Great Philosophers

  

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer

(painting by Rembrandt)

 

 

Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

 

 

 

 

It seems to me, that philosophers are part scientist and part linguist; there are
even philosophers of science such as Carnap and Popper. Often philosophers
talk in circles and end up where they started, but there is no denying that they
present (and attempt to answer) the prime questions of existence. Many of the
following were more than just philosophers (Aristotle, Pythagoras and Francis
Bacon for example), but I tried to select a diverse group of thinkers.

 

 

"Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks

for nothing but obedience and piety."

 

"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a

disturber of established religion."

 

Baruch Spinoza

 

 

 

 

 

"Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy extinguishes it."

Voltaire

 

"In theology we must consider the predominance of authority;

in philosophy the predominance of reason."

Johannes Kepler

 

School of Athens by Raphael

(includes Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus and Diogenes)

 

Death of Socrates

by  Jacques-Louis David

 

The Death of Socrates

by Jean-François-Pierre Peyron

 

Death of Socrates

by Jacques-Philip-Joseph de Saint-Quentin

 

The Death of Socrates

by Giambettino Cignaroli

 

 

"In every age, natural philosophy had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with;

namely, superstition, and blind and immoderate zeal of religion."

Francis Bacon

 

 

Socrates

 

 

 

Plato

 

 

Aristotle

David Hume

 

Pythagoras of Samos

 

Confucius

John Locke

 

Rene Descartes

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Bertrand Russell

 

http://youtu.be/tP4FDLegX9s  1959 interview

 

 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Immanuel Kant

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

 

Philo of Alexandria

 

 

Lao Tzu

 

 

Thomas Aquinas

(reluctantly added to list)

 

Baruch Spinoza

 

Thomas Hobbes

 

Karl Marx

Jean-Paul Sartre

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

 

Epicurus

 

Zeno of Citium

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

 

Niccolo Machiavelli

 

 

John Stuart Mill

 

Søren Kierkegaard

 

George Berkeley

 

 

Mary Wollstonecraft

 

Plotinus

William of Ockham

 

 

Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina

(Avicenna)

 

George Santayana

 

Albert Camus

 

Simone de Beauvoir

 

 

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Michel Foucalt

 

 

Gottlob Frege

 

 

Diogenes of Sinope

Denis Diderot

 

Edward Husserl

 

Francis Bacon

 

Thales of Miletus

 

 

Xenophanes

 

Heraclitus

 

Martin Heidegger

 

Thomas Paine

Voltaire

 

Friedrich Schelling

Karl Popper

 

William James

 

José Ortega y Gasset

 

Auguste Comte

 

 

Miguel de Unamuno

 

Alfred North Whitehead

Jacques  Derrida

 

 

Rudolf Carnap

 

 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

Noam Chomsky