Biography of great thinkers great

He is widely regarded as one of the most influential persons who ever lived, offering insights into all aspects of human knowledge. Euclid BC Greek mathematician. Roman statesman, lawyer and political philosopher. Cicero wrote an influential account of individual liberty, republican government and the natural rights of man. His works were important to the Renaissance and Era of Revolutions.

Marcus Aurelius — — Roman Emperor and philosopher. Al -Khwarizmi — Persian Mathematician. He also developed algebra, a new branch of mathematics. He spread a philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which stresses the underlying unity of creation — an important philosophical strand of Hinduism. Leonardo Da Vinci — Artist and biography of great thinkers great man.

Da Vinci made many scientific discoveries. A supreme polymath, Da Vinci investigated anatomy, geology, mathematics. He was an artist, sculptor and is credited with having an unprecedented imagination and ability to invent new ideas. William Shakespeare English poet and playwright. Galileo — Creating one of the first modern telescopes, Galileo revolutionised our understanding of the world supporting the earlier work of Copernicus.

His book Two New Sciences laid the groundwork for the science of Kinetics and strength of materials. Rene Descartes — French philosopher and mathematician. Descartes was an early exponent of rationalism and reason, laying an important framework for the European enlightenment. His use of logic and reason to address questions relating to religion were groundbreaking.

He also made significant discoveries in maths and calculus. Baruch Spinoza Jewish-Dutch philosopher. Spinoza was an influential rationalist, who saw an underlying unity in the universe. He was critical of religious scriptures and promoted a view that the Divine was in all, and the Universe was ordered — despite its apparent contradictions.

John Locke — English political philosopher, Locke was a leading philosopher and political theorist, who had a profound impact on liberal political thought, around the time of the American and French revolutions. He is credited with ideas, such as the social contract — the idea government needs to be with the consent of the governed. Locke also argued for liberty, religious tolerance and rights to life and property.

Sir Isaac Newton Newton made studies in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. In his Principia Mathematicapublished inhe laid the foundations for classical mechanics, explaining the law of gravity and the Laws of Motion. Newtonian thought dominated the science of physics into the Twentieth Century. Voltaire — — French philosopher and critic.

Best known for his work Candide which epitomises his satire and criticisms of social convention. Voltaire was instrumental in promoting Republican ideas and satirised the excess of the absolute monarchy of France. Benjamin Franklin American politician and scientist. Benjamin Franklin played a key role in promoting the idea of a United States.

He left a lasting legacy on American society. Whether or not his thought led to the terrible Campaign of Terror that succeeded the French Revolution remains a question. Rousseau was not a big fan of philosophers. He viewed them negatively, believing that they were primarily responsible for societal deterioration and despotism. Rousseau was a firm believer in individual liberty.

He believed that it was human nature to do good for others. His metaphysics and speculative philosophy are founded on a reasonable comprehension of the idea of nature. His practical philosophy, which includes morals and political philosophy, is founded on the notion of liberty. Both of these streams of philosophy have had a huge impact on later philosophical history.

His moral concept is one of liberation. Moral assessment and moral duty would be inconceivable without human freedom, Kant believed. Kant argues that if a person is unable to behave in any other way, his or her actions have no moral value. He also argues that every human being is born with a morality that alerts them to the fact that the moral law governs them.

However, Kant argues that the complete natural world is subjected to a rigorous Newtonian biography of great thinkers great principle, suggesting that all of our physical activities are produced by antecedent events rather than by our free will. So, how can liberty and morality coexist? She met an American explorer in Paris in while celebrating the French Revolution, and their liberal and unmarried escapades together resulted in her first daughter.

She married William Godwin, the prominent British anarchist, a few years later. They married right away, with her feminist view of marriage as the basis of all female subjugation and his anarchic perspective of marriage as exactly this type of shackling social norm that needed to be eradicated. Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft c. Mary died of septicemia just 10 days after giving birth to her daughter.

She was a true child of the French Revolution, anticipating a new era of reason and charity. Mary took up the mission of assisting women in achieving a better life for themselves, their children, and their spouses. Of course, it took more than years for civilization to begin to implement her ideas. Auguste Comte was a well-known French philosopher who is credited with founding the field of sociology.

He is also recognized as the first philosopher of science in some situations. In an attempt to alleviate the societal melancholy of the French Revolution, he even devised the renowned Positive Philosophy. Auguste Comte established a social ideology founded on scientific grounds. He began giving lectures to a group of prominent French thinkers in However, he had a nervous collapse after roughly a third of his lecture series.

Despite spending a lengthy period in the hospital, he was nevertheless able to complete one of his main works. In this essay, he maintained that society, like the material realm, has its own set of rules. Ayn Rand was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. She went to North America after finishing university in Russia in She became well-known as a supporter of Objectivist philosophy after distinguishing herself as a novelist.

Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. She penned mainstream and scientific philosophy, which she presented in both fictional and non-fictional formats. These philosophical novels are based on subjects she explored in nonfiction articles and books in the s and s, including epistemology, virtue theory, economic and political rights, and aesthetics.

Her opinions were divisive during her lifetime and remain so today. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is regarded as a seminal text in the history of feminism. Beauvoir had previously denied being a feminist, but once the powerful Second Sex became pivotal in the field of feminism, she finally accepted it. The book had a huge impact, paving the way for the next wave of feminism in Canada, North America, Australia, and other parts of the world.

He is also a former education editor and reporter for U. Noam Chomsky. Erasmus of Rotterdam. John Locke. Francis Bacon. Auguste Comte. Charles-Louis de Secondat. John Dewey. William James. John Stuart Mill. Socrates Getty Images. Aristotle Getty Images. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. John Locke Getty Images. Adam Smith Getty Images.

Biography of great thinkers great

Mary Wollstonecraft Getty Images. Beginning with A Treatise of Human NatureHume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy.

He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism. However, his performance using our Ranking Analytics made this inclusion unavoidable. For more on the sometimes overlapping phenomena of influence and infamy, take a look at our discussion on the undeniable influence of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. From toWittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the relatively slim page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung Logical-Philosophical Treatise which appeared, together with an English translation, in under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the book Philosophical Investigations. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy.

His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. He is considered one of the fundamental figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from aesthetics to ontology to politics, both in the analytic and continental tradition.

An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the and the. The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism; of which he argued that reason is found in God.

His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction.

Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and biography of great thinkers great. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

Russell was also a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.

His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology.

He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels.