Philosophy and Theology

This is the homepage for the Philosophy and Theology category, a subcategory of Thought.

Some general resources:

• Crash Course Philosophy YT Playlist
• Sisyphus 55 Philosophy YT Playlist (created by Anna Csiki-Fejer)
• School of Life Philosophy YT Playlist (created by Anna Csiki-Fejer)
• TED-Ed Philosophy YT Playlist (created by Anna Csiki-Fejer)
• SparkNotes Philosophy

Pierre Abelard

He was a Scholastic philosopher/theologian. He had a famous love affair with Heloise, a nun at Argentuil.

Sic et Non

Theodor Adorno

Against Epistemology

• posited that Sigmund Freud and Edmund Husserl were “philosophical opposites”

St. Anselm of Canterbury

He was the founder of Scholasticism. He created the ontological argument for God’s existence in his book

Proslogion

• created the ontological argument for God’s Existence

St. Thomas Aquinas

He was a medieval Italian Scholastic and a student of Albertus Magnus. He became known as “Doctor Angelicus”.

Summa Theologica

• divided into “Theology”, “Ethics”, and “Christ”
• harmonizes philosophies from many backgrounds
• contains the “quinque viae” (“five ways”), five arguments for the existence of God
  • Argument of degree
  • Argument of the first mover
  • argument from the order of the world
• laws created by humans are designed to fit the majority
• the soul gains knowledge by deriving intelligible species from sensible forms and that the will is subject to intelligence
• “Doctrine of Double Effect”, which motivates just war theory
• calls Averroes “the Commentator”

Summa Contra Gentiles

• “Against Gentiles”
• “Beatific vision”
• Contra Plato, Spirit is divided into two parts, rational and irrational

Contra Errores Graecorum

• “Against the errors of the Greeks”
• Written to Pope Urban IV
• opposed to the Eastern Church

Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

On the Principles of Nature

“On the Unicity of Intellect”

• Contra Siger of Brabant
• “Against the Averroists”

Hannah Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Aristotle

An ancient Greek philosopher, the student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great. He founded the Lyceum.

Nicomachean Ethics

• Virtues consist in a “golden mean” between two extremes
• the highest aim in life is happiness

Physics

• Describes motion and change in terms of “four causes” that make a given thing what it is

Metaphysics

• “After Physics”
• Describes the structure of reality

Poetics

• Discusses the types of drama
• Considered “catharsis”, an effect of tragedies

The Organon

• a collection of six of Aristotle’s works on logic and dialectic
• contains Prior Analytics, where he invented the syllogism, a form of deductive argument

For more info…

St. Augustine of Hippo

An early North African Christian philosopher, theologian, and church father.

Confessions

• thirteen books
• chronicled his childhood and experiments with Manichaeism, the story of how he converted to Christianity (the religion of his mother Monica)
• story of how his sinful friends lead him to steal some pears in a work
• story of how a child scooping water out of the sea informed him about the impossibility of elucidating the mysteries of the divine
• converted after a child’s voice told him to open his Bible at random

City of God

• Christianity did not lead to the fall of Rome
• inspired by the Vandal sack of Rome

The Measure of the Soul

• describes the superiority of the soul over the body

Reconsiderations

• old age review of what he no longer agreed with in his writings

Marcus Aurelius

Stoic and Roman emperor

Meditations

• standard Stoic text

Francis Bacon

Lord Chancellor of England and advocate of the scientific method. Some claim that he is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays.

He compared his ideal to that of a bee making honey. He categorized the fantastical, contentious, and delicate distempers of learning. He lists “polychrest” and “magic” among the twenty-seven prerogative instances.

He coined the phrase “knowledge is power.”

Sylva Sylvarum

• the benefits of consuming opium

Instauratio Magna

• “The Great Instauration”
• the misconceptions of philosophy were due to false gods

The New Atlantis

• narrator meets a Jew named Joabin, who resides on an island containing Solomon’s House

Novum Organum

• rails against the idols of the theater, the idols of the cave, the idols of the market place, and the idols of the tribe as entities which handicapped men from studying nature

The Masculine Birth of Time

• unfinished

“Of Vicissitude of Things”

• cited Solomon’s sentence that “all novelty is oblivion”

Cesare Beccaria

Greatly influenced the Founding Fathers

On Crimes and Punishments

• condemned torture and the death penalty
• founding work in the field of penology

Jeremy Bentham

Founder of modern utilitarianism, saying that it is the “greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” He was a lawyer but he became disillusioned with law after hearing the lectures of William Blackstone, whom he thought ignored the social consequences of law. He was a leading proponent of the classical school of criminology and advocated the use of a new type of prison which he called the “panopticon”.

