Philosophers

Socrates

• Classical 

•  Rationalist. Knows he doesn’t know much.

• Virtue is knowledge, and vice is ignorance.

• “Know that you are a soul. Seat of virtues in your soul”. If you know what will make you happy, won’t you do it? no one knowingly does evil

• Was against the Sophists (would only teach for money, would not facilitate discussion and hated Socrates questioning them)

Plato

• Classical

•  Rationalist. The world of forms. 3 parts of a city: rulers, auxiliaries (soldiers), and laborers. 3 parts of the soul: reason, appetite, and spiritedness. 3 virtues: wisdom, courage, and temperance. Justice is a well-ordered soul. Taught the immortality of the soul. We have innate ideas that we pull up from the unconscious 

  • Created the analogy of the cave: True knowledge comes when someone escapes the cave, sees the real world beyond, and understands the difference between illusion and truth.

Aristotle

• Classical 

• More an empiricist. Forms only exist in real things (no other realms). Nothing in the mind that isn’t first in the senses. Humans are body and soul composite.

• 4 causes: material cause (what it’s made of)

  • formal cause (the shape or essence),

  • efficient cause (process that brings it to being)

  • final cause (the purpose or goal of a thing)

  • Golden mean virtues: recklessness — courage — coward. Middle with two extremes in both ways.

    • Courage = middle between recklessness (too much) and cowardice (too little)

  • Rule of the 1 (monarchy), rule of the few (oligarchy), rule of the many (democracy)

Augustine

• Medieval 

• Rationalist.

• Humans are body and soul.

• Soul is immortal; body is temporary.

• True happiness comes from the soul’s union with God. Truth is eternal and unchanging, found in God.

• True happiness is living according to God’s will.

Thomas Aquinas

• Medieval 

• Aristotelian. Turns Aristotle ethics Christian.

• Empiricist foundation for his rationalism.

• 5 ways to prove God’s existence and concept of Natural law.

• Faith and reason complimentary; faith and reason are complementary; reason can independently show God’s existence

Rene Descartes

• 17th century

• Rationalist. Refutes skepticism, so begins as a skeptic. Can I trust my senses?

• Where do we come up with the idea of God?

• We’ve never experienced perfection of infinity, so he must exist. Animals don’t have souls.

• “Cogito, ergo sum” → “I think, therefore I am.”

• Mind boday dualism: Mind and body interact, but are fundamentally different substances.

Baruch Spinoza

• 17th century

• Monist:Rejected Descartes’ dualism.

• Only one underlying substance: God=nature

• Mind and matter are different “attributes” but still one.

• Believed god was nature, but that he was so much more: God is the totality of reality

• Ethics:Cultivating inner acceptance leads to peace of mind. (we can’t change external factors/events)

John Locke

• 17th century (died in 1704 tho)

• Empiricist. We know things through our senses.

• Indirect realisism: We perceive representations of objects in our mind, caused by the external world

• Simple and complex ideas.

• Inherent in human reason to know God exists. Sexism is manmade and can be altered.

• Rights are natural and God-given: life, liberty, and property.

• Primary and secondary qualities.

  • Primary qualities: extension, weight, motion, and number.

  • Secondary qualities: color, smell, taste, sound

David Hume

• 18th century 

• Empiricist & skeptic – knowledge comes from experience, but it’s limited.

• Two perceptions:

  • Impressions = vivid experiences

  • Ideas = faint copies of impressions

• No permanent self – identity changes over time.

• Causation:

  • Cause and effect = habit of the mind, not certainty.

• Knowledge: only two kinds → relations of ideas (logic, math) and matters of fact (experience).

• Ethics: morality is based on sentiment/feeling, not reason.

• Reason is not the guide for action; passions and sentiments drive us.

George Berkeley

• 17th

• empiricist and idealist. Two realities: mind and mental events. Everything is immaterial, just ideas

• To be is to be perceived.God as ultimate perceiver → Even when humans don’t perceive objects, God ensures their continuous existence.

• Immaterialism → There is no material substance; all that exists are minds and ideas.

• All knowledge comes from perception 

Immanuel Kant

• 18th century (died in 1804)

• Bridges Rationalism and Empiricism → Agreed both are partly right but partly wrong.

• Transcendental Idealism:

  • Our mind actively structures experience.

  • We can only know things as they appear to us (phenomena), not things-in-themselves (noumena).

G.W.F. Hegel

• 19th cent

• Historicist. Romanticism.

• 3 stages of knowledge: Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

• Knowledge and history progress through conflict and resolution.

• History moves in a progressive manner.

• World spirit or reason means the sum of human utterances. Only man has a spirit. No eternal truths.

• truths emerge through historical development.

Karl Marx

• 19th century

• He’s an atheist who hates Christianity. Historical materialist. Existential philosophy. Socialist and economist. Communist Manifesto. Wanted revolution for the working class. Committed to industrialization in a fairer way. Not caring for the liberation of ethnic groups or women. Focused on class.

Soren Kierkegaard

• 19th century

• Hegel hater. Individualism reacts to romanticism. Attacks reason in the name of faith.

• Founder of existentialism.

• 3 stages of life: aesthetic, ethical, and religious.

• Reason plays no role, only faith. Subjective truth.

• Reason is limited; faith is central

Charles Darwin

• 19th century 

• naturalistic scientist. Natural selection. Naturalistic: nature and the sensory world only. Evolutionary progress toward perfection. 

Sigmund Freud

• 19th cent

• not a philosopher, but impacted it.

• The theory of the unconscious. Ego, superego, and the id. Pleasure principle: id. Worlds moral expectations: superego.

• Any high endeavor has low basis. Roots of aggression.

• Civilization and its discontents.

Jean-Paul Sartre

• 20th century

• an existentialist. A philosophy focused on human freedom, choice, and responsibility.

• Existence precedes essence – Humans exist first, and then define themselves through actions.

• Radical freedom and responsibility – Humans are free to choose, and must take responsibility for the consequences.

• Bad faith (mauvaise foi) – Denying your freedom or pretending you are determined by circumstances is living in “bad faith.”

• Authenticity – Living honestly according to one’s freedom and choices.

• 20th-century existentialist who focuses on freedom, choice, and personal responsibility. Not a classical historical school like Hellenist, Enlightenment, or Renaissance.

Nietzsche

• 19th century

• We are shaped by history. Different cultures and historical periods have different moralities.

• Disagrees that there is any meaning to history. He thinks modernity is regressive. The modern world is.

• Looks back in history and looks at where was great art produced (the renaissance, etc.).

• Lost his mind at 44. Thinks modern humanity is sick. He loves human creativity.

• Christianity is what made the modern world sick. Wrote a book “The Anti-Christ.” He is the one who famously declares, “God is dead.”

• He attacks liberalism, socialism, anarchy, communism. He becomes an inspiration to the Nazis