100 Essential Thinkers (Western)

Presocratics
Thales of Miletus: The first natural scientist and analytical philosopher in Western intellectual history
Pythagoras of Samos : The ultimate nature of reality is number
Xenophanes of Colophon : 'If horses could draw, they would draw their gods like horses'
Heraclitus: War and strife between opposites is the eternal condition of the universe
Parmenides of Elea: One cannot know that which is not - that is impossible
Zeno of Elea: Achilles can never catch the tortoise no matter how fast he runs


The Academics
Socrates: 'The only thing I know is that I know nothing'
Plato: 'The safest characterisation of Western philosophy is that of a series of footnotes to Plato' (A.N.Whitehead)
Aristotle: More than just a philosopher, Aristotle was a scientist, astronomer and political theorist


The Atomists
Democritus: The fundamental nature of the universe consists of indivisible atoms in constant motion
Epicurus: Epicurus's ethics consisted in the pursuit of happiness, conceived of as the elimination of pain


The Cynics
Diogenes of Sinope: Nicknamed 'the dog' for his vagrant lifestyle, Diogenes was described as 'a Socrates gone mad'


The Stoics
Marcus Tullius Cicero: Cicero's dialogues are principally a 'pick and mix' of the three leading Greek philosophical schools
Philo of Alexandria: Philo of Alexandria was something of an odd fish in classical thought
Lucius Annaeus Seneca: The heart of philosophy was the belief in a simple life devoted to virtue and reason
Marcus Aurelius: The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts


The Sceptics
Sextus Empiricus: The intention [of scepticism] is to bring about a kind of therapeutic apostasy


The Neoplatonists
Plotinus: Plotinus believed in a trio of divinities, these being the One, the Intellect and the Soul


The Christians
St Augustine of Hippo: Rational thought is the servant of faith: 'unless thou believe thou shalt not understand' (Isaiah)
Boethius: Those who do ill shall suffer more if they are not caught than those that are
St Anselm: The quality of perfection is an attribute only applicable to God
St Thomas Aquinas: 'If the hand does not move the stick, the stick will not move anything else'


The Scholastics
John Duns Scotus: Duns Scotus is immortalised in the English language for giving his name to the term 'Dunce'
William of Occam: Occam's Razor: 'Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'


The Age of Science
Nicolaus Copernicus: Copernicus revived the idea that the earth and planets revolve around the sun
Niccolo Machiavelli: Never has the phrase 'the ends justify the means' been more appropriate
Desiderius Erasmus: For Erasmus, religion is ... a confidence in human reason to know and worship God
Thomas More: More's vision of Utopia is a kind of Christian communism
Francis Bacon: 'The repetetive occurrence of an incident does not guarantee that the same thing will happen again'
Galileo Galilei: The first to discover the law of falling bodies, Galileo was far more than just an astronomer
Thomas Hobbes: Without the rule of law, the life of man would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'
Sir Issac Newton: Newton's insight was that the universe runs accordingly to law-governed mechanical principles


The Rationalists
Rene Descartes: 'Cogito ergo sum' (I think, therefore I am)
Antoine Arnauld: Precision of thought is essential to every aspect and walk of life
Nicolas Malebranche: Whenever we think we are doing something, God is really doing it for us
Benedict de Spinoza: There is only one substance, and that substance we can conceive of as either Nature or God
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: God has chosen to make actual the best of all possible worlds


The Empiricists
John Locke: The mind at birth is like a blank slate, waiting to be written on by the world of experience
David Hume: There is no justification for believing that there is any casual necessity in the ordering of events
Thomas Reid: 'The general is, and at the same time is not, the person who was flogged at school'
Voltaire: 'He [the theist] laughs at Lorette and at Mecca; but he succours the needy and defends the oppressed'
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ' Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains'
Denis Diderot: Pre-empted Freud by suggesting that childhood experiences influenced development of moral values


The Idealists
George Berkeley: 'To be is to be perceived' (esse est percipi)
Immanuel Kant: 'What are the necessary preconditions for having any experience at all?'
Johann Christoph Schiller: 'Fear only affects us as sensuous beings, and cannot hold sway over our will'
Frederick Wilhelm Schelling: Schelling outlines his enterprise as the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Ultimate truth is slowly uncovered through the unfolding evolution of the history of ideas
Arthur Schopenhauer: In music and arts we can contemplate the universal will apart from our own individual strivings


The Liberals
Adam Smith: 'Unintended consequences of intended action' will be to the benefit of society at large
Mary Wollstonecraft: 'The neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore'
Thomas Paine: The proceeds of land and property tax should be invested in a welfare system
Jeremy Bentham: What one ought to do is to maximise pleasure and minimise pain
John Stuart Mill: Actions are right in proportion as they promote happiness, wrong as they produce the reverse
Auguste Comte: 'The intellect should not be the slave of the passions but the servant of the heart'


The Evolutionists
Charles Robert Darwin: Complex design arises naturally without the need to posit a designer
Henri Louis Bergson: Bergson rejects any kind of 'teleological' explanation of evolution
Alfred North Whitehead: The history of science cannot be separated from the cultural environment in which it is pursued