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

• his legal and social theory

George Berkeley

Irish empiricist and immaterialist philosopher. He opposed the adoption of the sumptuary laws.

He coined the phrase “Esse est percipi”, “to be is to be perceived”.

He posited that natural phenomena constitute a divine universal language.

Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

• attacked Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities
• uses the pleasure-pain argument to prove that pain cannot exist independently of the mind
• the mind cannot cincieve of mind-independent objects via the master argument
• the causes of passive ideas cannot be matter and instead must be the mind of God

Theory Towards a New Theory of Vision

• spatial depth is by itself invisible

De Motu

• his theories of motion

The Analyst

• criticized Newton’s philosophy

The Alciphron

• countered Shaftesbury and other philosophers

Edmund Burke

Intellectual founder of modern conservatism

He decried the theory of a social contract by claiming that individual rights must arise organically from a particular set of legal and cultural norms

A Vindication of Natural Society

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Albert Camus

Existentialist

The Myth of Sisyphus

• defined suicide as an attempt to escape the absurdity of being, which is compared to eternally pushing a boulder up a hill

Cicero

On the Republic

On the Laws

On the Nature of the Gods

• discusses Epicurean and Stoic views on religion

Hortensius

For more info…

Confucius

A pivotal thinker from China’s Spring and Autumn period. He emphasized proper conduct and filial piety. He introduced ren, the inner state which allows one to behave compassionately towards others, and li, which helps individuals attain ren.

Analects

For more info…

Gilles Deleuze

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

• with Guattari
• critiqued Freud’s writings on the memoris of Judge Schreber
• “The Holy Family”
  • one of Freud’s theories is critiqued for its “familialism”
• one of Freud’s theories is critiqued as “theater” in favor of the “factory” model of desiring-production

Democritus

A Greek philosopher who is partly credited with the creation of the atomic theory (aka atomism). He was a student of Leucippus, who also gets some credit.

Renee Descartes

He was a Rationalist philosopher.

Cartesian dualism included the ability of body and soul to affect each other, through the pineal gland.

He used an example of the changes in burning wax to describe how perception cannot accurately describe objects and theorized that all of perceived reality could just be a dream.

He claimed that the cause of something must contain as much reality as the subject itself, which is the causal adequacy principle.

Meditations on First Philosophy

• created his version of the ontological argument for God’s existence

Discourse on the Method

• “Cogito ergo sum”/“Je pense donc je suis”/“I think therefore I am”

Rules for the Direction of the Mind

John Dewey

American Pragmatist

Democracy and Education

Diogenes of Sinope

A student of Antisthenes and the founder of Cynicism (“Cynicism” is “dog-like” in Greek, he used other’s insults as the name of his philosophy). He rejected conventional social norms in search for a truly virtuous life. He lived in a tub or barrel on the street. He legendarily wandered Athens in his futile search for an honest man. There are tons of entertaining stories about Diogenes and his interactions with “real” philosophers.

For more infos…

Epictetus

Another Stoic, notably a slave. His views were recorded by his student Arrian in the Discourses.

Epicurus

Ancient Greek philosopher who founded Epicureanism. He thought that pleasure is the highest/only good and that the absence of pain (aponia) is the highest pleasure. He claimed that human happiness consists of a kind of tranquility known as ataraxia. Critics said his school was hedonistic and made selfishness into a good.

For more info…

Michel Foucault

A bald French philosopher who notably thought everything was a prison.

He noted that the exclusion of lepers eventually transitioned to other exclusion rituals in analogy to the Renaissance image of the Ship of Fools.

The “Great Confinement” is a response to un-reason.

He claimed that each era has a system of knowledge called an episteme.

He assessed the motives of Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke.

He noted that the structure of confession was transferred to the therapist’s office in half-complete set of volumes.

His genealogy of knowledge is a direct allusion to Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality.

