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- Locke and Jeremy Bentham in England, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Condorcet in France, and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in colonial America all contributed to an evolving critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and to sketching the outline of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy.
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Who were the Big 5 Enlightenment thinkers?
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Mar 4, 2024 · The big five Enlightenment thinkers in terms of who inspired the most discussion were John Locke (natural rights and liberty), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a fairer society), Adam Smith (founder of modern economics), Immanuel Kant (turned philosophy upside down), and Thomas Paine (called for revolution).
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- Socrates. Socrates, often hailed as the father of Western philosophy, was a figure of monumental significance in the development of philosophical thought.
- Plato. Plato, born in Athens around 428 BC, was a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy. As a student of Socrates, he was deeply influenced by his teacher's ideas and methods, which he further developed and refined in his own philosophical system.
- Aristotle. Aristotle, born in 384 BC in the city of Stagira in northern Greece, was one of the most influential philosophers in history. A student of Plato's Academy, Aristotle would go on to tutor Alexander the Great and establish his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens.
- Pythagoras. Pythagoras, born around 570 BC on the island of Samos, was a philosopher and mathematician whose influence extends far beyond the realm of ancient Greece.
- Plato. Thanks to Plato, we know a lot about Socrates. Nevertheless, Plato made his own important contributions. Born around 427 B.C.E., Plato influenced Western philosophy by developing several of its many branches: epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.
- Aristotle. Aristotle is still considered one of the greatest thinkers in the areas of politics, psychology, and ethics. Like Plato, Aristotle was a prolific writer.
- Pericles. At the other end of ancient Greece was another strong leader working to grow the city of Athens. His name was Pericles. Pericles was born over 100 years before Alexander the Great, but he had a similar background.
- Pythagoras. If you’ve ever tried to find the area of a right triangle, you’ve likely had to use something called the Pythagorean theorem, which is named after the mathematician Pythagoras.
May 15, 2007 · Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997).
Aug 20, 2010 · There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung, key figures of which include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered through...
May 1, 2024 · Rene Descartes, French mathematician and philosopher, generally regarded as the founder of modern Western philosophy. He is known for his epistemological foundationalism as expressed in the cogito (‘I think, therefore I am’), his metaphysical dualism, and his rationalism based on innate ideas of mind, matter, and God.
Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics.
