1916. His parents were Robert Howison of Virginia and Eliza Holmes Howison of Maryland. These were old and distinguished Southern families, Presbyterians and slaveholders. Howison's biography is eclectic and the basis of Howison's later devotion to pluralism. Howison was the primary originator of philosophical pluralism in America, which was his most enduring contribution to philosophy. Although he was widely recognized during his lifetime, Howison's ideas have spread and come into the present mainly through influence on other notable philosophers whose names have continued to attract attention, especially Josiah Royce, William James, and Borden Parker Bowne. Howison was, by the accounts of those who knew him, a very persuasive philosopher.
Franz Xaver von Baader
Franz von Baader (27 March 1765 – 23 May 1841), born Benedikt Franz Xaver Baader, was a German Catholic philosopher, theologian, physician and mining engineer. Resisting the empiricism of his day, he denounced most Western philosophy since Descartes as trending into atheism and has been considered a revival of the Scholastic school. He was one of the most influential theologians of his age but his influence on subsequent philosophy has been less marked. Today he is thought to have re-introduced theological engagement with Meister Eckhart into academia and even Christianity and Theosophy more generally.
Christian Wolff (philosopher)
Theoretical philosophy had for its parts ontology or "philosophia prima" as a general metaphysics, which arises as a preliminary to the distinction of the three special metaphysics on the soul, world and God: rational psychology, rational cosmology and rational theology. The three disciplines are called empirical and rational because they are independent of revelation. This scheme, which is the counterpart of religious tripartition in creature, creation, and Creator, is best known to philosophical students by Kant's treatment of it in the "Critique of Pure Reason". In the "Preface" of the 2nd edition of Kant's book, Wolff is defined "the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers." Wolff was read by Kierkegaard's father Michael Pedersen, and his son himself was influenced by both Wolff and Kant to the point of resuming the tripartite structure and philosophical content to formulate his own three "Stages on Life's Way".
Anaximander
Anaximander's theories were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition, and by some ideas of Thales – the father of philosophy – as well as by observations made by older civilizations in the East (especially by the Babylonian astrologers). All these were elaborated rationally. In his desire to find some universal principle, he assumed, like traditional religion, the existence of a cosmic order; and in elaborating his ideas on this he used the old mythical language which ascribed divine control to various spheres of reality. This was a common practice for the Greek philosophers in a society which saw gods everywhere, and therefore could fit their ideas into a tolerably elastic system.
Intercultural philosophy
In the long history of philosophical thought there has always been a claim for universality although many great thinkers from the past see philosophical value only in the western tradition and oversee what other parts of the world have achieved on their own over the centuries. Eurocentric philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel agree upon Greek being the only birthplace of philosophy and traditions such as the Chinese or Indian ones are only teachings of wisdom. Others speak of more than one birthplace and include Asian traditions.
René Descartes
Descartes has often been dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy, the thinker whose approach has profoundly changed the course of Western philosophy and set the basis for modernity. The first two of his "Meditations on First Philosophy", those that formulate the famous methodic doubt, represent the portion of Descartes' writings that most influenced modern thinking. It has been argued that Descartes himself didn't realize the extent of this revolutionary move. In shifting the debate from "what is true" to "of what can I be certain?," Descartes arguably shifted the authoritative guarantor of truth from God to humanity (even though Descartes himself claimed he received his visions from God)—while the traditional concept of "truth" implies an external authority, "certainty" instead relies on the judgment of the individual.
Rationalism
The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is a systematic, logical, rational philosophy developed in seventeenth-century Europe. Spinoza's philosophy is a system of ideas constructed upon basic building blocks with an internal consistency with which he tried to answer life's major questions and in which he proposed that "God exists only philosophically." He was heavily influenced by Descartes, Euclid and Thomas Hobbes, as well as theologians in the Jewish philosophical tradition such as Maimonides. But his work was in many respects a departure from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many of Spinoza's ideas continue to vex thinkers today and many of his principles, particularly regarding the emotions, have implications for modern approaches to psychology. To this day, many important thinkers have found Spinoza's "geometrical method" difficult to comprehend: Goethe admitted that he found this concept confusing. His "magnum opus", "Ethics", contains unresolved obscurities and has a forbidding mathematical structure modeled on Euclid's geometry. Spinoza's philosophy attracted believers such as Albert Einstein and much intellectual attention.
