c
a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece.

Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him

as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition.According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales.Thales attempted to explain
natural phenomena without reference to mythology and was tremendously influential in this respect. Almost all of the other pre-Socratic philosophers
follow him in attempting to provide an explanation of ultimate substance, change, and the existence of the world -- without reference to mythology.
Those philosophers were also influential, and eventually Thales' rejection of mythological explanations became an essential idea for the scientific
revolution. He was also the first to define general principles and set forth hypotheses, and as a result has been dubbed the "Father of Science".



 was an Archaic Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher also known as the father of philosophy active in the latter half of the 6th century BC. One
of the three Milesian philosophers, he is identified as a younger friend or student of Anaximander. Anaximenes, like others in his school of thought,
practiced material monism. This tendency to identify one specific underlying reality made up of a material thing constitutes the bulk of the contributions
for which Anaximenes is most famed.

   



Anaximenes used his observations and reasoning to provide causes for other natural phenomena on the earth as well. Earthquakes he asserted were
the result either of lack of moisture, which causes the earth to break apart because of how parched it is, or of overabundance thereof, which also
causes cracks in the earth because of the excess of water. In either case the earth becomes weakened by its cracks and hills collapse, causing
earthquakes. Lightning is also caused by a violent separation, this time of clouds by winds to create a bright, fire-like flash. Rainbows are formed when
[11]
densely compressed air is touched by the rays of the sun. These examples further show how Anaximenes like the other Milesians looked for the
broader picture in nature, seeking unifying causes for diversely occurring events rather than treating each one on a case-by-case basis or attributing
them to gods or a personified nature.


  was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished
parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he
led, and still more from the riddling nature of his philosophy and his contempt for humankind in general, he was called "The Obscure," and the
"Weeping Philosopher."

Heraclitus is famous for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, as stated in his famous saying, "You cannot step twice into the same
river." He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down is one and the same," existing things being characterized by pairs of
contrary properties, and other explorations of the concept of dualism. His cryptic utterance that "all things come to be in accordance with this _
,
has been the subject of numerous interpretations.




 was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia; Milet in modern Turkey. He belonged to the Milesian school
and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes
and Pythagoras amongst his pupils.

Anaximander was one of the earliest Greek thinkers at the start of the Axial Age, the period from approximately 700 BC to 200 BC, during which
similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India, Iran, the Near East, and Ancient Greece. He was an early proponent of science and tried to
observe and explain different aspects of the universe, with a particular interest in its origins, claiming that nature is ruled by laws, just like human
societies, and anything that disturbs the balance of nature does not last long. Like many thinkers of his time, Anaximander's contributions to philosophy
relate to many disciplines.



 was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of
philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides describes two
views of reality. In c
 c (a part of the poem), he explains how reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and
unchanging. In c
 
 , he explains the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful. These thoughts strongly influenced Plato, and
through him, the whole of Western philosophy.

Ä
 was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being
the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements. He also proposed powers called Love and Strife which would act as forces to
bring about the mixture and separation of the elements. These physical speculations were part of a history of the universe which also dealt with the
origin and development of life. Influenced by the Pythagoreans, he supported the doctrine of reincarnation. Empedocles is generally considered the last
Greek philosopher to record his ideas in verse. Some of his work still survives today, more so than in the case of any other Presocratic philosopher.
Empedocles' death was mythologized by ancient writers, and has been the subject of a number of literary treatments.


  was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus,
who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos.

His exact contributions are difficult to disentangle from his mentor Leucippus, as they are often mentioned together in texts. Largely ignored in Athens,
Democritus was nevertheless well-known to his fellow northern-born philosopher Aristotle. Plato is said to have disliked him so much that he wished all
his books burnt.Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science".



was an Ionian Greek philosopher and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of our information about
Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, thus very little reliable information is known about him. His followers pursued the religious rites
and practices developed by Pythagoras, and studied his philosophical theories. The Pythagorean meeting-places were burned, and Pythagoras was
forced to flee the city.

Pythagoras made influential contributions to philosophy and religious teaching in the late 6th century BC. He is often revered as a great mathematician,
mystic and scientist, and he is best known for the Pythagorean theorem which bears his name. However, because legend and obfuscation cloud his
work even more than with the other pre-Socratic philosophers, one can say little with confidence about his teachings, and some have questioned
whether he contributed much to mathematics and natural philosophy. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher, or lover of
wisdom, and Pythagorean ideas exercised a marked influence on Plato, and through him, all of Western philosophy.
 

 was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue ð 
, Plato credits him with
having invented the role of the professional sophist or teacher of virtue. He is also believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times
through his statement that man is the measure of all things. This idea was very revolutionary for the time and contrasting to other philosophical
doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside the human influence.