The Pragmatists
Ernst Mach: 'We know only one source which directly reveals scientific facts - our senses'
Charles Sanders Peirce: Peirce sees knowledge as a means of stabilising our habitual behaviour in response to doubt
William James: 'There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere'
John Dewey: 'The truth is that which works'


The Materialists
Karl Marx: Economics is the primary conditioning factor of life
Friedrich Engels: 'One can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together'
Cladimir Illych Lenin: 'Freedom of criticism' means freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas ... into socialism
Sigmund Freud: 'When I was young, the only thing I longed for was philosophical knowledge'
Carl Gustav Jung: Ultimately, Jung claims, the self is fully realised in death
John Maynard Keynes: Downturns in the economy are short-term problems stemming from a lack of demand


The Existentialists
Soren Kierkegaard: 'Each age has its depravity. Ours is ... a dissolute pantheistic contempt for individual man'
Friedrich Nietzsche: Nietzsche's philosophy has wrongly gained the reputation of supporting Nazism
Edmund Husserl: One cannot separate the conscious state from the object of that state
Martin Heidegger: It is only in full ... awareness of our own mortality that life can take on any purposive meaning
Jean-Paul Sartre: It is up to the individual to choose the life they think best
Albert Camus: Suicide, as a resolution of the absurd, would be ... a denial of the very condition of man's existence
Simone de Beauvoir: ' One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'


The Linguistic Turn
Gottlob Frege: The meaning of a term can only be given in the context of a sentence
Bertrand Russell: [Russell's] theory of a definite descriptions has become a standard tool of logical analysis
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Meaning cannot be divorced from the activities and behaviour of the language users
Ferdinand de Saussure: Saussure defines language as a system of signs, whose relationships can be studied in the abstract
George Edward Moore: The question of whether something is good is always an 'open' question
Moritz Schlick: A statement is meaningful if it was either true by definition or is in principle verifiable by existence
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky: The structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought
Rudolph Carnap: Logical syntax provides the conventional rules that set out the forms of any meaning proposition
Alfred Jules Ayer: Statements about material objects can be reduced to statements about 'sense-data'
Alfred Tarski: Truth is a property of sentences, not of the world or of states of affairs
John Langshaw Austin: Austin's approach begins with an analysis of the different kinds of things we can do with words
Gilbert Ryle: Cartesian Dualism, the myth of 'the ghost in the machine', rests on a 'category-mistake'
Noam Chomsky: The mind is very far from being a blank state at birth


The Postmodernists
Claude Levi-Strauss: Man must suppress his natural desires and conform to rules to create a stable society
Michel Foucault: Controlling the mind is a more effective means of social control than punishing the body
Jacques Derrida: There is no fixed conceptual order amongst signifiers


The New Scientists
Emile Durkheim: Individualism has a consequence moral individualism: 'the cult of the individual'
Albert Einstein: E=MC² where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light
Karl Popper: The mark of a scientific theory is whether it makes predictions that could in principle serve to falsify it
Kurt Godel: The human mind is capable of working out truths that no ... mechanical procedure can decide
Alan Turing: Why suppose that a computer that imitates the behaviour of a thinking person is really thinking?
Burrhus Frederic Skinner: The mental realm was unnecessary to the explanation of human behaviour
Thomas Kuhn: There are radical discontinuities between different periods of scientific investigation
Paul Feyerabend: Science is always revolutionary, characterised by a plurality of concurrent hypotheses
W.V.O Quine: Only science can tell us about the world: it is the final arbiter of the truth


From the book compiled by a thinker himself, Philip Stokes

Year 2010

The year of great changes as I forsee and should expect. For today, the first day of 2010, and in the wee hours, I find myself wanting to input more philosophy.

Year 2009, the year I grow and mature the most as compared to the former 22 years. Year 2009, where all my desires repressed, hopefully, the dark one purged and the bright one achieved. Year 2010, the year of great changes, I would have to adapt and survive fast, with carte blanche and Excelsior !!! -_-X

I have "informed" everyone and summarised the year 2009 and the 2010 to be coming ...., through the facebook. 2010 would give me many tests. Harder. And the change in environment will be another great test I have to withstand. To excel, to handle all the stress and most importantly, to be happy and fulfilled, while harbouring the ambition to be a good, intelligent and useful, and hopefully great man.

My thirst for knowledge is as usual, but I have been pretty disappointed with my memories. It is like a fledging, and a small one that simply have many things to store. I know it has tremendous capacity and potential, and I do not want the wealth of water to overflow in my cup of thought, cup of memory and cup of knowledge. I need the trios to cooperate with my wisdom and firmness to get things done successfully and well.

Ah! I should stop blabbering ... For the first other entry I should meticulously and painstakingly input the very outline of the 100 essential thinkers through the ages. Philosophy has taught me and encouraged me to think. For my thinking will be put to practical uses, and help an individual in distress for a brick, and help the entire nation for a house, and help the world for an estate.

Excelsior !!!

From a dilettante of Philosophy. Dream Big, Do Big !!!
Cogito Ergo Sum!
"Virtuous men are always powerful, and bad men always weak for both desire the good but only the virtuous get it" - Boethius
And a more mature and experience Hep Mailliw. -_-X