Democritus
Democritus was born in Abdera, Thrace, around 460 BC, although there are disagreements about the exact year. His exact contributions are difficult to disentangle from those of his mentor Leucippus, as they are often mentioned together in texts. Their speculation on atoms, taken from Leucippus, bears a passing and partial resemblance to the 19th-century understanding of atomic structure that has led some to regard Democritus as more of a scientist than other Greek philosophers; however, their ideas rested on very different bases.
Largely ignored in ancient Athens, Democritus is said to have been disliked so much by Plato that the latter wished all of his books burned. He was nevertheless well known to his fellow northern-born philosopher Aristotle.
Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science". None of his writings have survived; only fragments are known from his vast body of work.
History of economic thought
Adam Smith (1723–1790) is popularly seen as the father of modern political economy. His 1776 publication "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" happened to coincide not only with the American Revolution, shortly before the Europe-wide upheavals of the French Revolution, but also the dawn of a new industrial revolution that allowed more wealth to be created on a larger scale than ever before.
Pre-Socratic philosophy
The first pre-Socratic philosophers were from Miletus on the western coast of Anatolia. Thales (624-546 BC) is reputedly the father of Greek philosophy; he declared water to be the basis of all things. Next came Anaximander (610-546 BC), the first writer on philosophy. He assumed as the first principle an undefined, unlimited substance without qualities ("apeiron"), out of which the primary opposites, hot and cold, moist and dry, became differentiated. His younger contemporary, Anaximenes (585-525 BC), took for his principle air, conceiving it as modified, by thickening and thinning, into fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth.
Deaths of philosophers
The documented history of philosophy is often said to begin with the notable death of Socrates. Since that time, there have been many other noteworthy deaths of philosophers.
Military history of Jewish Americans
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was a theoretical physicist and philosopher, widely regarded as one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time. A German-Swiss Nobel laureate, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (née Koch). The Einsteins were non-observant Jews.
Isaac Passy
Isaac Passy (; 13 March 1928 in Plovdiv – 13 August 2010) was a Jewish Bulgarian philosopher specializing in aesthetics. He was a professor at Sofia University from 1952 until 1993. He was the most prolific philosopher in the history of Bulgaria. He published over 40 monographs and over 80 volumes of the philosophical classics. He was the father of Solomon Passy.Blaise Pascal, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave LeBon, Dmitry Merezhkovski, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Miguel de Unamuno, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Søren Kierkegaard, Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Shestov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Thomas Mann, Cicero, Horace and several others.
History of logic
None of the surviving works of the great fourth-century philosopher Plato (428–347 BC) include any formal logic, but they include important contributions to the field of philosophical logic. Plato raises three questions:The first question arises in the dialogue "Theaetetus", where Plato identifies thought or opinion with talk or discourse ("logos"). The second question is a result of Plato's theory of Forms. Forms are not things in the ordinary sense, nor strictly ideas in the mind, but they correspond to what philosophers later called universals, namely an abstract entity common to each set of things that have the same name. In both the "Republic" and the "Sophist", Plato suggests that the necessary connection between the assumptions of a valid argument and its conclusion corresponds to a necessary connection between "forms". The third question is about definition. Many of Plato's dialogues concern the search for a definition of some important concept (justice, truth, the Good), and it is likely that Plato was impressed by the importance of definition in mathematics. What underlies every definition is a Platonic Form, the common nature present in different particular things. Thus, a definition reflects the ultimate object of understanding, and is the foundation of all valid inference. This had a great influence on Plato's student Aristotle, in particular Aristotle's notion of the essence of a thing.
Philosophy of education
Waldorf education (also known as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education) is a humanistic approach to pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The educational philosophy's overarching goals are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, morally responsible and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos () was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy. Knowledge of his life is clouded by legend, but he appears to have been the son of Mnesarchus, a seal engraver on the island of Samos. Modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras's education and influences, but they do agree that, around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a number of dietary prohibitions, traditionally said to have included vegetarianism, although modern scholars doubt that he ever advocated for complete vegetarianism.
