Saturday, January 02, 2010

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

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