Philosophers You
Should Know
Siddhartha Gautama
c. 563 – 483 BCE
The tongue like a
sharp knife, Kills
without drawing
blood.
India
• Founder of Buddhism
• Four noble truths:
– Wake up to the reality of human suffering;
– All suffering is a result of insatiable desire.
– There is a cure for our suffering: reaching
“Nirvana” or the quenching of desire.
– The course of treatment: looking inward to
realize that we are but an illusion; one does
this through the eight-fold path.
• Right seeing; right thinking; right
speaking; right acting; right lifestyle;
right effort; right mind-set; and right
meditating
Socrates
469 – 399 BCE
Ignorance is the
only evil.
Greece
• Predominantly interested in the
moral questions that affect our lives.
• He taught through a system of
questions and answers called a
dialectic.
• Accepting one’s ignorance was the
first step towards knowledge.
• Searched for the essential natures of
concepts like love, courage, peace.
• Thought to be a radical and was
condemned to death by drinking
hemlock.
Plato
428 – 354 BC
Is there a perfect
world?
Greece
• The Republic
• Student of Socrates
• Believed in an unseen world
where perfect models of
everything on Earth existed.
• Our world is merely a reflection
of (shadows of) that perfection.
• Good leaders are not born, they
just have the right education.
Aristotle
384 – 322 BCE
Those who can,
do; those who
understand,
teach.
Greece
• Student of Plato
• Knowledge involves keen
observation of the world around
you.
• Everything is striving towards its
own unique form of perfection.
• Women were second-class
citizens and only “unfinished
men.”
• The “golden mean” or the idea of
doing nothing to excess will lead
to the greatest happiness.
• Taught Alexander the Great.
Lao Tzu
6th century BCE
Thinking is the
cause of all
problems.
China
• “Old Master”
• Is said to have told Confucius to give
up his devotion to ritual and custom.
• Dao De Jing is concerned with how the
individual should approach life.
• Wu-Wei or “receptivity” means to
accept things as they come, go with
the flow, and do not try to change the
natural course of things.
• Created the Taoist worldview of yin
and yang.
St. Augustine of Hippo
354 – 430
I believe in
order to
understand.
modern Algeria
• Confessions
• Only our souls can experience divine
reality.
• People have free will; in other words,
God gave us the right to decide what to
do with ourselves.
• Evil is the pursuit of Earthly pleasure.
• We must have God’s guidance, or grace,
to move beyond our nature.
Avicenna
980 – 1037
The world is divided
into men who have wit
and no religion and
men who have religion
and no wit.
Persia
• His Canon of Medicine was the
primary medical textbook
throughout medieval Europe.
• All human souls are immortal.
• Allah is a necessary and
perfect being, cannot change,
and so he is eternal.
• Through observation, inferred
that Venus is closer to the sun
than Earth is.
St. Thomas Aquinas
1225 – 1274
•
•
•
Without God
there is no
universe.
•
Italy
Summa Theologiae
ALL living things have souls: plants’
ensure growth; animals’ are capable of
feeling; people’s have the ability to reason.
Tried to prove the existence of God
through reason; however, we cannot grasp
the true nature of God.
Knowledge must come from our sensesexperiences.
God is the only being for whom the fact
that He is and what He is are identical.
Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 - 1527
The end justifies
the means.
Italy
• The Prince
• Build generalizations from
experience and historical fact.
• People do not have to love a
leader, but should fear him.
• A ruler has the right, the
requirement, to do whatever
is necessary to maintain
power and control.
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679
The condition
of man is a
condition of
war.
England
• The Leviathan
• It is rational for people to submit
to a strong ruler to ensure order
and peace.
• Nature is made of material
matter; there is nothing spiritual
about it.
• Reality is defined by our senses.
René Descartes
1596 – 1650
I think;
therefore,
I am.
France
• Discourse on Method and Principles of
Philosophy
• Trusted math because, “asleep or
awake,” two plus three always
equals five.
• Questioned the existence of
everything, even himself.
• The idea of a perfect being cannot
have been created by anything less
than a perfect being; therefore, God
must have planted the idea into our
heads, so he must exist.
• Invented coordinate geometry, and
the graph: the x and y axes.
Baruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677
There cannot
be too much
joy.
Netherlands
• Ethics
• God and all the natural universe are one
substance.
• Used geometric formulae to find the truth
about the universe.
• First to examine the Bible as an historical
document rather than a revealed truth.
Also, said that the importance of the Bible
lies in its moral message.
• Democracy is the most stable form of
government and best promotes individual
wellbeing.
John Locke
1632 – 1704
The mind is a
blank piece of
paper.
England
• Essay Concerning Human Nature
• There is an implied contract
between subjects and rulers; the
ruler’s authority is not absolute,
but is answerable to the majority.
• If the ruler breaks the terms of the
contract, the governed have the
right to rebel.
• People have inalienable rights: life,
freedom, property, and to revolt
against the unjust.
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797
“The beginning is always
today.”
Great Britain
• Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters
• The first feminist
• Attacked monarchy and hereditary
privilege in support of the
emerging middle class
• women are essential to the nation
because they educate its children
• Women deserve the same basic
rights as men
Soren Kierkegaard
1813 – 1855
Life is not a
problem to solve,
but a reality to
experience.
Denmark
• Either / Or: A Fragment of Life
• Our relationship with God is a
private matter; we must make our
own decisions and moral choices.
• Three stages of personal
development: the aesthetic
(artistic), the ethical (dutiful), and
the religious stages (the only one
of any permanent significance).
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 – 1900
God is dead.
Germany
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Life eternally repeats itself, so each
person lives the same life over and
over again.
• Individuals should try to achieve
their full potential.
• His sister edited his works to fit her
own philosophical views – one was
that Hitler was the prototype of the
superman who combined strength,
intellect, and creativity.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
1869 – 1948
Be the change
you want to
see in the
world.
India
• Autobiography: The Story of My
Experiments with Truth
• “The great soul in beggar’s rags”
• Nonviolence towards all living
things.
• People should pursue political as
well as spiritual freedom.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Nelson Mandela both followed his
teachings.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 – 1980
Hell is other
people.
France
• Being and Nothingness
• People who live stereotypical
lives are not really living.
• People (actors) are free to write
their own scripts and cannot
blame anyone else for a bad
performance.
• Demanded that we face up to
the responsibility of what we
do and who we become.
Simone de Beauvoir
1908 – 1996
One is not born,
but rather
becomes, a
woman.
France
• The Second Sex
• Mother of Feminism
• Refused the conventional female
role for herself.
• Women are oppressed by
mundane chores.
• Differences between men and
women stem from social
influences, not biological ones.
1905 – 1982
Ayn Rand
Russia/ United States
• Anthem; The Fountainhead; Atlas Shrugged
• Reality, reason, rights, and capitalism
• Reality is absolute; things are what they
are regardless of our feelings or wishes. (
“A is A.” Aristotle)
Man, every man, is
an end in himself;
he must work for
his rational selfinterest.
• To understand reality and survive in it,
man must use his reason.
• To live in society, man must be free to
act by his own judgment.
• Everyman is a free-thinking and freeacting individual.
• Capitalism is the ideal system.
Works Cited
• Law, Stephen. Eyewitness Companions:
Philosophy. New York: DK Publishing. 2007
• Stevenson, Jay, Ph.D., The Complete Idiot’s Guide
to Philosophy. New York: Alpha. 2005
• Weate, Jeremy. A Young Person’s Guide to
Philosophy. New York: DK Publishing, Inc. 1998