Biography of great thinkers great

Rousseau was a firm believer in individual liberty. He believed that it was human nature to do good for others.

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His metaphysics and speculative philosophy are founded on a reasonable comprehension of the idea of nature. His practical philosophy, which includes morals and political philosophy, is founded on the notion of liberty. Both of these streams of philosophy have had a huge impact on later philosophical history. His moral concept is one of liberation. Moral assessment and moral duty would be inconceivable without human freedom, Kant believed.

Kant argues that if a person is unable to behave in any other way, his or her actions have no moral value. He also argues that every human being is born with a morality that alerts them to the fact that the moral law governs them. However, Kant argues that the complete natural world is subjected to a rigorous Newtonian causation principle, suggesting that all of our physical activities are produced by antecedent events rather than by our free will.

Biography of great thinkers great: Encyclopaedic Biography Of World Great Thinkers

So, how can liberty and morality coexist? She met an American explorer in Paris in while celebrating the French Revolution, and their liberal and unmarried escapades together resulted in her first daughter. She married William Godwin, the prominent British anarchist, a few years later. They married right away, with her feminist view of marriage as the basis of all female subjugation and his anarchic perspective of marriage as exactly this type of shackling social norm that needed to be eradicated.

Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft c. Mary died of septicemia just 10 days after giving birth to her daughter. She was a true child of the French Revolution, anticipating a new era of reason and charity. Mary took up the mission of assisting women in achieving a better life for themselves, their children, and their spouses. Of course, it took more than years for civilization to begin to implement her ideas.

Auguste Comte was a well-known French philosopher who is credited with founding the field of sociology. He is also recognized as the first philosopher of science in some situations. In an attempt to alleviate the societal melancholy of the French Revolution, he even devised the renowned Positive Philosophy. Auguste Comte established a social ideology founded on scientific grounds.

He began giving lectures to a group of prominent French thinkers in However, he had a nervous collapse after roughly a third of his lecture series. Despite spending a lengthy period in the hospital, he was nevertheless able to complete one of his main works. In this essay, he maintained that society, like the material realm, has its own set of rules.

Ayn Rand was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. She went to North America after finishing university in Russia in She became well-known as a supporter of Objectivist philosophy after distinguishing herself as a novelist. Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. She penned mainstream and scientific philosophy, which she presented in both fictional and non-fictional formats.

These philosophical novels are based on subjects she explored in nonfiction articles and books in the s and s, including epistemology, virtue theory, economic and political rights, and aesthetics. Her opinions were divisive during her lifetime and remain so today. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is regarded as a seminal text in the history of feminism.

Beauvoir had previously denied being a feminist, but once the powerful Second Sex became pivotal in the field of feminism, she finally accepted it. The book had a huge impact, paving the way for the next wave of feminism in Canada, North America, Australia, and other parts of the world. She had a considerable effect on both existentialism in feminists and feminist philosophy, despite not considering herself a philosopher and not being regarded as one at the time of her death.

Michel Foucault was a major character in Western philosophy in the 20th century, and top of the most modern philosophers on our list. He was also a well-known philologist, literary critic, social theorist, and historian of ideas. We just get the ball rolling. The rest is up to you The InfluenceRanking engine calculates a numerical influence score for biography of great thinkers great, institutions, and disciplinary programs.

The InfluenceRanking engine measures the influence of a given person in a given discipline, as well as in important related subdisciplines. Influence can also be measured within a specific set of time parameters. For instance, it is said that Greek thinker Pythagoras coined the term philosophy in the 6th Century BC. This, therefore, seems an appropriate starting point for the period under investigation.

We concede from the outset that this ranking list reflects a problem, not specifically with our algorithm, but with the human history of influence. What follows is a list composed entirely of men, most of them European, descendent from European ancestry, or famous for proliferating European ideas. Absent are the great women who have altered the course of human history by way of their ideas and actions.

Also limited in appearance are the brilliant thinkers from Arabic or African antiquity, from Eastern traditions of thought, or from more recent centuries where the greatest minds were set to work on advancing civil rights. Rather, this is a direct reflection of the enormous scope of time accounted for in our ranking. Across the vast majority of the years represented here, social, racial, and gender inequality have been very real and very consequential realities.

