Socrates

Socrates, (born c. 470 BCE, Athens [Greece]—died 399 BCE, Athens), Greek

philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on
ancient and modern philosophy. Socrates was a widely recognized and controversial
figure in his native Athens, so much so that he was frequently mocked in the plays of
comic dramatists. (The Clouds of Aristophanes, produced in 423, is the best-known
example.) Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is depicted in conversation
in compositions by a small circle of his admirers—Plato and Xenophon first among
them. He is portrayed in these works as a man of great insight, integrity, self-mastery,
and argumentative skill. The impact of his life was all the greater because of the way in
which it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of impiety and sentenced
to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow
citizens. Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech Socrates gave at his trial
in response to the accusations made against him (Greek apologia means “defense”). Its
powerful advocacy of the examined life and its condemnation of
Athenian democracy have made it one of the central documents of Western thought
and culture.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates
Plato- (born 428/427 BCE, Athens, Greece—died 348/347, Athens),
ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), teacher
of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and founder of the Academy, best known as the author of
philosophical works of unparalleled influence.
Building on the demonstration by Socrates that those regarded as experts
in ethical matters did not have the understanding necessary for a good human life, Plato
introduced the idea that their mistakes were due to their not engaging properly with
a class of entities he called forms, chief examples of which were Justice, Beauty, and
Equality. Whereas other thinkers—and Plato himself in certain passages—used the
term without any precise technical force, Plato in the course of his career came to
devote specialized attention to these entities. As he conceived them, they were
accessible not to the senses but to the mindalone, and they were the most
important constituents of reality, underlying the existence of the sensible world and
giving it what intelligibility it has. In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational
treatment of the forms and their interrelations, starting with the most fundamental
among them (the Good, or the One); in ethics and moral psychology he developed the
view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had
suggested) but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony
between the three parts of the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite). His
works also contain discussions in aesthetics, political
philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His
school fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly conceived but in a wide range
of endeavours that today would be called mathematical or scientific.

https://www.britannica.com/search?query=plato
St Augustine

St. Augustine is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy

infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism.   He is famous for being an inimitable
Catholic theologian and for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. He argues
that skeptics have no basis for claiming to know that there is no knowledge.  In a proof
for existence similar to one later made famous by René Descartes, Augustine says,
“[Even] If I am mistaken, I am.” He is the first Western philosopher to promote what has
come to be called "the argument by analogy" against solipsism: there are bodies
external to mine that behave as I behave and that appear to be nourished as mine is
nourished; so, by analogy, I am justified in believing that these bodies have a similar
mental life to mine. Augustine believes reason to be a uniquely human cognitive
capacity that comprehends deductive truths and logical necessity. Additionally,
Augustine adopts a subjective view of time and says that time is nothing in reality but
exists only in the human mind’s apprehension of reality. He believes that time is not
infinite because God“created” it.
Augustine tries to reconcile his beliefs about freewill, especially the belief that humans
are morally responsible for their actions, with his belief that one’s life is predestined.
Though initially optimistic about the ability of humans to behave morally, at the end he is
pessimistic, and thinks that original sin makes human moral behavior nearly impossible:
if it were not for the rare appearance of an accidental and undeserved Grace of God,
humans could not be moral. Augustine’s theological discussion of freewill is relevant to
a non-religious discussion regardless of the religious-specific language he uses; one
can switch Augustine’s “omnipotent being” and “original sin” explanation of
predestination for the present day “biology” explanation of predestination; the latter
tendency is apparent in modern slogans such as “biology is destiny.”