  

Protagoras was also renowned as a teacher who addressed subjects connected to virtue and political life. He was especially involved in the question of
whether virtue could be taught, a commonplace issue of 5th Century BC Greece. Rather than educators who offered specific, practical training in
rhetoric or public speaking, Protagoras attempted to formulate a reasoned understanding, on a very general level, of a wide range of human
phenomena. He also seems to have had an interest in 


, or the correct use of words.

His most famous saying is: "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not".

Protagoras was a proponent of agnosticism. In his lost work, 
 , he wrote: "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they
exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.

„
 was a Classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly
through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary
Aristophanes. Many would claim that Plato's dialogues are the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity.

Through his portrayal in Plato's dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who
also lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socratic method, or

 . It is Plato's Socrates that also made important and lasting
contributions to the fields of epistemology and logic, and the influence of his ideas and approach remains strong in providing a foundation for much
western philosophy that followed.

As one recent commentator has put it, Plato, the idealist, offers "an idol, a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of the 'Sun-God', a teacher
condemned for his teachings as a heretic. Yet, the 'real' Socrates, like many of the other Ancient philosophers, remains at best enigmatic and at worst
unknown.

c „
  



Forming an accurate picture of the historical Socrates and his philosophical viewpoints is problematic at best. This issue is known as the Socratic
problem.

Socrates did not write philosophical texts. The knowledge of the man, his life, and his philosophy is based on writings by his students and
contemporaries. Foremost among them is Plato; however, works by Xenophon, Aristotle, and Aristophanes also provide important insights. The
difficulty of finding the ³real´ Socrates arises because these works are often philosophical or dramatic texts rather than straightforward histories. Aside
from Thucydides and Xenophon, there are in fact no straightforward histories contemporary with Socrates that dealt with his own time and place. A
corollary of this is that sources that do mention Socrates do not necessarily claim to be historically accurate, and are often partisan.

However, it is also clear from other writings, and historical artifacts that Socrates was not simply a character, or invention, of Plato. The testimony of
Xenophon and Aristotle, alongside some of Aristophanes' work (especially c
 ), can be usefully engaged in fleshing out our perception of
Socrates beyond Plato's work.


 was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of
higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western
philosophy and science. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by his apparently unjust execution.

Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings
have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts.

Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, rhetoric and mathematics.


  

"Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Socrates often does, the reality of the material world.
In several dialogues, most notably the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most
people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the
hands to be real. In the c


, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses". In other
words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature
("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the
warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy
and religion.

  was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics,
metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates, Aristotle is
one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western
philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics.

Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although
they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late
nineteenth century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the
Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially Eastern Orthodox theology, and the
scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All
aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.

„
c 

 
 was an Italian priest of the Catholic Church in the Dominican Order, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian
in the tradition of scholasticism, known as    and  

  or    
 . He is frequently referred to as Thomas

because "Aquinas" refers to his residence rather than his surname. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of the
Thomistic school of philosophy and theology. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a
reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law and political theory.

Aquinas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the
„c

 and the „ 

. One of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and
philosopher.

  

By profession, Aquinas was a theologian rather than a philosopher. Indeed he nowhere characterizes himself as a philosopher, and the references to
philosophers found in his own work refer to pagans rather than Christians. He was, nonetheless, a masterfully skilled philosopher. Much of his work
bears upon philosophical topics, and in this sense may be characterized as philosophical. Aquinas' philosophical thought has exerted enormous
influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially that of the Roman Catholic Church, extending to Western philosophy in general. Aquinas stands
as a vehicle and modifier of Aristotelianism, Augustinian Neoplatonism and Proclean Neoplatonism.

Ä 


Aquinas believed "that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. However,
he believed that human beings have the natural capacity to know many things without special divine revelation, even though such revelation occurs
from time to time, "especially in regard to [topics of] faith.

„  was Bishop of Hippo Regius. He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province.

In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus After his conversion to Christianity and
baptism, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He
believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom and framed the concepts of original sin and just war.

When the Roman Empire in the West was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Church as a spiritual City of God , distinct
from the material Earthly City.His thought profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's    was closely identified with the church,
the community that worshipped God.


 was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant was the last influential philosopher of modern
Europe in the classic sequence of the theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment beginning with thinkers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David
[1]
Hume.

Kant created a new perspective in philosophy which had widespread influences on philosophy continuing through to the 21st century. He published
important works on epistemology, as well as works relevant to religion, law, and history. One of his most prominent works is the 
 ð


 , an investigation into the limitations and structure of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and
highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works of his maturity are the 
 ð
 , which concentrates on
ethics, and the 
 

, which investigates aesthetics and teleology.

Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed through epistemology.He suggested that by understanding the sources and limits of human
knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that
object. He concluded that all objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in
terms of causality ± which he concluded that it does ± then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a
cause or an effect. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics cannot be answered by the human mind, but the sciences are firmly
grounded in laws of the mind.

Kant¶s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The
philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer each saw themselves as correcting and expanding the Kantian system, thus bringing about
various forms of German idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy, influencing both analytic and continental philosophy.

