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470 BCE
Socrates of Athens
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. -
427 BCE
Plato
Was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the development of Western philosophy.Unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Plato's entire work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. -
384 BCE
Aristotle
was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira, Chalkidiki, in the north of Classical Greece. Along with Plato, he is considered the "Father of Western Philosophy". Standard interpretations of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics usually maintain that Aristotle emphasizes the role of habit in conduct. It is commonly thought that virtues, according to Aristotle, are habits and that the good life is a life of mindless routine. -
354 BCE
Augustine
He is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism. He is famous for being an inimitable Catholic theologian and for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. He argues that skeptics have no basis for claiming to know that there is no knowledge. -
1225
Thomas Aquinas
was an Italian Dominican friar, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. He was an immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, within which he is also known as the Doctor Angelicus and the Doctor Communis.The moral philosophy of him involves a merger of at least two apparently disparate traditions: Aristotelian eudaimonism and Christian theology. -
1561
Francis Bacon
was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Early in his career he claimed “all knowledge as his province” and afterwards dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning. To take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural magic), he proposed a new system based on empirical and inductive principles. -
Rene Descartes
He is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy".His fundamental break with Scholastic philosophy was twofold. First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to doubt given their reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model. -
John Locke
was among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the 17th century. He is often regarded as the founder of a school of thought known as British Empiricism, and he made foundational contributions to modern theories of limited, liberal government. He was influential in the areas of theology, religious toleration, and educational theory. In his work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke offer an analysis of the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge. -
Immanuel Kant
His ethical theory exerted a powerful influence on the subsequent history of philosophy and continues to be a dominant approach to ethics, rivaling consequentialism and virtue ethics. The features of Kant’s ethics include: its a priori method, its conception of the will as autonomous, its categorical imperative, its theory of freedom, and its account of moral motivation. Kant maintained that foundational moral principles must be a priori, not based on observation or experience. -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
is one of the greatest systematic thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. In addition to epitomizing German idealist philosophy, Hegel boldly claimed that his own system of philosophy represented an historical culmination of all previous philosophical thought. His overall encyclopedic system is divided into the science of Logic, the philosophy of Nature, and the philosophy of Spirit. Although his ideas went far beyond earlier Kantianism, he founded his own school of Hegelianism. -
Charles Darwin
He was an American philosopher. The influence of Darwin upon ethical theory, was the general biological and logical principles in his 'Origin of Species,' which gave the theory of moral evolution a concrete setting and a much broader basis for the social nature of man. Darwin proposed that any animal endowed with social instincts, including parental and filial affections, would acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual process had became as well-developed as in men. -
John Dewey
Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were able to cope with the problems raised by the dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods.In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people.