https://www.iep.utm.edu/augustin/
Rene Descartes

René Descartes is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.”
This title is justified due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian
philosophy prevalent at his time and to his development and promotion of the new,
mechanistic sciences. His fundamental break with Scholastic philosophy was twofold.
First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to doubt given their
reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace
their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic
model.
Descartes attempted to address the former issue via his method of doubt. His basic
strategy was to consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This
“hyperbolic doubt” then serves to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an
unprejudiced search for the truth. This clearing of his previously held beliefs then puts
him at an epistemological ground-zero. From here Descartes sets out to find something
that lies beyond all doubt. He eventually discovers that “I exist” is impossible to doubt
and is, therefore, absolutely certain. It is from this point that Descartes proceeds to
demonstrate God’s existence and that God cannot be a deceiver. This, in turn, serves to
fix the certainty of everything that is clearly and distinctly understood and provides the
epistemological foundation Descartes set out to find.
Once this conclusion is reached, Descartes can proceed to rebuild his system of
previously dubious beliefs on this absolutely certain foundation. These beliefs, which
are re-established with absolute certainty, include the existence of a world of bodies
external to the mind, the dualistic distinction of the immaterial mind from the body, and
his mechanistic model of physics based on the clear and distinct ideas of geometry.
This points toward his second, major break with the Scholastic Aristotelian tradition in
that Descartes intended to replace their system based on final causal explanations with
his system based on mechanistic principles. Descartes also applied this mechanistic
framework to the operation of plant, animal and human bodies, sensation and the
passions. All of this eventually culminating in a moral system based on the notion of
“generosity.”
The presentation below provides an overview of Descartes’ philosophical thought as it
relates to these various metaphysical, epistemological, religious, moral and scientific
issues, covering the wide range of his published works and correspondence.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/descarte/
John Locke
John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of
the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that
men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally
subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty,
and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society.
Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for
understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where
people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government
in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and
property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the
rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be
resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus also important for his
defense of the right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and
the separation of legislative and executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration,
Locke denied that coercion should be used to bring people to (what the ruler believes is)
the true religion and also denied that churches should have any coercive power over
their members. Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as
the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.
For a more general introduction to Locke’s history and background, the argument of
the Two Treatises, and the Letter Concerning Toleration, see Section 1, Section 4,
and Section 5, respectively, of the main entry on John Locke in this encyclopedia. The
present entry focuses on seven central concepts in Locke’s political philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/
David Hume

