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571 BCE
Lao-Tzu
A Chinese Philosopher that advocates naturalness, spontaneity and freedom from social conventions and desires. -
551 BCE
Confucius
A Chinese Philosopher which philosophy's focuses on the structure of human relationships, and in particular on the core relationship of the family which provides an idealized model for all other relationships. -
470 BCE
Socrates
Socrates believed that if one knows what the good is, one will always do what is good. Thus if one truly understands the meaning of courage, self-control, or justice, one will act in a courageous, self-controlled and just manner. -
428 BCE
Plato
Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. -
384 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle's philosophy stresses biology, instead of mathematics like Plato. He believed the world was made up of individuals (substances) occurring in fixed natural kinds (species). Each individual has built-in patterns of development, which help it grow toward becoming a fully developed individual of its kind. -
1225
Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas philosophy rules about how to act and virtues, personality traits which are taken to be good or moral. -
1469
Niccolo Machiavelli
Machiavelli posits that human nature generates a capacity for choice and action that permits people to overcome external forces. -
René Descartes
Descartes posits the only thing I can be sure of is that I exist because even when I doubt that, there is an “I” doing the doubting. -
John Locke
“the seeking out those Rules, and Measures of humane Actions, which lead to Happiness, and the Means to practice them” -
David Hume
Hume's philosophy is based on his empiricist theory of the mind. -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau believed that good government must have the freedom of all its citizens as its most fundamental objective. -
Immanuel Kant
One idea is universality, we should follow rules of behaviors that we can apply universally to everyone. and one must never treat people as a means to an end but as an end in themselves. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson's philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality. -
John Stuart Mill
Mill's most extensively articulated in his classical text Utilitarianism. Its goal is to justify the utilitarian principle as the foundation of morals. -
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard insists that the single individual has ethical responsibility of his life. -
Karl Marx
German Philosopher who is a famous advocate for communism. His ethics describes morality as a property of one's behavior conditioned by social and historical existence. -
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche's attacks morality both for its commitment to untenable descriptive metaphysical and empirical claims about human agency, as well as for the deleterious impact of its distinctive norms and values on the flourishing of the highest types of human. -
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein's philosophical ethics cannot promote the meaning of life, but only working on one's individual self, that is to say, the quest for an ethical sense is an instrument of the individual's being-in-the-world and the desire to find meaning in life. -
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. His earliest studies, though phenomenological, underscored the freedom and by implication the responsibility of the practitioner of the phenomenological method. -
Michel Foucault
Foucault says that the form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection, and by this he means that freedom consists in reflectively informed ascetic practices or practices of self.