Socrates

Socrates, (born c. 470 BCE, Athens[Greece]—died 399 BCE, Athens), Greek

philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on
ancient and modern philosophy.
 Socrates was a widely recognized and controversial figure in his native Athens, so much so that
he was frequently mocked in the plays of comic dramatists. (The Clouds of Aristophanes,
produced in 423, is the best-known example.) Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is
depicted in conversation in compositions by a small circle of his admirers—
Platoand Xenophon first among them. He is portrayed in these works as a man of great
insight, integrity, self-mastery, and argumentative skill. The impact of his life was all the greater
because of the way in which it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of impiety
and sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow
citizens. Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech Socrates gave at his trial in
response to the accusations made against him (Greek apologiameans “defense”). Its
powerful advocacy of the examined life and its condemnation of Athenian democracy have
made it one of the central documents of Western thought and culture.

Plato, (born 428/427 BCE, Athens, Greece—died 348/347, Athens),

ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), teacher
of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and founder of the Academy, best known as the author of
philosophical works of unparalleled influence.
Building on the demonstration by Socrates that those regarded as experts
in ethical matters did not have the understanding necessary for a good human life, Plato
introduced the idea that their mistakes were due to their not engaging properly with
a class of entities he called forms, chief examples of which were Justice, Beauty, and
Equality. Whereas other thinkers—and Plato himself in certain passages—used the
term without any precise technical force, Plato in the course of his career came to
devote specialized attention to these entities. As he conceived them, they were
accessible not to the senses but to the mind alone, and they were the most
important constituents of reality, underlying the existence of the sensible world and
giving it what intelligibility it has. In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational
treatment of the forms and their interrelations, starting with the most fundamental
among them (the Good, or the One); in ethics and moral psychology he developed the
view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had
suggested) but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony
between the three parts of the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite). His
works also contain discussions in aesthetics, political
philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His
school fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly conceived but in a wide range
of endeavours that today would be called mathematical or scientific.

St. Augustine
St. Augustine, also called Saint Augustine of Hippo, original Latin name Aurelius
Augustinus, (born November 13, 354, Tagaste, Numidia [now Souk Ahras, Algeria]—
died August 28, 430, Hippo Regius [now Annaba, Algeria]; feast day August 28), bishop of
Hippo from 396 to 430, one of the Latin Fathers of the Church and perhaps the most significant
Christian thinker after St. Paul. Augustine’s adaptation of classical thought to Christian teaching
created a theological system of great power and lasting influence. His numerous written works,
the most important of which are Confessions(c. 400) and The City of God (c. 413–426), shaped
the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much of medieval and modern
Christian thought. In Roman Catholicism he is formally recognized as a doctor of the church.
Augustine is remarkable for what he did and extraordinary for what he wrote. If none of his
written works had survived, he would still have been a figure to be reckoned with, but his stature
would have been more nearly that of some of his contemporaries. However, more than five
million words of his writings survive, virtually all displaying the strength and sharpness of his
mind (and some limitations of range and learning) and some possessing the rare power to attract
and hold the attention of readers in both his day and ours. His distinctive theological style shaped
Latin Christianity in a way surpassed only by Scripture itself. His work continues to hold
contemporary relevance, in part because of his membership in a religious group that was
dominant in the West in his time and remains so today.
Intellectually, Augustine represents the most influential adaptation of the
ancient Platonictradition with Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin Christian world.
Augustine received the Platonic past in a far more limited and diluted way than did many of his
Greek-speaking contemporaries, but his writings were so widely read and imitated throughout
Latin Christendom that his particular synthesis of Christian, Roman, and Platonic traditions
defined the terms for much later tradition and debate. Both modern Roman
Catholic and Protestant Christianity owe much to Augustine, though in some ways
each community has at times been embarrassed to own up to that allegiance in the face of
irreconcilable elements in his thought. For example, Augustine has been cited as both a
champion of human freedom and an articulate defender of divine predestination, and his views
on sexuality were humane in intent but have often been received as oppressive in effect.

René Descartes, (born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France—died February 11,
1650, Stockholm, Sweden), French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was
one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern
version of mind-body dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he
promoted the development of a new science grounded in observation and experiment, he has
been called the father of modern philosophy. Applying an original system of methodical doubt,
he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from authority, the senses, and reason and erected
new epistemic foundations on the basis of the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this
he expressed in the dictum “I think, therefore I am” (best known in its Latin formulation, “Cogito,
ergo sum,” though originally written in French, “Je pense, donc je suis”). He developed
a metaphysicaldualism that distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of which is
thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions.
Descartes’s metaphysics is rationalist, based on the postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter,
and God, but his physics and physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and
empiricist.

Immanuel Kant, (born April 22, 1724, Königsberg, Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia]—died

February 12, 1804, Königsberg), German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic
work in epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all
subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianismand idealism.
Kant was one of the foremost thinkers of the Enlightenment and arguably one of the greatest
philosophers of all time. In him were subsumed new trends that had begun with
the rationalism(stressing reason) of René Descartes and the empiricism(stressing experience)
of Francis Bacon. He thus inaugurated a new era in the development of philosophical thought.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart,
Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tübingen. After graduation
he became a tutor and an editor and explored theology. His first published
success was Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Spirit) in 1807. Hegel

taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, publishing work on dialectical thinking and

theories of totality. He died of cholera in 1831.

Aristotle, Greek Aristoteles, (born 384 BCE, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece—died

322, Chalcis, Euboea), ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the
greatest intellectual figures of Western history. He was the author of a philosophical and
scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both
Christian Scholasticism and medievalIslamic philosophy. Even after the intellectual
revolutions of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, Aristotelian
concepts remained embedded in Western thinking.

Francis Bacon, in full Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban, also called (1603–18) Sir
Francis Bacon, (born January 22, 1561, York House, London, England—died April 9, 1626,
London), lord chancellor of England (1618–21). A lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master
of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for the sharp worldly wisdom of a few
dozen essays; by students of constitutional history for his power as a speaker in Parliament and
in famous trials and as James I’s lord chancellor; and intellectually as a man who claimed all
knowledge as his province and, after a magisterial survey, urgently advocated new ways by
which man might establish a legitimatecommand over nature for the relief of his estate.

John Locke, (born August 29, 1632, Wrington, Somerset, England—died October 28, 1704,

High Laver, Essex), English philosopher whose works lie at the foundation of modern
philosophical empiricismand political liberalism. He was an inspirer of both the
European Enlightenment and the Constitution of the United States. His
philosophical thinking was close to that of the founders of modern science, especially Robert
Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, and other members of the Royal Society. His political thought was
grounded in the notion of a social contractbetween citizens and in the importance of toleration,
especially in matters of religion. Much of what he advocated in the realm of politics was
accepted in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and in the United States after the
country’s declaration of independence in 1776.
John Amos Comenius was a Czech philosopher, pedagogue and theologian from
the Margraviate of Moravia[2][3]and is considered the father of modern education.[4][5] He served
as the last bishop of Unity of the Brethren and became a religious refugeeand one of the earliest
champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna.
As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant
Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century.

Comenius was the innovator who first introduced pictorial textbooks, written in native language
instead of Latin, applied effective teaching based on the natural gradual growth from simple to
more comprehensive concepts, supported lifelong learning and development of logical thinking by
moving from dull memorization, presented and supported the idea of equal opportunity for
impoverished children, opened doors to education for women, and made instruction universal and
practical. Besides his native Bohemian Crown, he lived and worked in other regions of the Holy
Roman Empire, and other countries: Sweden, the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, Transylvania, England, the Netherlands and Hungary.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (born June 28, 1712, Geneva, Switzerland—died July 2, 1778,
Ermenonville, France), Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist whose treatises and
novels inspired the leaders of the French Revolutionand the Romantic generation. Rousseau
was the least academic of modern philosophers and in many ways was the most influential. His
thought marked the end of the Age of Reason. He propelled political and ethicalthinking into
new channels. His reforms revolutionized taste, first in music, then in the other arts. He had a
profound impact on people’s way of life; he taught parents to take a new interest in their children
and to educate them differently; he furthered the expression of emotion rather than polite
restraint in friendship and love. He introduced the cult of religious sentiment among people who
had discarded religious dogma. He opened people’s eyes to the beauties of nature, and he
made liberty an object of almost universal aspiration.