Hume is our Politics, Hume is our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our
Religion.” This statement by nineteenth century philosopher James Hutchison
Stirlingreflects the unique position in intellectual thought held by Scottish philosopher
David Hume. Part of Hume’s fame and importance owes to his boldly skeptical
approach to a range of philosophical subjects. In epistemology, he questioned common
notions of personal identity, and argued that there is no permanent “self” that continues
over time. He dismissed standard accounts of causality and argued that our
conceptions of cause-effect relations are grounded in habits of thinking, rather than in
the perception of causal forces in the external world itself. He defended the skeptical
position that human reason is inherently contradictory, and it is only through naturally-
instilled beliefs that we can navigate our way through common life. In the philosophy of
religion, he argued that it is unreasonable to believe testimonies of alleged miraculous
events, and he hints, accordingly, that we should reject religions that are founded on
miracle testimonies. Against the common belief of the time that God’s existence could
be proven through a design or causal argument, Hume offered compelling criticisms of
standard theistic proofs. He also advanced theories on the origin of popular religious
beliefs, grounding such notions in human psychology rather than in rational argument or
divine revelation. The larger aim of his critique was to disentangle philosophy from
religion and thus allow philosophy to pursue its own ends without rational over-
extension or psychological corruption.  In moral theory, against the common view that
God plays an important role in the creation and reinforcement of moral values, he
offered one of the first purely secular moral theories, which grounded morality in the
pleasing and useful consequences that result from our actions. He introduced the term
“utility” into our moral vocabulary, and his theory is the immediate forerunner to the
classic utilitarian views of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. He is famous for the
position that we cannot derive ought from is, the view that statements of moral
obligation cannot simply be deduced from statements of fact. Some see Hume as an
early proponent of the emotivist metaethical view that moral judgments principally
express our feelings. He also made important contributions to aesthetic theory with his
view that there is a uniform standard of taste within human nature, in political theory
with his critique of social contractarianism, and economic theory with his anti-
mercantilist views. As a philosophical historian, he defended the conservative view that
British governments are best run through a strong monarchy.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/hume/
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the
history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,
and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement
that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of
his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason.  A large part of Kant’s work
addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is
that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural,
empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible
realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints,
Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of
experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of space and time.
Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is
not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the
Rationalists’ notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was
possible.  Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a
phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience.  These
categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are
necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their causal behavior and
logical properties.  These two theses constitute Kant’s famous transcendental idealism
and empirical realism.
Kant’s contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work
in metaphysics and epistemology.  He is the most important proponent in philosophical
history of deontological, or duty based,  ethics. In Kant’s view, the sole feature that
gives an action moral worth is not the outcome that is achieved by the action, but the
motive that is behind the action.  And the only motive that can endow an act with moral
value, he argues, is one that arises from universal principles discovered by reason.  The
categorical imperative is Kant’s famous statement of this duty: “Act only according to
that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal
law.”
https://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
work is commonly associated with the philosophical movement called
existentialism and its intention to begin with an analysis of the concrete experiences,
perceptions, and difficulties, of human existence. However, he never propounded quite
the same extreme accounts of radical freedom, being-towards-death, anguished
responsibility, and conflicting relations with others, for which existentialism became both
famous and notorious in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps because of this, he did not
initially receive the same amount of attention as his French contemporaries and
friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. These days though, his
phenomenological analyses are arguably being given more attention than either, in both
France and in the Anglo-American context, because they retain an ongoing relevance in
fields as diverse as cognitive science, medical ethics, ecology, sociology and
psychology. Although it is difficult to summarize Merleau-Ponty’s work into neat
propositions, we can say that he sought to develop a radical re-description of embodied
experience (with a primacy given to studies of perception), and argued that these
phenomena could not be suitably understood by the philosophical tradition because of
its tendency to drift between two flawed and equally unsatisfactory alternatives:
empiricism and, what he called, intellectualism. This article will seek to explain his
understanding of perception, bodily movement, habit, ambiguity, and relations with
others, as they were expressed in his key early work, Phenomenology of Perception,
before exploring the enigmatic ontology of the chiasm and the flesh that is so
evocatively described in his unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/merleau/

Paul Montgomery Churchland 

(born October 21, 1942) is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies
in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from
the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of
full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed
Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a joint
appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive
Science Faculty. As of this February 2017, Churchland is recognised as Professor
Emeritus at the UCSD, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Moscow Center
for Consciousness Studies of Moscow State University. Churchland is the husband of
philosopher Patricia Churchland, with whom he collaborates, and The New Yorker has
reported the similarity of their views, e.g., on the mind-body problem, are such that the
two are often discussed as if they are one person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Churchland

Patricia Churchland

Patricia Smith Churchland (born July 16, 1943) is a Canadian-

American analyticalphilosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and
the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at
the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She
has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since
1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness
Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected
a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[5] Educated at the University of
British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oxford, she taught
philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the
philosopher Paul Churchland. The New Yorker magazine observed regarding the
philosophical couple that, "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed,
in journals and books, as one person

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was one of the most influential psychologist, physiologist and
philosopher of the mind belonging to the twentieth century. With the help of his
colleague Joseph Breuer, he developed the theory of the mind as a complex energy
structure. Freud’s most important contribution to humanity in general and psychology in
particular is the development of psychoanalysis, a practice devised to treat the mentally
ill through dialogue.

The famous theory of Unconsciousness presented by Freud is one of its kind, in

which he presents the idea that a large portion of human attitudes can be explained
through mental processes and resulting actions which are not clearly visible. Thus the
centuries-long approach of deeming the behavior of a neurotic patient as unexplainable
is a faulty one, according to Freud. Rather, the odd behavior can be critically observed
to draw out the causes explaining it, so as to treat it. Slips of tongue and dreams can act
as a doorway through which the hidden causes of his mental ailments can be
recognized. This gives rise to the notion that us mortals are not completely free to act
according to one’s will, and there are some mental processes running in the background
which determine our deeds.

