Thomas Paine

Ideas – The rights of humankind originate at birth. – Government should exist only for the security, happiness, and unity of humankind. – Republican government is based on reason and engenders freedom; government by hereditary succession is based on ignorance and reduces people to slavery. – Equality of natural property and the right of

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Thomas More

Ideas – A program of education grounded on ethics, the study Greek and LAtin, and the imitation of ancient pagan and Christian writers os the soundest plan for spiritual renewal and reform of the church and society. – Nature teaches that the best society is one whose aim is the temporal well-being or happiness

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Thomas Jefferson

 Ideas – All human beings are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights. – Governments are established to protect the rights of citizens. – The right to work the land is a fundamental human right; consequently, a state that allows private ownership of land must provide employment to those who do not

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley, the distinguished zoologist and advocate of Darwinism, madeseveral incursions into philosophy. From his youth he had studied its problems unsystematically; he had a way of going straight to the point in any discussion; and, judged by a literary standard, he was a great master of expository and argumentative prose. Apart from

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Thomas Aquinas

Ideas – The existence of God is not self-evident to reason, but it is demonstrable. – In God, essence and existence are inseparable, indeed, identical: It belongs to ‘what’ God is ‘that’ God is. – The essence of finite things is separable from their existence. – The finite order receives its existence by ‘participation’

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Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Ideas – As human beings, we are often in situations in which we must choose between incompatibloe alternatives. – God may place us religiously in paradoxical situations of anguished choice as a test of faith. – There are objective problems, but they cannot be answered objectively for the person, who must decide about his

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Socrates

Socrates, the celebrated Greek philosopher and moralist, was born at Athens in the year 469 B.C. His father, Sophroniskus, was a sculptor and he followed the same profession in the early part of his life. His family was respectable in descent, but humble in point of means. He had the usual education of the

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Simone Weil

Ideas – Thought is inextricably linked to action. – The person is a creation of natural and social forces and can ve ‘decreated’ by them. – Pure goodness for which the human aspires is found by God’s direct descent and through the mediation of natural and social structures. – The suffering of Christ is

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Simone de Beauvoir

Ideas – As human beings, we live in a tragically anbiguous condition, but we must assume responsibility for the direction of our lives. – Every person is originally free. – Woman is the ‘other’; she lives in a world in which men have compelled her to be the second sex. – Despite the historical

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Sigmund Freud

Ideas – Human behavior is the result of both heredity and environment. – By means of the techniques of free association and analysis of symbols, we may learn about the structure and functioning of self. – The model of self should be constructed in terms of the ;id; (which represents drives), the ‘ego’ (which

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Sextus Empiricus

Major Ideas – It is futile to attempt to determine external realities (the nonevident) by appeal to appearances (the evident). – We have access to only appearances and no reason to prefer one appearance to another. – Appearances vary according to the condition of the observer and the nature of what is judged. –

Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke is an American philosopher now emeritus from (Princeton) and professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. He is best known for his attack on the descriptivist (Fregean, Russellian) theory of reference with respect to proper names, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of the name’s being associated

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Saint Teresa of Avila

Ideas – God dwells within the soul. – The soul travels within herself tou nite with God. – One image for the soul is an interior castle with many mansions. – By practicing mental prayer, the soul enters the interior castle. – The first three mansions correspond to the purgative way, where the beginner

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Saint John of the Cross

Ideas – Substantial union with God is that by which the soul exists. – The union of likeness, also called transforming or mystical union, is that by which the soul becomes like God. – God is darkness to the soul in that the divine is essentially other than the human. – Since the means

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Saint Bonaventure

Ideas – Traditional Christian doctrines are correct, and innovations are erroneous. – The wish to introduce new doctrines is the expression of a bad moral character, and so is curiosity (the wish to find things out independently of their relevance to salvation). – People need discipline not only of their conduct but also of

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Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Ideas – There is a natural simplicity in the very substance of the soul; for the soul, it is the same to be as to live, but it is not the same thing to be as yo live well or to live happily; nevertheless the soul can ascend to this. – For God, to

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Reinhold Niebuhr

Ideas – The nature of the human being is flawed in its inclination to pride and power, but it exists in freedom under the shadow of God, is endowed with moral capacity, and in individual terms, can approach the ideal of Christian love. – God acts in history but is also hidden from history

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Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas – The basic concrete entities are not enduring subsstances, but events (later: ‘ actual entities’ or ‘actual occasions’) related by their space-time relations and exemplifying their qualitative and mathematical patterns (later: ‘eternal objects’). – Time is differentiated from space by the acts of inheriting patterns from the past (later: ‘causal prehensions’). – Enduring

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Archimedes

Ideas – Convergence methods, in which a curvilinear figure is bounded inside and out by similar rectilinear figures, can approximate the area of the curved figure to any degree of accuracy: Using convergence methods, the value of pi is found to be greater than 3 10/71 and less than 3 1/7. – Objects have

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Aristotle

Ideas – Ideas do not have an independent, extra-mental subsistence, but exist in things. – The material substratum, which is the potential for the existence of finite things, must be distinguished from absolute nonbeing or privation. – The substances of things are a union of form and matter. – Body and soul are conjoined

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