Discipline and Punish

• about society’s evolving reaction to crime
• analyzed Bentham’s Panopticon

The Will to Knowledge

• developed the theory of bio-power (the ability to “make live and let die”)

The Order of Things

• the conditions of discourse changed over time

The Birth of the Clinic

• developed the concept of the medical gaze

Madness and Civilization

“What is an Author?”

Betty Friedan

The Second Sex

• 1963
• chapter “The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead”
  • argued that Mead went “a step beyond Freud” in highlighting that women are “unique human beings”
  • criticized Mead’s emphasis on gender essentialism
• attacked Freud’s views that women were “a strange, inferior, less-than-human species”

Carlo Ginzburg

“Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”

• the use of “medical semantics” connected the art historian Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes, and Sigmund Freud

Adolf Grunbaum

The Foundations of Psychoanalysis

• calls psychoanalysis pseudo-scientific
• blasts Popper’s critique of Freud since Freud’s claims are in fact falsifiable

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

German idealist Enlightenment philosopher

Phenomenology of Spirit

• Concept of “dialectic”: the tension between a thesis and its antithesis results in a synthesis

Elements of the Philosophy of Right

• his political philosophy

The Science of Logic

• the doctrine of being and doctrine of essence

“On the Abortive State of Art and Scholarship in Turkey”

• Graduation speech at the Gymnasium

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

• summarized his beliefs

Martin Heidegger

An existentialist philosopher who was taught by Edmund Husserl. He was also a Nazi sympathizer.

Being and Time

• describes “dasein” or “there-being”

Heraclitus of Ephesus

An ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who thought that the natural world is in flux and originated in fire.

Thomas Hobbes

An English political philosopher who supported a strong absolute monarchy.

Leviathan

• life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, a “war of all against all”
• argued for necessity of a strong sovereign
• identifies the social contract as a method of overcoming the “war of all against all” in the state of nature
• appetite and aversion underlie all “Passions” of humans after dividing animal motion into “Vital” and “Voluntary” components
• lists judicial and law-making authority as two of the twelve principal rights of Commonwealths
• absolute monarchy is the best of three types of government
• section “Of the Kingdom of Darkness”
  • explains the four causes of ignorance

David Hume

A Scottish Empiricist philosopher who disbelieved in miracles.

He criticized the idea of a social contract by demonstrating that governments always derive authority by tradition.

He defined miracles as transgressions of the laws of nature.

Hume’s guillotine is his raising of the “is-ought problem”

He first put forth by the bundle theory which was advanced the David Parfit.

In six volumes he detailed English history from Julius Caesar’s invasion.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

A Treatise of Human Nature

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

• Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes debate the status of God’s existence

William James

American neo-pragmatist

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Pragmatism

• if a man ever goes around an unseen squirrel while chasing it around a tree?

Immanuel Kant

18th-century German philosopher who founded deontology. He was awoken from his dogmatic slumber by David Hume. He was a professor at the University of Konigsberg.

He called the way a pure non-empirical concept is associated with the mental image of an object “schema”.

He defined enlightenment as “Sapere aude,” or “Dare to know.”

Critique of Pure Reason

• distinguished between a posteriori and a priori judgements
• classified a priori knowledge as analytic or synthetic
• thus synthesized rationalist and empiricist theories of epistemology
• a priori truths are universal
• attacks the circular logic of pure reason
• defines an ontological and a “watch-maker” proof of God’s existence
• God, freedom, and immortality are the unavoidable problems with pure reason

Critique of Practical Reason

• moral laws are universal

Critique of Judgement

• extended a priori knowledge to the idea of sensus communis
• beauty is universal

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason/Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone

• society can foster moral behavior through an “invisible church”
• humans are essentially evil

Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime

• marriage is the union of a couple into a single moral entity

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

• introduced the categorical imperative
  • “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”
  • lying cannot be a universal law, so it is always immoral

The Metaphysics of Morals

• argues for moral relativism
• defends the Three Maxims

Perpetual Peace

• outlined a world without a war based on constitutional republics
• proposed a social contract between nations rather than individuals
• Three Definitive Articles: republican constitutions, federations of free states, and universal hospitability

Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy

The Only Possible Ground for Demonstration of the Existence of God

See Qwiz5’s article for more information

Soren Kierkegaard

A Danish existentialist philosopher.

