ethical philosophers

Socrates

470 BCE

-Born in deme alopece, Athens - Died at the age of 71
He is the inventor of the so-called Socratic method or elenchus which remains one of the most commonly used approaches not only to answer the fundamental questions of philosophy but it also serves as a tool for scientific research.
- A classical Greek philosopher credited as one of the founders of western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the western ethical traditional of thought.

Plato

428 BCE

Born and died in Athens, Greece
- He uses these dialogues to explore philosophical concepts such as government, love, and the soul.
- Was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the development of Western philosophy.
-Plato wrote predominantly in the style of dialogues.

Aristotle

384 BCE

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.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.

Augustine

354 BCE

St. Augustine is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism.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.

Thomas Aquinas

1225

St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian philosopher and theologian of the Medieval period. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology at the peak of Scholasticism in Europe, and the founder of the Thomistic school of philosophy and theology.The philosophy of Aquinas has exerted enormous influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially that of the Roman Catholic Church, but also Western philosophy in general.

Francis Bacon

1561

was an English philosopher, statesman, essayist and scientist of the late Renaissance period. He was an astute and ambitious politician in the turbulent and poisonous political climate of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. His major contribution to philosophy was his application of inductive reasoning (generalizations based on individual instances), the approach used by modern science, rather than the a priori method of medieval Scholasticism and Aristotelianism.

Rene Descartes

1596

was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and writer of the Age of Reason. He has been called the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy can be seen as a response to his writings. His contribution to mathematics was also of the first order, as the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system and the founder of analytic geometry, crucial to the invention of calculus and mathematical analysis.

John Locke

1632

He uses a theory of natural rights to argue that governments have obligations to their citizens, have only limited powers over their citizens, and can ultimately be overthrown by citizens under certain circumstances. He also provided powerful arguments in favor of religious toleration. This article attempts to give a broad overview of all key areas of Locke’s thought.

Immanuel Kant

1724

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. 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.

Goerge Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1770

is one of the greatest systematic thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. In addition to epitomizing German idealist philosophy, Hegel boldly claimed that his own system of philosophy represented an historical culmination of all previous philosophical thought. Hegel's overall encyclopedic system is divided into the science of Logic, the philosophy of Nature, and the philosophy of Spirit.

Charles Robert Darwin

1809

Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin Darwinian theory, it originally included the broad concepts of transmutation of species or of evolution which gained general scientific acceptance after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, including concepts which predated Darwin's theories. It subsequently referred to the specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann barrier

John Dewey

1859

He was also one of the fathers of Functionalism (or Functional Psychology), and a leading representative of the progressive movement in American education during the first half of the 20th Century.He developed a broad body of work encompassing virtually all of the main areas of philosophy, and wrote extensively on social issues in popular publications, gaining a reputation as a leading social commentator of his time.