Socrates the Younger
Socrates the Younger (Greek: Σωκράτης ὁ νεώτερος, "Sōkrátēs ho neōteros", c. 415 – 4th century BCE) was an ancient Athenian philosopher. Ancient texts suggest that he was a young student of the elder Socrates and later a cohort of Plato. He is best remembered for his depiction in Plato's "Statesman", and scholars have suggested that he had ties to Academic and Pythagorean philosophy.
Classics
Two historians flourished during Greece's classical age: Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus is commonly called the father of history, and his "History" contains the first truly literary use of prose in Western literature. Of the two, Thucydides was the more careful historian. His critical use of sources, inclusion of documents, and laborious research made his History of the Peloponnesian War a significant influence on later generations of historians. The greatest achievement of the 4th century was in philosophy. There were many Greek philosophers, but three names tower above the rest: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. These have had a profound influence on Western society.
British philosophy
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book "Leviathan" established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
Ancient history
Philosophy, religion and science were diverse in the Hundred Schools of Thought producing thinkers such as Confucius, Lao Tzu and Mozi during the sixth century BC. Similar trends emerged throughout Eurasia in India with the rise of Buddhism, in the Near East with Zoroastrianism and Judaism and in the west with Ancient Greek Philosophy. In these developments religious and philosophical figures were all searching for human meaning.
John Italus
John Italus or Italos (, "Iōannēs o Italós"; ) was a Neoplatonic Byzantine philosopher of the eleventh century. He was Calabrian in origin, his father being a soldier. He came to Constantinople, where he became a student of Michael Psellus in classical Greek philosophy. He succeeded Psellus in his position as head of the philosophical school. Subsequently, he came into conflict with Diogenes, and he was condemned in 1082 by Patriarch Cosmas I of Constantinople for heresy.
Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard
The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard has been a major influence in the development of 20th-century philosophy, especially existentialism and postmodernism. Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher who has been labeled by many as the "Father of Existentialism", although there are some in the field who express doubt in labeling him an existentialist to begin with. His philosophy also influenced the development of existential psychology.
Western philosophy
Aristotle was a pupil of Plato. Aristotle was perhaps the first truly systematic philosopher and scientist. He wrote about physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics and logic. Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, who in turn conquered much of the ancient world at a rapid pace. Hellenization and Aristotelian philosophy exercised considerable influence on almost all subsequent Western and Middle Eastern philosophers, including Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Western medieval, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (, ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889 at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward, a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.
List of Muslim philosophers
The ninth-century Neo-Platonist Al-Kindi is considered the founder of Arab philosophy. The tenth century philosopher al-Farabi contributed significantly to the introduction of Greek and Roman philosophical works into Muslim philosophical discourse and established many of the themes that would occupy Islamic philosophy for the next centuries; in his broad-ranging work, his work on logic stands out particularly. In the eleventh century, Avicenna, one of the greatest creative philosophers ever, developed his school of philosophy with strong Aristotelian and Neoplatonist roots. In the twelfth century, the philosophy of illumination was systematized by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi. Towards the end of the century philosophy underwent a decline in much of the Muslim world, in part due to al-Ghazali's argument that philosophy was incompatible with religion. In Andalusia, Averroes, defended philosophy against this charge; his extensive works include noteworthy commentaries on Aristotle. Although philosophy in its traditional Aristotelian form fell out of favor in much of the Arab world, forms of mystical philosophy following on from writers such as Ibn Arabi and Ibn Sabin, persisted.
List of Heidelberg University people
Alumni in the field of arts include classical composer Robert Schumann, philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach and Edmund Montgomery, poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff and writers Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Gottfried Keller, Irene Frisch, Heinrich Hoffmann, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, José Rizal, W. Somerset Maugham, Jean Paul, and Literature Nobel Laureate Carl Spitteler. Amongst Heidelberg alumni in other disciplines are the "Father of Psychology" Wilhelm Wundt, the "Father of Physical Chemistry" J. Willard Gibbs, the "Father of American Anthropology" Franz Boas, Dmitri Mendeleev, who created the periodic table of elements, inventor of the two-wheeler principle Karl Drais, Alfred Wegener, who discovered the continental drift, as well as political theorist Hannah Arendt, political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, and sociologists Karl Mannheim, Robert E. Park and Talcott Parsons.
Stoic logic
The Stoic tradition of logic originated in the 4th-century BCE in a different school of philosophy known as the Megarian school. It was two dialeticians of this school, Diodorus Cronus and his pupil Philo, who developed their own theories of modalities and of conditional propositions. The founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, studied under the Megarians and he was said to have been a fellow pupil with Philo. However, the outstanding figure in the development of Stoic logic was Chrysippus of Soli (c. 279 – c. 206 BCE), the third head of the Stoic school. Chrysippus shaped much of Stoic logic as we know it creating a system of propositional logic. As a logician Chrysippus is sometimes said to rival Aristotle in stature. The logical writings by Chrysippus are, however, almost entirely lost, instead his system has to be reconstructed from the partial and incomplete accounts preserved in the works of later authors such as Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laërtius, and Galen.
Iranian philosophy
In 2005, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ranked Zarathustra as first in the chronology of philosophers. Zarathustra's impact lingers today due in part to the system of rational ethics he founded called Mazda-Yasna. The word Mazda-Yasna is Avestan and is translated as "Worship of Wisdom" in English. The encyclopedia Natural History (Pliny) claims that Zoroastrians later educated the Greeks who, starting with Pythagoras, used a similar term, philosophy, or “love of wisdom” to describe the search for ultimate truth.
History of science in early cultures
The earliest Greek philosophers, known as the pre-Socratics, provided competing answers to the question found in the myths of their neighbours: "How did the ordered cosmos in which we live come to be?" The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, dubbed the "father of science", was the first to postulate non-supernatural explanations for natural phenomena such as lightning and earthquakes. Pythagoras of Samos founded the Pythagorean school, which investigated mathematics for its own sake, and was the first to postulate that the Earth is spherical in shape. Subsequently, Plato and Aristotle produced the first systematic discussions of natural philosophy, which did much to shape later investigations of nature. Their development of deductive reasoning was of particular importance and usefulness to later scientific inquiry.
Max Pinchard
Max Pinchard was philosopher 's father.
Francis Hutcheson (philosopher)
Francis Hutcheson (; 8 August 1694 – 8 August 1746) was an Irish philosopher born in Ulster to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became known as one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is remembered for his book ""A System of Moral Philosophy"".
Jurisprudence
Thomas Aquinas (Thomas of Aquin, or Aquino, c. 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian philosopher and theologian in the scholastic tradition, known as "Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis". He is the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of the Thomistic school of philosophy, for a long time the primary philosophical approach of the Roman Catholic Church. The work for which he is best known is the "Summa Theologica". One of the thirty-five Doctors of the Church, he is considered by many Catholics to be the Church's greatest theologian. Consequently, many institutions of learning have been named after him.
Philosopher
While Pythagoras coined the word, the first known elaboration on the topic was conducted by Plato. In his "Symposium", he concludes that Love is that which lacks the object it seeks. Therefore, the philosopher is one who seeks wisdom; if he attains wisdom, he would be a sage. Therefore, the philosopher in antiquity was one who lives in the constant pursuit of wisdom, and living in accordance to that wisdom. Disagreements arose as to what living philosophically entailed. These disagreements gave rise to different Hellenistic schools of philosophy. In consequence, the ancient philosopher thought in a tradition. As the ancient world became schism by philosophical debate, the competition lay in living in manner that would transform his whole way of living in the world.
Rationalism
Descartes was the first of the modern rationalists and has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy.' Much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.
Socrates
Socrates (; , ; – 399 BC) was a classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher, of the Western ethical tradition of thought.
An enigmatic figure, he made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the only source to have written during his lifetime.
Philosophy of happiness
St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 AD) was an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy.
Ionian Enlightenment
According to Aristotle, Thales of Miletus was the “Founder of Natural Philosophy.” Even though he is recognized as the founder of philosophy much of what we know about him and his philosophy is up to debate because he left no writings for which early students of philosophy could rely on. Known as one of the Seven Sages, which was an exclusive club of poets and statesmen, he was the only one who could claim to be a philosopher and scientist. Thales is credited with being a political adviser, philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and engineer. Throughout his life he is alleged to have traveled and studied throughout the Mediterranean in places such as Egypt, Phoenicia, and Babylon which all influenced his philosophy and theories. Thales allegedly founded geometry, although he may have been taught this in Egypt, and also studied the stars. Thales tried to search for the arkhe, which can be translated to searching for the source for all things. He believed the source for all things (arkhe) was water. This is based on the notion that somehow all things, and more importantly all living things, originate in water and therefore water is the basic starting-point of everything. The apparent stability of the Earth became one phenomenon for which any self-respecting natural philosopher had to have an explanation, for Thales he believed the Earth rested upon water.
John Locke
John Locke (; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Philosopher
The separation of philosophy and science from theology began in Greece during the 6th century BC. Thales, an astronomer and mathematician, was considered by Aristotle to be the first philosopher of the Greek tradition.
Didier Diderot
Didier Diderot (14 September 1685 in Langres - 3 June 1759 ibid) was a French craftsman and the father of the encyclopedist, author, philosopher of enlightenment Denis Diderot.
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (; ; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl's thought profoundly influenced the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.
History of economic thought
Until Joseph J. Spengler's 1964 work "Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun", Adam Smith (1723–1790) was considered the "Father of Economics". Now there is a second candidate, Arab Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) of Tunisia, although what influence Khaldun had in the West is unclear. Arnold Toynbee called Ibn Khaldun a "genius" who "appears to have been inspired by no predecessors and to have found no kindred souls among his contemporaries...and yet, in the Prolegomena (Muqaddimat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place." Ibn Khaldoun expressed a theory of the lifecycle of civilizations, the specialization of labor, and the value of money as a means of exchange rather than as a store of inherent value. His ideas on taxes bore a striking resemblance to supply-side economics' Laffer curve, which posits that beyond a certain point higher taxes discourage production and actually cause revenues to fall.
Jewish philosophy
David ibn Merwan al-Mukkamas was author of the earliest known Jewish philosophical work of the Middle Ages, a commentary on the "Sefer Yetzirah"; he is regarded as the father of Jewish medieval philosophy. Sl-Mukkamas was first to introduce the "methods" of Kalam into Judaism and the first Jew to mention Aristotle in his writings. He was a proselyte of Rabbinic Judaism (not Karaite Judaism, as some argue); al-Mukkamas was a student of physician, and renowned Christian philosopher, Hana. His close interaction with Hana, and his familial affiliation with Islam gave al-Mukkamas a unique view of religious belief and theology.
Philosophy
East Asian philosophical thought began in Ancient China, and Chinese philosophy begins during the Western Zhou Dynasty and the following periods after its fall when the "Hundred Schools of Thought" flourished (6th century to 221 BCE). This period was characterized by significant intellectual and cultural developments and saw the rise of the major philosophical schools of China, Confucianism, Legalism, and Daoism as well as numerous other less influential schools. These philosophical traditions developed metaphysical, political and ethical theories such Tao, Yin and yang, Ren and Li which, along with Chinese Buddhism, directly influenced Korean philosophy, Vietnamese philosophy and Japanese philosophy (which also includes the native Shinto tradition). Buddhism began arriving in China during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), through a gradual Silk road transmission and through native influences developed distinct Chinese forms (such as Chan/Zen) which spread throughout the East Asian cultural sphere. During later Chinese dynasties like the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) as well as in the Korean Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) a resurgent Neo-Confucianism led by thinkers such as Wang Yangming (1472–1529) became the dominant school of thought, and was promoted by the imperial state.