Moreover, our rankings are limited to those thinkers whose work has enjoyed extensive translation in the English-speaking world. Because our influence rankings measure the raw permeation of citations, writing, and ideas originating with each of these thinkers, the rigid prejudices that have persisted throughout history are also reflected on our list.

This is not an endorsement of those prejudices-merely a faithful reporting on a subject which is inherently reflective of those prejudices. Happily, when one distills a more current period of history in the philosophy discipline, one can see just how much the field of thought has evolved today, such that a meaningful number of women, people of color, and people of non-European origin are represented.

This denotes a clear evolution in an academic field that, for all of its insight and illumination, also has a deep-seated history of Eurocentrism. What follows is a list, in order, of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. Most of the names below will be familiar, though you might find a few surprises. Other information provided below includes a condensed Wikipedia bio for each philosopher, their Key Contributions to the discipline, and Selected Works.

You can also biography of great thinkers great on the profile link for each philosopher to see where they rank in specific philosophy subdisciplines, such as logic, ethics, and metaphysics. Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is 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. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. He was the founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle. Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality.

The so-called neoplatonism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Dates below should be seen as approximations. His influence was felt in his lifetime through his dialogues with prominent pupils. Therefore, he is best read through the works of his most influential students:.

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government.

Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. John Dewey. William James. John Stuart Mill. Socrates Getty Images. Aristotle Getty Images. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below.

Biography of great thinkers great: Great Thinkers is a collection of

John Locke Getty Images. Adam Smith Getty Images. Mary Wollstonecraft Getty Images. Karl Marx Getty Images. Du Bois Getty Images. Du Bois Related: How W. Jean-Paul Sartre Getty Images. Ayn Rand Getty Images. Simone De Beauvoir Getty Images. Jordan Friedman Freelance Writer. Roman statesman, lawyer and political philosopher. Cicero wrote an influential account of individual liberty, republican government and the natural rights of man.

His works were important to the Renaissance and Era of Revolutions. Marcus Aurelius — — Roman Emperor and philosopher. Al -Khwarizmi — Persian Mathematician. He also developed algebra, a new branch of mathematics. He spread a philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which stresses the underlying unity of creation — an important philosophical strand of Hinduism.

Biography of great thinkers great: 1. St Augustine by Rebecca

Leonardo Da Vinci — Artist and renaissance man. Da Vinci made many scientific discoveries. A supreme polymath, Da Vinci investigated anatomy, geology, mathematics. He was an artist, sculptor and is credited with having an unprecedented imagination and ability to invent new ideas. William Shakespeare English poet and playwright. Galileo — Creating one of the first modern telescopes, Galileo revolutionised our understanding of the world supporting the earlier work of Copernicus.

His book Two New Sciences laid the groundwork for the science of Kinetics and strength of materials. Rene Descartes — French philosopher and mathematician. Descartes was an early exponent of rationalism and reason, laying an important framework for the European enlightenment. His use of logic and reason to address questions relating to religion were groundbreaking.

He also made significant discoveries in maths and calculus. Baruch Spinoza Jewish-Dutch philosopher. Spinoza was an influential rationalist, who saw an underlying unity in the universe. He was critical of religious scriptures and promoted a view that the Divine was in all, and the Universe was ordered — despite its apparent contradictions.

John Locke — English political philosopher, Locke was a leading philosopher and political theorist, who had a profound impact on liberal political thought, around the time of the American and French revolutions. He is credited with ideas, such as the social contract — the idea government needs to be with the consent of the governed. Locke also argued for liberty, religious tolerance and rights to life and property.

Sir Isaac Newton Newton made studies in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. In his Principia Mathematicapublished inhe laid the foundations for classical mechanics, explaining the law of gravity and the Laws of Motion. Newtonian thought dominated the science of physics into the Twentieth Century. Voltaire — — French philosopher and critic.

Best known for his work Candide which epitomises his satire and criticisms of social convention. Voltaire was instrumental in promoting Republican ideas and satirised the excess of the absolute monarchy of France. Benjamin Franklin American politician and scientist. Benjamin Franklin played a key role in promoting the idea of a United States.

He left a lasting legacy on American society. He expanded on Hobbes notion of a social contract to state it should be more egalitarian. He was an influence behind changes in French society which culminated in the French Revolution.