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Thales
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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.
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Pythagoras
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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.
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Socrates
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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.
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Plato
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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.
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Aristotle
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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.
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Machiavelli
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Italian political theorist whose book The Prince (1513) describes the achievement and maintenance of power by a determined ruler indifferent to moral considerations.
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Copernicus
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Polish astronomer who advanced the theory that Earth and the other
planets revolve around the sun, disrupting the Ptolemaic system of
astronomy.
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Galileo
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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.
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Newton
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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.
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Bacon
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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.
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Hobbes
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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.
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Descartes
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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."
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Wittgenstein
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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.
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