Aristippus
Aristippus of Cyrene (; ; c. 435 – c. 356 BCE) was the founder of the Cyrenaic school of Philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates, but adopted a very different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by circumstances to oneself and by maintaining proper control over both adversity and prosperity. His outlook came to be called "ethical hedonism." Among his pupils was his daughter Arete.
Michael Friedman (philosopher)
Michael Friedman (born April 2, 1947) is an American philosopher of science, best known for his work on scientific explanation, philosophy of physics and Immanuel Kant. Friedman has also done important historical work on figures in Continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.
Plato
The exact time and place of Plato's birth are unknown, but it is certain that he belonged to an aristocratic and influential family. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars believe that he was born in Athens or Aegina between 429 and 423 BC. His father was Ariston. According to a disputed tradition, reported by Diogenes Laërtius, Ariston traced his descent from the king of Athens, Codrus, and the king of Messenia, Melanthus. Plato's mother was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker and lyric poet Solon. Perictione was sister of Charmides and niece of Critias, both prominent figures of the Thirty Tyrants, the brief oligarchic regime, which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404–403 BC). Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children; these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato as head of his philosophical Academy). The brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon are mentioned in the "Republic" as sons of Ariston, and presumably brothers of Plato, but some have argued they were uncles. But in a scenario in the "Memorabilia", Xenophon confused the issue by presenting a Glaucon much younger than Plato.
Rudolph Goclenius
Rudolph Goclenius the Elder (; born "Rudolf Gockel" or "Göckel"; 1 March 1547 – 8 June 1628) was a German scholastic philosopher who lived from March 1, 1547 to June 8, 1628. Gockel is often credited with coining the term "psychology" in 1590, but the term was used by Marko Marulić at least 66 years earlier. Gockel also had extensive backing and significant contributions to the field of ontology. He extended on many ideas from Aristotle, such as both the introduction of ontology and metaphysics. Several of Gockel’s ideas were published and built upon by later philosophers.
Heliodorus of Alexandria
Heliodorus of Alexandria () was a Neoplatonist philosopher who lived in the 5th century AD. He was the son of Hermias and Aedesia, and the younger brother of Ammonius. His father, Hermias, died when he was young, and his mother, Aedesia, raised him and his brother in their home city of Alexandria until they were old enough to go to philosophy school. Aedesia took them to Athens where they studied under Proclus. Eventually they returned to Alexandria, where they both taught philosophy. Damascius, who was taught by Heliodorus, describes him as less gifted than his elder brother, and more superficial in his character and studies.
Sandon (philosopher)
Sandon (; 1st century BC) is an Orphic philosopher mentioned in the "Suda". He is described briefly as a son of Hellanikos. He has been identified with the Sandon of Tarsus mentioned by Pseudo-Lucian in the essay "Macrobii" ("Long Lives"), who was the father of Athenodorus (the Stoic philosopher and the tutor of Augustus Caesar). His father Hellanicus may have been the Orphic philosopher of the late 2nd century mentioned by Damascius.
Al-Farabi
As a philosopher, Al-Farabi was a founder of his own school of early Islamic philosophy known as "Farabism" or "Alfarabism", though it was later overshadowed by Avicennism. Al-Farabi's school of philosophy "breaks with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle [... and ...] moves from metaphysics to methodology, a move that anticipates modernity", and "at the level of philosophy, Alfarabi unites theory and practice [... and] in the sphere of the political he liberates practice from theory". His Neoplatonic theology is also more than just metaphysics as rhetoric. In his attempt to think through the nature of a First Cause, Alfarabi discovers the limits of human knowledge".
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard is considered by some modern theologians to be the "Father of Existentialism". Because of his influence and in spite of it, others only consider either Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre to be the actual "Father of Existentialism". Kierkegaard predicted his posthumous fame, and foresaw that his work would become the subject of intense study and research. In 1784 Immanuel Kant, many years before Kierkegaard, challenged the thinkers of Europe to think for themselves in a manner suggestive of Kierkegaard's philosophy in the nineteenth century. In 1854 Søren Kierkegaard wrote a note to "My Reader" of a similar nature.