Claimed one must reconcile the “finite with the infinite” in order to eliminate despair.

The Sickness Unto Death

Either/Or

• contrasts a hedonistic lifestyle with an ethical one
• section “Diary of a Seducer”
  • draws on his relationship with Regine Olsen

Fear and Trembling

• asks “Is there an Absolute Duty to God?” wrt Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac
• dread is worse than fear because dread has no object and reflects the emptiness of the self

See Qwiz5’s article for more information

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

A philosopher and mathematician who independently developed calculus from Isaac Newton. He hypothesized that this is the best of all worlds, and was satirized as Doctor Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide because of it.

Theodicy

John Locke

An English Empiricist philosopher known for developing social contract theory with Rousseau.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• criticized the theory of innate ideas
• proposed the theory of tabula rasa (blank slate)
• we gain knowledge through experience

Two Treatises of Government

• rejected Filmer’s Patriarchia
• people have the right to life, liberty, and property

Of Civil Government

• justified the Glorious Revolution

Peter Lombard

A Scholastic theologian/philosopher.

The Four Books of Sentences

Niccolo Machiavelli

A “realist” political theorist

The Prince

• model prince Cesare borgia, son of Alexander VI

Discourses of Livy

• one of the first uses of the concept of checks and balances
• emphasized the strength of a tripartite structure and the superiority of a republic over principality

The Mandrake

The Golden Ass

The History of Florence

John Stuart Mill

A British Utilitarian philosopher and economist.

He rejected Kant’s “intuitionism” in favor of empirical observation in one work.

He noted that it was “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” in arguing for the superiority of intellectual pleasures, like reading Wordsworth, over physical pleasures.

He wrote that one could distinguish between “good” and “bad” versions of Auguste Comte in response to System of Positive Polity.

Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy

• extended the ideas of Ricardo
• discussed unsettled questions including the relationship between profit and wages

Principles of Political Economy

• examined the necessity of private property

Utilitarianism

On Liberty

• The Harm Principle: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”
• rules are needed to curb a “tyranny of the majority”
• asks whether non-believers are persecuted by a “Mahomedan” (Muslim) country’s ban on eating pork
• one section
  • the importance of “individuality”, “one of the elements of well-being”
  • takes a notable stance against the principles of the Calvinist view of self-will
• claims “an Akbar or a Charlemagne” (a compassionate tyrant) is needed for immature “barbarians” to rise to civility
• when Main fails to see Diversity, he loses the ability to conceive of it
• helped introduce Wilhelm von Humboldt’s work to English speakers
• often notes that people assume their own infallibility in making judgements

A System of Logic

Friedrich Nietzsche

A philosopher known for his ideas of an ubermensch and eternal recurrence.

He called amor fati the formula for greatness in a human being.

He asked the sexist philosophers of his time, “Supposing Truth is a woman - what then?”

He claimed that the shadow of God was impossible to overcome, which he analogized to the Buddha’s shadow remaining on cave walls after the sage’s death.

He critiqued the “herd mentality” of previous thinkers.

“On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”

• claimed that all language is metaphor

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

• discussed the prophecy of the “ubermensch” (superman)
• concept of “eternal recurrence”

The Gay Science

• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”

Beyond Good and Evil

• the “will to power” explains all human behavior

On the Genealogy of Morals

• master and slave morality

Ecce Homo

• philosophical autobiography
• chapter “Why I Write Such Great books”
• chapter “Why I am a Destiny”

The Birth of Tragedy

• dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of literature
• criticized Socrates for limiting the Dionysian element, ultimately destroying Athenian drama

Human, All Too Human

• great art is the result of hard work, not genius or divine inspiration
• compilation of aphorisms originally attributed to Voltaire

Blaise Pascal

A theologian who came up with his namesake wager, the idea that you should believe in God because there is the possibility of infinite benefit if you do and infinite punishment if you don’t, while only finite cost if he isn’t real and you believe in him.

Pensees

Charles Sanders Pierce

A pragmatist philosopher

“The Fixation of Belief”

“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”

• discouraged “obscure conceptions”

Plato

An ancient Greek philosopher, the student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. He founded the Academy. He is known for his Theory of Forms, that abstract ideas (“forms”) are more real than the material world of the senses.