     
! "  was a 19th-century German philosopher and classical philologist. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and
beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, the eternal
recurrence, and the will to power.

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.


 #$%  
%   


The statement "God is dead", occurring in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in c
 „

), has become one of his best-known remarks. On
the basis of it, most commentators regard Nietzsche as an atheist; others suggest that this statement reflects a more subtle understanding of divinity. In
Nietzsche's view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively 'killed' the Christian
God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years.

Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of
objective truth. Instead we would retain only our own multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the name "perspectivism".

Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life
lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas
has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which
he can orient himself. Developing this idea, Nietzsche wrote c „

 , therein introducing the concept of a value-creating Übermensch.
According to Lampert, "the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism Zarathustra's gift of the superman is given to a
mankind not aware of the problem to which the superman is the solution.

  „ was an English philosopher, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human
mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics,
political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. He is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in
ð

  
, after reading Charles Darwin's 
 
 „


. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended
evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.

Ä 

The first clear articulation of Spencer¶s evolutionary perspective occurred in his essay, 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', published in Chapman's




 in 1857, and which later formed the basis of the ð

 
„
 ð  
 . Spencer posited that all
structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied
by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed, throughout the
cosmos.

This attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different from that to be found in Darwin¶s 
 „


 which was published two
years later. Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalized Darwin¶s work on natural selection. But although
after reading Darwin's work he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' as his own term for Darwin's concept, and is often misrepresented as a thinker
who merely applied the Darwinian theory to society, he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection into his preexisting overall system.

Ä 
 
is a term applied to the work of a number of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, generally
held that the focus of philosophical thought should be to deal with the conditions of existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions,
[3][4]
responsibilities, and thoughts. The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, posthumously regarded as the father of existentialism,
maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of
many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.

Subsequent existential philosophers retain the emphasis on the individual, but differ, in varying degrees, on how one achieves and what constitutes a
fulfilling life, what obstacles must be overcome, and what external and internal factors are involved, including the potential consequences of the
existenceor non-existence of God. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in both style and content, as
too abstract and remote from concrete human experience. Existentialism became fashionable in the post-World War years as a way to reassert the
importance of human individuality and freedom.

Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by 19th-century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in
earlier centuries.

  

 
is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its utility in providing happiness or pleasure as summed among all
sentient beings. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome. The most influential
contributors to this ideology were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Utilitarianism was described by Bentham as "the


 


 or



 principle. Utility, the good to be maximized, has been defined by
various thinkers as happiness or pleasure, although preference utilitarians define it as the satisfaction of preferences. It may be described as a life
stance, with happiness or pleasure being of ultimate importance.

Utilitarianism can be characterised as a quantitative and reductionist approach to ethics. It can be contrasted with deontological ethics (which do not
regard the consequences of an act as being a determinant of its moral worth) and virtue ethics (which focuses on character), as well as with other
varieties of consequentialism.

In general usage, the term utilitarian refers to a somewhat narrow economic or pragmatic viewpoint. Philosophical utilitarianism, however, is a much
broader view that encompasses all aspects of people's lives.

c#  

 

i 

Act utilitarianism states that, when faced with a choice, we must first consider the likely consequences of potential actions and, from that, choose to do
what we believe will generate most pleasure.

þ

 




 




 

It has been argued that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism, because for any given rule, in the case where breaking the rule produces
more utility, the rule can be sophisticated by the addition of a sub-rule that handles cases like the exception. This process holds for all cases of
exceptions, and so the 'rules' will have as many 'sub-rules' as there are exceptional cases, which, in the end, makes an agent seek out whatever
outcome produces the maximum utility.

c&'

Two-level utilitarianism states that one should normally use 'intuitive' moral thinking, in the form of rule utilitarianism, because it usually maximizes
happiness. However there are some times when we must ascend to a higher 'critical' level of reflection in order to decide what to do, and must think as
an act utilitarian would.

 

The motive approach attempts to deal realistically with how human beings actually function psychologically.

!
 

!
   

 
requires us to promote the least amount of evil or harm, or to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest
number.


i


this type of utilitarianism falls victim to the Repugnant Conclusion, whereby large numbers of people with very low but non-negative utility values can be
seen as a better goal than a population of a less extreme size living in comfort. In other words, according to the theory, it is a moral good to breed more
people on the world for as long as total happiness rises.



 
is a sociopolitical movement that aims for a classless and stateless society structured upon communal ownership of property.

Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution and only possible after
a transitional stage develops the productive forces, leading to a superabundance of goods and services.

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless society, one where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue
are made in the best interests of the collective society with the interests of every member of society given equal weight in the practical decision-making
process in both the political and economic spheres of life. In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to the policies of the various communist
states, which were authoritarian governments that had centrally planned economies and ownership of all the means of production. Most communist
governments based their ideology on Marxism-Leninism.

As a political ideology, communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism, a broad group of economic and political philosophies that draw on
various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Communism
attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism.