I felt overwhelmed reading books about philosophy history every time until I read A Little History of Philosophy, written by Nigel Warburton. Its conciseness and to-the-pointness deeply attracted me, and I finished it fast. Although it only has 40 chapters, it is still not easy to remember and understand all philosophiers’ideas, works, and experiences. So I decided to make a list. Every item on the list includes the philosopher’s name, birth and death years, and his or her most famous idea.
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Socrates
- 470–399 BC
- I know that I know nothing
- The unexamined life is not worth living”
- Gadfly
- Plato
- 428/427 or 424/423 BC
- In The Republic,Philosophers would be at the top and would get a special education; Beneath them would be soldiers who were trained to defend the country, and beneath them would be the workers.
- Aristotle
- 384–322 BC
- Eudaemonia isn’t about fleeting moments of bliss or how you feel.
- Pyrrho
- 365–360 BC
- We know nothing
- Epicurus
- 341–270 BC
- The fear of death was a waste of time and based on bad logic.
- Cicero
- 106-43 BC
- Learning Not to Care
- Augustine
- 354-430 AD
- God has given us free will.
- Boethius
- 480–524 AD
- He should not forget that God judges human beings on how they behave, the choices they make, even though he knows in advance what they will do.
- Aquinas
- 1225-1274
- This first cause, he declared, must have been God. God is the uncaused cause of everything that is.
- Machiavelli
- 1469-1527
- Machiavelli stresses that it’s better as a leader to be feared than to be loved.If you can achieve what you are aiming for by showing kindness, keeping your promises, and being loved, then you should do this (or at least appear to do it). But if you can’t, then you need to combine these human qualities with animal ones.
- Thomas Hobbes
- 1588-1679
- Life outside society would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
- René Descartes
- 1596-1650
- I think, therefore I am
- Blaise Pascal
- 1623-1662
- Place Your Bets
- Baruch Spinoza
- 1632-1677
- God is nature and nature is God
- John Locke
- 1632-1704
- Whenever laws end, tyranny begins.
- George Berkeley
- 1685-1753
- Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
- Voltaire
- 1694–1778
- I hate what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it
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Leibniz
- 1646–1716
- The present is big with the future.
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David Hume
- 1711–76
- Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
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Jacques Rousseau
- 1712-1778
- Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains
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Immanuel Kant
- 1724-1804
- Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means to your end.
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Jeremy Bentham
- 1748-1832
- It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.
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Hegel
- 1770-1831
- The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
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Schopenhauer
- 1788-1860
- Reality has two aspects. It exists both as Will and as Representation.
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Charles Darwin
- 1809-1882
- It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
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Søren Kierkegaard
- 1813-1855
- Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
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Karl Marx
- 1818-1883
- Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
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William James
- 1842-1910
- The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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Nietzsche
- 1844-1900
- God is dead, and we have killed him.
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Sigmund Freud
- 1856-1939
- The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
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Bertrand Russell
- 1872-1970
- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
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Alfred Jules Ayer
- 1910-1989
- The principle of verification is a criterion of meaningfulness. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
- 1905-1980
- Existence precedes essence.
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Wittgenstein
- 1889-1951
- The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
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Hannah Arendt
- 1906-1975
- The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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Philippa Foot
- 1920-2010
- The duty of not being unjust can override the duty of truth-telling.
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John Rawls
- 1921-2002
- The most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position.
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Alan Turing
- 1912-1954
- A machine can be called intelligent when it can deceive a human into believing that it is human.
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Peter Singer
- 1946
- To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.