French philosophy
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
Theology of Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard's theology has been a major influence in the development of 20th century theology. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a 19th-century Danish philosopher who has been generally considered the "Father of Existentialism". During his later years (1848–1855), most of his writings shifted from philosophical in nature to religious.
Transmission of the Greek Classics
Al-Kindi ("Alkindus"), a famous logician and prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, is unanimously hailed as the "father of Islamic or Arabic philosophy". His synthesis of Greek philosophy with Islamic beliefs met with much opposition, and at one point he was flogged by those opposed to his ideas. He argued that one could accept the Koran and other sacred texts, and work from that point to determine truth. Whenever he ran into an impasse, he would abandon the Greek ideas in favor of the Islamic faith. He is considered to be largely responsible for pulling the Arab world out of a mystic and theological way of thinking into a more rationalistic mode. Previous to al-Kindi, for example, on the question of how the immaterial God of the Koran could sit on a throne in the same book, one theologist had said, “The sitting is known, its modality is unknown. Belief in it is a necessity, and raising questions regarding it is a heresy.” Few of al-Kindi's writings have survived, making it difficult to judge his work directly, but it is clear from what exists that he carefully worked to present his ideas in a way acceptable to other Muslims.
Essence–energies distinction
The Danish Lutheran philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, widely considered the father of existentialism, expressed (pseudonymously as John Climacus) in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments" an approach to God which holds that the Father's "hypostasis" (existence) has logical primacy over his "ousia" (essence or substance). Hence the teaching that the core of existentialist philosophy can be understood as the maxim, "existence before essence." This has caused many Western observers to see Eastern Orthodox Christian theology as existentialistic (since the Essence–Energies distinction also somewhat holds the view). This also accounts for other existentialist works such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground". In the case of Dostoevsky, his existentialist outlook would have drawn from his Russian Orthodox faith, but there is no record of Dostoevsky (and the Eastern Orthodox church in general) being exposed to or influenced by Kierkegaard's philosophical works.
Parmenides
Parmenides' considerable influence on the thinking of Plato is undeniable, and in this respect Parmenides has influenced the whole history of Western philosophy, and is often seen as its grandfather. Even Plato himself, in the "Sophist", refers to the work of "our Father Parmenides" as something to be taken very seriously and treated with respect. In the "Parmenides", the Eleatic philosopher, which may well be Parmenides himself, and Socrates argue about dialectic. In the "Theaetetus", Socrates says that Parmenides alone among the wise (Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Epicharmus, and Homer) denied that everything is change and motion.
Western philosophy
Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation. The prominent figure of this period was Augustine of Hippo (one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity) who adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it in the 4th century and whose influence dominated medieval philosophy perhaps up to end of the era but was checked with the arrival of Aristotle's texts. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers (including Anselm of Canterbury, the father of scholasticism) up until the 13th century.
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus (; , "Thalēs"; 624 – c. 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer from Miletus in Asia Minor (present-day Milet in Turkey). He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, and he is otherwise historically recognized as the first individual in Western civilization known to have entertained and engaged in scientific philosophy.
History of physics
The move towards a rational understanding of nature began at least since the Archaic period in Greece (650–480 BCE) with the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The philosopher Thales of Miletus (7th and 6th centuries BCE), dubbed "the Father of Science" for refusing to accept various supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena, proclaimed that every event had a natural cause. Thales also made advancements in 580 BCE by suggesting that water is the basic element, experimenting with the attraction between magnets and rubbed amber and formulating the first recorded cosmologies. Anaximander, famous for his proto-evolutionary theory, disputed the Thales' ideas and proposed that rather than water, a substance called "apeiron" was the building block of all matter. Around 500 BCE, Heraclitus proposed that the only basic law governing the Universe was the principle of change and that nothing remains in the same state indefinitely. This observation made him one of the first scholars in ancient physics to address the role of time in the universe, a key and sometimes contentious concept in modern and present-day physics. The early physicist Leucippus (fl. first half of the 5th century BCE) adamantly opposed the idea of direct divine intervention in the universe, proposing instead that natural phenomena had a natural cause. Leucippus and his student Democritus were the first to develop the theory of atomism, the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms.
