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620 BCE
Thales of Miletus (620 BCE - 546 BCE)
“Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.” His approach to heavenly phenomena marked the beginning of Greek astronomy. His hypotheses were novel and daring, and he paved the way for scientific inquiry by liberating phenomena from divine intervention. He established the Milesian school of natural philosophy and invented the scientific method. He proposed theories to explain many natural events such as the primary substance. -
551 BCE
Confucius (551 BCE - 479 BCE)
“Act with kindness but do not expect gratitude". Confucius is regarded as the first Chinese teacher who sought to make education widely available and was instrumental in establishing teaching as a profession. He also established ethical, moral, and social standards that served as the foundation for the way of life known as Confucianism. -
469 BCE
Socrates (469 BCE - 399 BCE)
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing". Socrates is one of the few people who have had such an impact on the world's cultural and intellectual development that history would be very different without him. He is best known for his association with the Socratic method of question and answer, his claim that he was ignorant (or conscious of his own lack of knowledge), and his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living for humans. -
427 BCE
Plato (427 BCE - 347 BCE)
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” Building on Socrates' demonstration that those regarded as experts in ethical matters lacked the understanding required for a good human life, Plato proposed that their errors were due to their failure to engage properly with a class of entities he called forms, the most prominent of which were justice, beauty, and equality. (427 BCE - 347 BCE) -
384 BCE
Aristotle (384 BCE - 322 BCE)
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Aristotle made significant contributions to logic, criticism, rhetoric, physics, biology, psychology, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. He is best known for rejecting Plato's theory of forms. He was more empirically minded than Plato and Socrates. A prolific writer, lecturer, and polymath, Aristotle transformed the majority of the subjects he studied. -
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679)
“Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools. ” Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher, is best known for his political ideas, and rightly so. His worldview is strikingly unique and still relevant to contemporary politics. His primary concern is the issue of social and political order: how humans can coexist peacefully while avoiding the danger and fear of civil conflict. -
John Locke (1632 - 1704)
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” He had an impact on theology, religious tolerance, and educational theory. Locke set out to analyze the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge in his most important work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He proposed an empiricist theory in which we acquire ideas through our observations of the world. The mind can then examine, compare, and combine these ideas in a variety of ways. -
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
"Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination". Kant is regarded as a pivotal figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism. He contends that human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all of our experience and that human reason creates the moral law, which serves as the foundation for our belief in God, freedom, and immortality. -
Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832)
“Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet". He is best known today for his moral philosophy, particularly his utilitarianism principle, which evaluates actions based on their consequences. He developed an ethical theory based on a large empiricist account of human nature. He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value, according to which pleasure and pain are fundamentally valuable and ultimately motivate us. -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
“Education is the art of making man ethical”. Hegel is known as one of the greatest systematic thinkers in Western philosophy. He claimed that his own system of philosophy represented the historical culmination of all previous philosophical thought. Hegel's overall encyclopedic system is divided into three parts: logic science, nature philosophy, and spirit philosophy. -
William David Ross (1877 - 1971)
“Talent is part of the equation, but when you combine talent with accountability and authenticity, it is tough to beat.” William David Ross is a humanities scholar best known for his contributions to moral philosophy and classical literature studies. In moral philosophy, his major achievement was the formulation of a major new ethical theory, a unique and still controversial system that combines deontological pluralism, ethical intuitionism, non-naturalism, and so-called prima facie duties. -
Martin Buber (1878 - 1965)
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Buber was a well-known philosopher, religious thinker, political activist, and educator of the twentieth century. He investigated how people interact with one another and behave morally or immorally. He organized these relationships into a hierarchy and demonstrated how they progressed from what he considered the lowest to the highest ethical levels. -
John Rawls (1921 - 2002)
“The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.” John Rawls sought to define what constitutes a moral and just society. He researched all of the philosophers who had come before him and discovered that he agreed and disagreed with them. He developed his own justice theory based on the concept of self-interest. To explain his ideas, he created a hypothetical scenario in which all people are equal. -
Jean-François Lyotard (1924 - 1998)
“The unthought hurts because we're comfortable in what's already thought.” His writings cover a wide range of philosophical, political, and aesthetic topics. His works can be roughly divided into three categories: early writings on phenomenology, politics, and structuralism critique, intermediate libidinal philosophy, and later work on postmodernism and the "differend." He believed that reality consists of singular events that cannot be accurately represented by rational theory.
