Influential figures in western philosophy
...can we possibly refuse to admit that there exist in each of us the same generic parts and characteristics as are found in the state? For I presume the state has not received them
from any other source. It would be ridiculous to imagine that the presence of the spirited element in cities is not to be traced to individuals, wherever this character is imputed
to the people, as it is to the natives of Thrace, and Scythia, and generally speaking, of the northern countries; or the love of knowledge, which would be chiefly attributed to our
own country; or the love of riches, which people would especially connect with the Phoenicians and the Egyptians.
from Book IV of Plato's "The Republic"
"Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are
human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned
with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able
to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint
of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment."
Immanuel Kant
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum
proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every
province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain,
and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of
the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every
object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man
is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and
fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him,
and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish
foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg
presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.
From
Emerson's famous Essay ~ History
This last excerpt is included, in expanded form, on our Human Nature - Tripartite Soul page, alongside other evidences in support
of such a three-way action of what might be called "Human Existential Being" from World Faith sources, Plato, Pythagoras and Shakespeare.
Human Being seems
to be rather "Tripartite"
Philosophy and Social Change
Our shortlist of the most dramatically
influential philosphers and greatest thinkers in history of western philosophy is comprised as follows
The links below bear some relationship to the
dramatically influential figures and great thinkers and writers on
our shortlist -
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John Locke
Philosophy local menu
Karl Marx and
Communist Ideology
Philosophy local menu
Adam Smith
Philosophy local menu
Charles Darwin
Philosophy local menu
Immanuel Kant
Philosophy local menu
Soren Kierkegaard and
John Paul Sartre
Friedrick Nietzsche and
Arthur Schopenhauer
Philosophy local menu