Socratic Dialogues

• The Republic
  • about justice and the ideal city-state
  • “The Allegory of the Cave”
• Meno
  • about whether virtue can be taught
• Apology
  • Socrates’ alleged defense during his trial
• Crito
  • Socrates’ imprisonment
  • Socrates claims that he cannot flee Athenian prison because of his consent to Athenian law
• Phaedo
  • Socrates’ death
• Symposium
  • the nature of love

For more info…

Karl Popper

German philosopher who formulated falsifiability

The Open Society and its Enemies

The Poverty of Historicism

Pythagoras of Samos

An ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, created the Pythagorean theorem. He theorized about the “music of the spheres”. He hated beans.

Willard Quine

American philosopher and mathematician

He illustrated the indeterminacy of translation by noting that one could interpret “gavagai” in many ways.

He introduced the idea of “cognitive synonymy”.

He posited a language without modal adverbs such that any two predicates both true of some object become interchanpeable.

He rejected second-order predicate logic as being “set theory in disguise.”

He proposed the axiom schema called New Foundations.

Word and Object

• develops indeterminacy of translation thesis
  • it is impossible to test any scientific hypothesis in isolation
  • inspired by Paul Duhem
  • linked to his “web of belief”

“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

• contrasted the terms “unmarried man” and “bachelor”
• criticized logical positivist semantic reductionism as a “metaphysical article of faith”
• attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction

Epistemology Naturalized

• traditional ways of studying knowledge have failed and should be replaced with scientific naturalism

John Rawls

Claimed that a social contract requires the existence of a “veil of ignorance”

Richard Rorty

Developer of neo-pragmatism

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

• attacked the pseudo-problems of analytic philosophy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A political philosopher from Geneva.

The Social Contract

• “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”
• monarchies work best in hot climates
• distinguishes between the sovereign and the state
• one section
  • a right must have a sense of moral obligation
  • explains that slaves only submit to their masters because they fear physical harm, not because they feel obliged to
• laws must be approved by the general will of the people
• the social contract is a contract between people and government, which exchanges liberties for protection

Bertrand Russell

A logician and philosopher. Created the thought experiment of Russell’s teapot to counter some arguments for God’s existence.

“Why I am Not a Christian”

Jean-Paul Sartre

A French existentialist philosopher. He was the lover of fellow existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. He defended orthodox Marxism despite his extreme individualism which caused him to lose the goodwill of Albert Camus.

He was asked by a young man whether he ought to abandon his mother to fight for freedom, to which Sartre noted that any answer derived from Christian or Kantian ethics would be inauthentic.

“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards.” “Existentialism is a Humanism.” “Existence precedes essence,” which gives humans radical freedom to define themselves by choice.

He wrote about a woman on a date, who pretends her hand doesn’t exist when a man starts to hold it.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology

• correlated “transcendence” and “facticity” with the “for-itself” and the “in-itself”
• “bad faith”
  • defining oneself through a socially constructed role, self-deception
  • using the example of a waiter named Pierre in a cafe
• the example of spying through a keyhole to describe the objectifying “look” or “gaze” of the Other, preceding Laura Mulvey

The Transcendence of the Ego

• one cannot think about the “intuitive apprehension” of another person’s contemplation

Critique of Dialectical Reason

• analyzed the “practico-inert” which limits human activity or “praxis”

The Family Idiot

• a critical and psychoanalytic biography of Gustave Flaubert

Seneca the Younger

A Stoic philosopher and advisor to Nero.

Arthur Schopenhauer

A pessimistic German philosopher. He intentionally schedules his lectures at the University of Berlin to conflict with Hegel’s.

He argued with Kant about the thing-in-itself.

