Plato (427—347 B.C.E.

Plato is one of the world's best known and most widely read and studied philosophers.
He was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and he wrote in the middle
of the fourth century B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Though influenced primarily by Socrates,
to the extent that Socrates is usually the main character in many of Plato's writings, he
was also influenced by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans.
There are varying degrees of controversy over which of Plato's works are authentic, and
in what order they were written, due to their antiquity and the manner of their
preservation through time. Nonetheless, his earliest works are generally regarded as
the most reliable of the ancient sources on Socrates, and the character Socrates that
we know through these writings is considered to be one of the greatest of the ancient
philosophers.

Plato's middle to later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, are
generally regarded as providing Plato's own philosophy, where the main character in
effect speaks for Plato himself. These works blend ethics, political philosophy, moral
psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an interconnected and systematic
philosophy. It is most of all from Plato that we get the theory of Forms, according to
which the world we know through the senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal,
and unchanging world of the Forms. Plato's works also contain the origins of the familiar
complaint that the arts work by inflaming the passions, and are mere illusions. We also
are introduced to the ideal of "Platonic love:" Plato saw love as motivated by a longing
for the highest Form of beauty—The Beautiful Itself, and love as the motivational power
through which the highest of achievements are possible. Because they tended to
distract us into accepting less than our highest potentials, however, Plato mistrusted
and generally advised against physical expressions of love.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Philosopher, Journalist, Activist, Scholar, Educator, Women's Rights Activist

(1759–1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer who advocated for women's equality. Her
book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman pressed for educational reforms.

Feminist writer and intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in
London. Brought up by an abusive father, she left home and dedicated herself to a life
of writing. While working as a translator to Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts,
she published her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She died
10 days after her second daughter, Mary, was born.

Early Life and First Works

Feminist writer and intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in
Spitalfields, London. Her father was abusive and spent his somewhat sizable fortune on
a series of unsuccessful ventures in farming. Perturbed by the actions of her father and
by her mother’s death in 1780, Wollstonecraft set out to earn her own livelihood. In
1784, Mary, her sister Eliza and her best friend, Fanny, established a school in
Newington Green. From her experiences teaching, Wollstonecraft wrote the
pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).

When her friend Fanny died in 1785, Wollstonecraft took a position as governess for the
Kingsborough family in Ireland. Spending her time there to mourn and recover, she
eventually found she was not suited for domestic work. Three years later, she returned
to London and became a translator and an adviser to Joseph Johnson, a noted
publisher of radical texts. When Johnson launched the Analytical Review in 1788, Mary
became a regular contributor. Within four years, she published her most famous
work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the work, she clearly abhors
prevailing notions that women are helpless adornments of a household. Instead, she
states that society breeds "gentle domestic brutes” and that a confined existence makes
women frustrated and transforms them into tyrants over their children and servants. The
key, she purports, is educational reform, giving women access to the same educational
opportunities as men.

The ideas in her book were truly revolutionary at the time and caused tremendous
controversy. Wollstonecraft also wrote Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, which asserted
that women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend
otherwise.

Personal Life and Legacy

In 1792, while visiting friends in France, Wollstonecraft met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an
American timber merchant and adventurer. Taken by him, she soon became pregnant.
They named their daughter Fanny, after Mary’s best friend. While nursing her firstborn,
Wollstonecraft wrote a conservative critique of the French Revolution in An Historical
and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. She also wrote a
deeply personal travel narrative, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,
Norway and Denmark, which became her most popular book in the 1790s. After their
travels to Scandinavia, Imlay left her.

Mary recovered, finding new hope in a relationship with William Godwin, the founder of
philosophical anarchism. Despite their belief in the tyranny of marriage, the couple
eventually wed due to her pregnancy. In 1797, their daughter Mary (who later famously
wrote Frankenstein), was born. Ten days later, due to complications of childbirth,
Wollstonecraft died.

The life and legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft has been the subject of several biographies,
beginning with her husband’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1798). For many years, the scandalous aspects of her life (such as her two
children born out of wedlock) were more noted than her works. The 1900s brought
renewed interest in her writings. In 2011, her image was projected onto the Palace of
Westminster to raise support for a permanent statue of the author.
René Descartes (1596—1650)

René Descartes is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” This
title is justified due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian
philosophy prevalent at his time and to his development and promotion of the new,
mechanistic sciences. His fundamental break with Scholastic philosophy was twofold.
First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to doubt given their
reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace
their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic
model.
Descartes attempted to address the former issue via his method of doubt. His basic
strategy was to consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This
“hyperbolic doubt” then serves to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an
unprejudiced search for the truth. This clearing of his previously held beliefs then puts
him at an epistemological ground-zero. From here Descartes sets out to find something
that lies beyond all doubt. He eventually discovers that “I exist” is impossible to doubt
and is, therefore, absolutely certain. It is from this point that Descartes proceeds to
demonstrate God’s existence and that God cannot be a deceiver. This, in turn, serves to
fix the certainty of everything that is clearly and distinctly understood and provides the
epistemological foundation Descartes set out to find.
Once this conclusion is reached, Descartes can proceed to rebuild his system of
previously dubious beliefs on this absolutely certain foundation. These beliefs, which
are re-established with absolute certainty, include the existence of a world of bodies
external to the mind, the dualistic distinction of the immaterial mind from the body, and
his mechanistic model of physics based on the clear and distinct ideas of geometry.
This points toward his second, major break with the Scholastic Aristotelian tradition in
that Descartes intended to replace their system based on final causal explanations with
his system based on mechanistic principles. Descartes also applied this mechanistic
framework to the operation of plant, animal and human bodies, sensation and the
passions. All of this eventually culminating in a moral system based on the notion of
“generosity.”
The presentation below provides an overview of Descartes’ philosophical thought as it
relates to these various metaphysical, epistemological, religious, moral and scientific
issues, covering the wide range of his published works and correspondence.