Pietru Caxaro
The same is to be said regarding the poetic form of Caxaro's extant philosophy. We have similar cases with philosophers of outstanding relevance, such as the Eleatics, including Parmenides himself, the father of philosophy. However, here, with Caxaro's case, the question is slightly more complex. We do not have to do with a then out-going poetic custom in an age where prose took the precedence, as in the Greek naturalistic philosophers (of the 5th century BCE). We are in the context of (15th-century) Medieval philosophy, highly susceptible to classical literature, both Greek and Roman, but particularly to Plato and Aristotle. Here, more than anything else, the poetic form is a technique, an expressive and cognitive distinction.
History of political science
The antecedents of Western politics can be traced back to the Socratic political philosophers, and Aristotle ("The Father of Political Science") (384–322 BC). These authors, in such works as "The Republic" and "Laws" by Plato, and "The Politics" and "Nicomachean Ethics" by Aristotle, analyzed political systems philosophically, going beyond earlier Greek poetic and historical reflections which can be found in the works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and dramatists such as Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides.
Al-Andalus
The al-Andalus philosopher Averroes (1126–1198) was the founder of the Averroism school of philosophy, and his works and commentaries influenced medieval thought in Western Europe. Another influential al-Andalus philosopher was Ibn Tufail.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (; 15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French politician and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term and is widely regarded as one of the ideology's most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.
Max Scheler
Max Ferdinand Scheler (; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Scheler developed further the philosophical method of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and was called by José Ortega y Gasset "the first man of the philosophical paradise." After his death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such." In 1954, Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, defended his doctoral thesis on "An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler."
Zoroaster
Elements of Zoroastrian philosophy entered the West through their influence on Judaism and Middle Platonism and have been identified as one of the key early events in the development of philosophy. Among the classic Greek philosophers, Heraclitus is often referred to as inspired by Zoroaster's thinking.
In 2005, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ranked Zarathustra as first in the chronology of philosophers. Zarathustra's impact lingers today due in part to the system of rational ethics he founded called Mazda-Yasna. The word "Mazda-Yasna" is Avestan and is translated as "Worship of Wisdom" in English. The encyclopedia Natural History (Pliny) claims that Zoroastrians later educated the Greeks who, starting with Pythagoras, used a similar term, philosophy, or "love of wisdom" to describe the search for ultimate truth.
Human nature
Philosophy in classical Greece is the ultimate origin of the Western conception of the nature of a thing. According to Aristotle, the philosophical study of human nature itself originated with Socrates, who turned philosophy from study of the heavens to study of the human things. Socrates is said to have studied the question of how a person should best live, but he left no written works. It is clear from the works of his students Plato and Xenophon, and also by what was said about him by Aristotle (Plato's student), that Socrates was a rationalist and believed that the best life and the life most suited to human nature involved reasoning. The Socratic school was the dominant surviving influence in philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages, amongst Islamic, Christian, and Jewish philosophers.
Islamic philosophy
The first detailed studies on the subject of historiography and the first critiques on historical methods appeared in the works of the Arab Ash'ari polymath Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who is regarded as the father of historiography, cultural history, and the philosophy of history, especially for his historiographical writings in the "Muqaddimah" (Latinized as "Prolegomena") and "Kitab al-Ibar" ("Book of Advice"). His "Muqaddimah" also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history, and he discussed the rise and fall of civilizations.
Pythagoras
According to R. M. Hare, Plato's "Republic" may be partially based on the "tightly organised community of like-minded thinkers" established by Pythagoras at Croton. Additionally, Plato may have borrowed from Pythagoras the idea that mathematics and abstract thought are a secure basis for philosophy, science, and morality. Plato and Pythagoras shared a "mystical approach to the soul and its place in the material world" and it is probable that both were influenced by Orphism. The historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston states that Plato probably borrowed his tripartite theory of the soul from the Pythagoreans. Bertrand Russell, in his "A History of Western Philosophy", contends that the influence of Pythagoras on Plato and others was so great that he should be considered the most influential philosopher of all time. He concludes that "I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as he was in the school of thought."