Plato-The son of Ariston (his father) and Perictione (his mother), Plato was born in the year after

the death of the great Athenian statesman Pericles. His brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus are
portrayed as interlocutors in Plato’s masterpiece the Republic, and his half brother Antiphon
figures in the Parmenides. Plato’s family was aristocratic and distinguished: his father’s side
claimed descent from the god Poseidon, and his mother’s side was related to the lawgiver Solon
(c. 630–560 BCE). Less creditably, his mother’s close relatives Critias and Charmides were
among the Thirty Tyrants who seized power in Athens and ruled briefly until the restoration of
democracy in 403.

Plato as a young man was a member of the circle around Socrates. Since the latter wrote nothing,
what is known of his characteristic activity of engaging his fellow citizens (and the occasional
itinerant celebrity) in conversation derives wholly from the writings of others, most notably Plato
himself. The works of Plato commonly referred to as “Socratic” represent the sort of thing the
historical Socrates was doing. He would challenge men who supposedly had expertise about
some facet of human excellence to give accounts of these matters—variously of courage, piety,
and so on, or at times of the whole of “virtue”—and they typically failed to maintain their
position. Resentment against Socrates grew, leading ultimately to his trial and execution on
charges of impiety and corrupting the youth in 399. Plato was profoundly affected by both the
life and the death of Socrates. The activity of the older man provided the starting point of Plato’s
philosophizing. Moreover, if Plato’s Seventh Letter is to be believed (its authorship is disputed),
the treatment of Socrates by both the oligarchy and the democracy made Plato wary of entering
public life, as someone of his background would normally have done.

After the death of Socrates, Plato may have traveled extensively in Greece, Italy, and Egypt,
though on such particulars the evidence is uncertain. The followers of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500
BCE) seem to have influenced his philosophical program (they are criticized in the Phaedo and
the Republic but receive respectful mention in the Philebus). It is thought that his three trips to
Syracuse in Sicily (many of the Letters concern these, though their authenticity is controversial)
led to a deep personal attachment to Dion (408–354 BCE), brother-in-law of Dionysius the Elder
(430–367 BCE), the tyrant of Syracuse. Plato, at Dion’s urging, apparently undertook to put into
practice the ideal of the “philosopher-king” (described in the Republic) by educating Dionysius
the Younger; the project was not a success, and in the ensuing instability Dion was murdered.

Plato’s Academy, founded in the 380s, was the ultimate ancestor of the modern university (hence
the English term academic); an influential centre of research and learning, it attracted many men
of outstanding ability. The great mathematicians Theaetetus (417–369 BCE) and Eudoxus of
Cnidus (c. 395–c. 342 BCE) were associated with it. Although Plato was not a research
mathematician, he was aware of the results of those who were, and he made use of them in his
own work. For 20 years Aristotle was also a member of the Academy. He started his own school,
the Lyceum, only after Plato’s death, when he was passed over as Plato’s successor at the
Academy, probably because of his connections to the court of Macedonia.

Because Aristotle often discusses issues by contrasting his views with those of his teacher, it is
easy to be impressed by the ways in which they diverge. Thus, whereas for Plato the crown of
ethics is the good in general, or Goodness itself (the Good), for Aristotle it is the good for human
beings; and whereas for Plato the genus to which a thing belongs possesses a greater reality than
the thing itself, for Aristotle the opposite is true. Plato’s emphasis on the ideal, and Aristotle’s on
the worldly, informs Raphael’s depiction of the two philosophers in the School of Athens (1508–
11). But if one considers the two philosophers not just in relation to each other but in the context
of the whole of Western philosophy, it is clear how much Aristotle’s program is continuous with
that of his teacher. (Indeed, the painting may be said to represent this continuity by showing the
two men conversing amicably.) In any case, the Academy did not impose a dogmatic orthodoxy
and in fact seems to have fostered a spirit of independent inquiry; at a later time it took on a
skeptical orientation.

Plato once delivered a public lecture, “On the Good,” in which he mystified his audience by
announcing, “the Good is one.” He better gauged his readers in his dialogues, many of which are
accessible, entertaining, and inviting. Although Plato is well known for his negative remarks
about much great literature, in the Symposium he depicts literature and philosophy as the
offspring of lovers, who gain a more lasting posterity than do parents of mortal children. His own
literary and philosophical gifts ensure that something of Plato will live on for as long as readers
engage with his works.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an
Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating
psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian
Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon
completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an
affiliated professor in 1902.Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice
there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United
Kingdom in 1939.

In creating psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free
association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process.
Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus
complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory.[8] His analysis of dreams as wish-
fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the
underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the
unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-
ego.[9] Freud postulated the existence of libido, an energy with which mental processes and
structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of
compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt.[10] In his later work Freud developed
a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.

Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains

influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and across the humanities. As
such, it continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic
efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause.[11]
Nonetheless, Freud's work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. In
the words of W. H. Auden's 1940 poetic tribute, by the time of Freud's death, he had become "a
whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our

Rule

The most familiar version of the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you.” Moral philosophy has barely taken notice of the golden rule in its own terms despite
the rule’s prominence in commonsense ethics. This article approaches the rule, therefore,
through the rubric of building its philosophy, or clearing a path for such construction. The
approach reworks common belief rather than elaborating an abstracted conception of the rule’s
logic. Working “bottom-up” in this way builds on social experience with the rule and allows us
to clear up its long-standing misinterpretations. With those misconceptions go many of the rule’s
criticisms.

David Hume (1711 - 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian of the Age of
Enlightenment. He was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and, along with John
Locke and Bishop George Berkeley, one of the three main figureheads of the influential British
Empiricism movement. David Hume, (born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711, Edinburgh,
Scotland—died August 25, 1776, Edinburgh), Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and
essayist known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.

Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature. Taking
the scientific method of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton as his model and building on the
epistemology of the English philosopher John Locke, Hume tried to describe how the mind
works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that no theory of reality is possible;
there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience. Despite the enduring impact of his
theory of knowledge, Hume seems to have considered himself chiefly as a moralist.

René Descartes

René Descartes French: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian";[10] 31 March 1596 – 11
February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Dubbed the father of
modern Western philosophy, much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his
writingswhich are studied closely to this day. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about
20 years (1629–49) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States
Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He is
generally considered one of the most notable intellectual representatives of the Dutch Golden
Age.

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university

philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian
coordinate system (see below) was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical
geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, used in the discovery of infinitesimal
calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.

Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. He frequently set his views
apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Les passions de l'âme, a
treatise on the early modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, Descartes goes
so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters
before". His best known philosophical statement is "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je
suis; I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discours de la méthode (1637; written in French
but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644;
written in Latin).
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of
the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed
from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into
matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining
natural phenomena.[15] In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of
creation.

Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by
Spinoza and Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes,
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza[16] and Descartes were all well-versed in
mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as
well.

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.”

a. Empiricism

Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, argued that human knowledge originates in our
sensations. Locke, for instance, was a representative realist about the external world and placed
great confidence in the ability of the senses to inform us of the properties that empirical objects
really have in themselves. Locke had also argued that the mind is a blank slate, or a tabula rasa,
that becomes populated with ideas by its interactions with the world. Experience teaches us
everything, including concepts of relationship, identity, causation, and so on. Kant argues that
the blank slate model of the mind is insufficient to explain the beliefs about objects that we have;
some components of our beliefs must be brought by the mind to experience.

b. Rationalism

The Rationalists, principally Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, approached the problems of
human knowledge from another angle. They hoped to escape the epistemological confines of the
mind by constructing knowledge of the external world, the self, the soul, God, ethics, and science
out of the simplest, indubitable ideas possessed innately by the mind. Leibniz in particular,
thought that the world was knowable a priori, through an analysis of ideas and derivations done
through logic. Supersensible knowledge, the Rationalists argued, can be achieved by means of
reason. Descartes believed that certain truths, that "if I am thinking, I exist," for example, are
invulnerable to the most pernicious skepticism. Armed with the knowledge of his own existence,
Descartes hoped to build a foundation for all knowledge.

Thomas Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas OP (/əˈkwaɪnəs/; Italian: Tommaso d'Aquino, lit. 'Thomas of Aquino';
1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian[6][7] Dominican friar, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the
Church. He was an immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of
scholasticism, within which he is also known as the Doctor Angelicus and the Doctor
Communis.[8] The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in
present-day Lazio.

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. Unlike many currents in the Church of the
time,[9] Thomas embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle—whom he called "the
Philosopher"—and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of
Christianity.[10] His best-known works are the Disputed Questions on Truth (1256-59), the
Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265), and the Summa Theologiae (1265-1274). His
commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle also form an important part of his body of work.
Furthermore, Thomas is distinguished for his eucharistic hymns, which form a part of the
Church's liturgy.

The Catholic Church honors Thomas Aquinas as a saint and regards him as the model teacher for
those studying for the priesthood, and indeed the highest expression of both natural reason and
speculative theology. In modern times, under papal directives, the study of his works was long
used as a core of the required program of study for those seeking ordination as priests or
deacons, as well as for those in religious formation and for other students of the sacred
disciplines (philosophy, Catholic theology, church history, liturgy, and canon law).[12]

Thomas Aquinas is considered one of the Catholic Church's greatest theologians and
philosophers. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when
the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the
special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."[13] The English
philosopher Anthony Kenny considers Thomas to be "one of the dozen greatest philosophers of
the western world".