 | | | GREATEST PHILOSOPHER | | | |
| 
| | A list of eminent philosophers which may help you when considering a candidate for nomination.
Find out about more philosophers...
Ancient World | Medieval and Renaissance | Enlightenment | Nineteenth Century | Twentieth Century | View All Philosophers
 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) - people are inherently selfish and need strong governance, otherwise anarchy will reign and life become "nasty brutish and short". Such social contract thinking influenced Rousseau, Spinoza and Locke.
 Rene Descartes (1596-1650) - Declared Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) as the only proposition not open to doubt. A dualist, he separated mind and matter as incompatible substances.
 Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) - Pantheist; believed the universe to be a single substance with infinite attributes; God and nature are therefore the same thing. Influenced German idealism, especially Goethe
John Locke (1632-1704) Founder of British Empiricism; the mind is a tabula rasa (a blank canvas) in which knowledge arises from sensation and is perfected by reflection. Science is possible because the senses faithfully represent reality.
Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) - Claimed we live in the best of all possible worlds; believed the universe possessed a divinely established harmony and developed the calculus to unlock how it worked.
George Berkeley (1685-1753) - believed matter cannot exist independent of perception, thus reality only exists in the mind. However, God organises sensations to give the impression of a real world.
Voltaire (1694-1778) - Enlightenment rationalist; based religious tolerance on empirical scepticism - if we cannot know things ourselves, we cannot persecute those with whom we disagree.
 David Hume (1711-76) Reason is subject to the emotions; knowledge cannot go beyond experience.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) "Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains". Philosopher of the French Revolution.
 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) "Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law" (Kant's Categorical Imperative or moral law).
 Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) - Advocated equality of education between the sexes; her Vindication of the Rights of Women is a founding work of feminist thinking.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis - the inevitable dialectic of history.
Find out about more philosophers...
Ancient World | Medieval and Renaissance | Enlightenment | Nineteenth Century | Twentieth Century | View All Philosophers |
| | |