Freud further said that the unconscious consists of the thoughts and feelings which
humans have repressed over the years, usually tracing back to events taking place in
the childhood. These suppressed thoughts return to the wakeful mind under certain
circumstances, such as hypnosis. This leads to the fact that humans are not even
unaware of their own thoughts and ideas.

Initially Freud thought that repression was a conscious act, but by his second paper on
neuroscience, he had changed his views, and had termed repression as an
‘unconscious defense’. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Jokes and their
Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he delves further into the topic of the Unconscious.

Freud also classified instincts into two basic types; Eros: the human instinct related to
life and sexuality and the Thanatos: the instinct of death and destruction. Irrespective of
the two major classifications, the sexual drive termed as libido is the most important
motivator of human actions, according to Freud. In fact, he even claimed of discerning
sexuality in humans from infancy. He defined sexuality as a form of pleasure derived
from the body. Humans throughout their lives act with one motive behind their minds:
the gain of bodily pleasure.

In his works Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id(1923), Freud
presents the model of the human psyche, dividing it into three parts, namely the Id,
Super-Ego and the Ego. Id is entirely the unconscious mind, which operates solely for
the gain of pleasures. Id is the source behind all human instincts and motivations. The
Super-Ego acts as a filter between the Ego and the Id, and acts entirely on moral
principles. The third part called the Ego strives to strike a balance between the moral
and immoral aspects of a person’s mind, and is reflected majorly through a person’s
actions.

Freud, through his concepts of the Conscious and Unconscious, and through practice of
hypnosis, was led to the treatment of psychological disorders through talking, which he
termed as psychoanalysis. He attempted relaxing the patient at first and depriving them
of sensory stimulations, and then made them speak up their thoughts without any
interference or censorship. Through this method he aimed to weaken the forces of the
moral guide, the Super-Ego, in order to reach the cause of the disorder hidden
somewhere in the Id. This method proved effective as Freud observed a decrease in the
symptoms of the patients.

The impact of Sigmund Freud’s contributions in the field of psychology, semiotics

creativity, and neuroscience can never be neglected. Even though his concepts have
sparked much debate and controversy, Freud has been termed as the father of modern
psychology.
http://www.famousphilosophers.org/sigmund-freud/

Aristotle

Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to

logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture,
medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under
Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for
rejecting Plato's theory of forms.
As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of
knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinas referred to him simply as "The
Philosopher." In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31
survive. Unfortunately for us, these works are in the form of lecture notes and draft
manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his
reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the
Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct
disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are
still used today.
As the father of the field of logic, he was the first to develop a formalized system for
reasoning. Aristotle observed that the validity of any argument can be determined by its
structure rather than its content. A classic example of a valid argument is his syllogism:
All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Given the structure
of this argument, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also
guaranteed to be true. Aristotle’s brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the
rise of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later.
Aristotle’s emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief in the scientific method
forms the backdrop for most of his work. For example, in his work in ethics and politics,
Aristotle identifies the highest good with intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one
who cultivates certain virtues based on reasoning. And in his work on psychology and
the soul, Aristotle distinguishes sense perception from reason, which unifies and
interprets the sense perceptions and is the source of all knowledge.

Aristotle famously rejected Plato’s theory of forms, which states that properties such as
beauty are abstract universal entities that exist independent of the objects themselves.
Instead, he argued that forms are intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from
them, and so must be studied in relation to them. However, in discussing art, Aristotle
seems to reject this, and instead argues for idealized universal form which artists
attempt to capture in their work.
Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school of learning based in Athens, Greece;
and he was an inspiration for the Peripatetics, his followers from the Lyceum.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/aristotl/