Philosophers

Famous Philosophers. 

13 cards   |   Total Attempts: 185
  

Cards In This Set

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Thales
Greek philosopher who is traditionally considered the first Western philosopher and a founder of geometry and abstract astronomy. He maintained that matter is composed of water.
Pythagoras
Greek philosopher who founded a school in southern Italy that sought to discover the mathematical principles of reality through the study of musical harmony and geometry. The Pythagorean theorem is ascribed to him.
Socrates
Greek philosopher whose indefatigable search for ethical knowledge challenged conventional mores and led to his trial and execution on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Although Socrates wrote nothing, his method of question and answer is captured in the dialogues of Plato, his greatest pupil.
Plato
Greek philosopher. A follower of Socrates, he presented his ideas through dramatic dialogues, in the most celebrated of which (The Republic) the interlocutors advocate a utopian society ruled by philosophers trained in Platonic metaphysics. He taught and wrote for much of his life at the Academy, which he founded near Athens in 386.
Aristotle
Greek philosopher. A pupil of Plato, the tutor of Alexander the Great, and the author of works on logic, metaphysics, ethics, natural sciences, politics, and poetics, he profoundly influenced Western thought. In his philosophical system, which led him to criticize what he saw as Plato's metaphysical excesses, theory follows empirical observation and logic, based on the syllogism, is the essential method of rational inquiry.
Machiavelli
Italian political theorist whose book The Prince (1513) describes the achievement and maintenance of power by a determined ruler indifferent to moral considerations.
Copernicus
Polish astronomer who advanced the theory that Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun, disrupting the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.
Galileo
Galileo (Galileo Galilei), 1564-1642, great Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist. By his persistent investigation of natural laws he laid foundations for modern experimental science, and by the construction of astronomical telescopes he greatly enlarged humanity's vision and conception of the universe. He gave a mathematical formulation to many physical laws.
Newton
English mathematician and scientist who invented differential calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravitation, a theory about the nature of light, and three laws of motion. His treatise on gravitation, presented in Principia Mathematica (1687), was supposedly inspired by the sight of a falling apple.
Bacon
English philosopher, essayist, courtier, jurist, and statesman. His writings include The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620), in which he proposed a theory of scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment that came to be known as the inductive method.
Hobbes
English philosopher and political theorist best known for his book Leviathan (1651), in which he argues that the only way to secure civil society is through universal submission to the absolute authority of a sovereign.
Descartes
French mathematician, philosopher, and scientist who is considered the father of analytic geometry and the founder of modern rationalism. His main works, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644), include the famous dictum "I think, therefore I am."
Wittgenstein
Austrian philosopher who taught in England and who had a major influence on 20th-century philosophy. His main works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), explore the relation between language and the world.