He praised Dutch still life as the highest form of art/

On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason

• outlined the necessary and sufficient characteristics of truth

On Vision and Colors

Prarerga and Parlipomena

• collected several otherwise unpublished essays and fragments

“On Women”

• “woman is by nature meant to obey”

“Metaphysics of Sexual Love”

• defended homosexuality as preventing unnecessary children

The World as Will and Representation/On the World as Will and Idea

• sequentially addressed epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics
• discusses aestheticism as the denial or rejection of idea
• claimed art is the only reprieve from the suffering caused by experience
• took inspiration from the Upanishads, which he described as “the production of the highest human wisdom”
• claimed that undifferentiated noumenon drives nature
• On the Basis of Morality (essay), makes up quarter

Socrates

An ancient Greek philosopher, perhaps the most important (ancient Greek philosophers are divided into pre-Socratic and Socratic). He was the teacher of Plato and produced no written works himself. We only know about him from Plato’s Socratic dialogues. He would go around Athens engaging in question-and-answer sessions to search for truth and draw out contradictions (the “Socratic method”). Athens put him on trial for corrupting the city’s youth, and he was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock.

For more info…

Herbert Spencer

Victorian founder of Social Darwinism.

He coined the term “survival of the fittest”.

Social Statics

• applied Lamarck’s evolutionary theory to society
• predicted that humanity would evolve away from government and into a state of perfect equilibrium (Social Darwinism)
• introduced the “first principle” of equal freedom
• men have a “right to ignore the state” if it does not follow the law of equal freedom

System of Synthetic Philosophy: Conditions Essential to Human Happiness

• 10 volumes
• discussed the “coercive” aspects of reform movements
• described a namesake “law of multiplicity”
• included several chapters about biology

Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Political

• “What knowledge is of most worth?”

Man Versus the State

• parliaments suffer from a “great political superstition”
• argued for small governments that allow for voluntary self-improvement
• nothing should infringe on the “laws of life”
• “over-legislation” and the army of bureaucracy led to a “New Toryism” akin to socialism

Baruch Spinoza

A Jewish pantheist and rationalist.

By viewing everything “sub specie aeternitatis”, “from an eternal perspective”, he sought precision akin to that of Euclid’s Elements.

Contra Descartes’ dualism, he was the first neutral monist of note.

Tractacus Theologico-Politicus

Ethics

• equated God with Nature
• divided according to a “geometric”scheme
• Part IV, “Of Human Bondage”
  • a person is always “prey to his passions” to the point that he is like a slave to him

Thales

A pre-Socratic thinker from the Greek colony of Miletus, the “first philosopher”. He rejected mythical explanations of the universe’s natures and claimed that the first principle of all existence is water, founding the Milesian school, which included Anaximander and Anaximenes.

He was also a civil engineer and a mathematician. He discovered that if a circle goes through three vertices of a triangle and one side fo the triangle is a diameter of the circle, then the triangle is a right triangle.

For more info…

Alexis de Tocqueville

A French visitor to 1830s-era United States.

Democracy in America

• researched with Gustave de Beaumont
• expanded scope beyond the original subject of prison reform
• contrasted groups of intrigue with those which “cling to principles rather than to their consequences” to define small and great political parties
• warned that by concentrating power in “an irresponsible person” constitutional democracies could fall prey to “soft despotism”
• “Present and Probable Future Conditions of the Indian Tribes” (chapter)
  • “I myself met with the last of the Iroquois, who were begging alms”

The Old Regime and the Revolution

• analyzed France under Louis XVI
• written late in his career

Lionel Trilling

The Liberal Imagination

• “Freud and Literature”
  • Freud’s theories “naturalize poetry”
  • describes Freud’s theories as a culmination of Romantic literature

Lao Tzu

A quasi-mythical thinker of the Taoist tradition, represented in tradition as an old man with a donkey. He is one of the Three Pure Ones of Taoism. He created the concept of tao, the way and wu wei, a life of non-action in accordance with the Tao. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Tao te Ching

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A logical positivist philosopher.

He created the beetle-in-a-box thought experiment to prove that private languages don’t exist.

He articulated the “picture theory of languages.”

He claimed that if a lion learned how to speak, humans would not be able to understand it.

He considered a “Robinson Crusoe” type figure who had been isolated from birth.

“That which we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.”

Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus

Philosophical Investigations

Blue and Brown Books

• compilations of his lectures

Zeno of Citium

The founder of Stoicism. He taught at the “painted porch” in Athens, which is how the philosophy got its name.

Zeno of Elea

A student of Paramenides who founded the Eleatic school. He is known for his paradoxes, including the arrow in flight and the race between Achilles and a tortoise. They show physical movement is impossible since any attempt to travel a distance must be preced by moving half that distance, which must be preceded by moving that half of half that distance, and so on.

For more info…