Great Ideas of Philosophy

Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715–1771): French philosopher who, in his A Treatise on Man, puts forth a radicalenvironmentalism, which holds that our essence does not precede our existence and experiences in the world; rather,it is a record of those experiences.Herodotus (5 th century B.C.): Greek scholar said to be the first historian in the modern accepted sense of the term;the “father of historical scholarship.” Known for his treatise The Persian Wars.Hippocrates (469–399 B.C.): Greek physician considered to be the father of modern medicine.Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): British philosopher who rejected Cartesian dualism and believed in the mortality ofthe soul; rejected free will in favor of a determinism that treats freedom as being able to do what one desires; andrejected Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy in favor of the “new” philosophy of Galileo and Gassendi, whichlargely treats the world as matter in motion. Hobbes is perhaps most famous for his political philosophy, whichmaintained that men in a state of nature, without civil government, are in a war of all against all in which life ishardly worth living. The way out of this desperate state is to make a social contract and establish the state to keeppeace and order.Homer (~ 750/800 B.C.): Blind Greek poet who wrote about the Trojan War, considered a defining moment inGreek history and presumed to have concluded a half-millennium earlier. Best known for his two epic poems TheIliad and The Odyssey.David Hume (1711–1776): One of the most influential philosophers to have written in the English language, Humeoffered an experiential theory of knowledge, morality, and religion. He made more credible the notion that a bonafide science of the mind was within reach.T. H. Huxley (1825–1895): British physician and surgeon who was one of the first adherents to Charles Darwin’stheory of evolution by natural selection; Huxley did more than anyone else to advance the theory’s acceptanceamong scientists and the public alike.Isocrates (446–338 B.C.): Greek philosopher who lived and wrote in the same cultural situation as Plato. Isocratesheld that reality is immediate human experience and metaphysical speculation is a waste of time and energy. He alsosaid that all knowledge is tentative and values are relative. Composed the Panegyricus, a work that raises thequestion of whether philosophy is something that just the Greeks do.William James (1842–1910): American psychologist and philosopher who maintained that every idea belongs tosomeone, that mental life is not an empty container filled with experiences agglomerating with one another. Thus,the external world is chosen for the content that will be experienced and associated.Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961): A younger colleague of Sigmund Freud, Jung divided the psyche into three parts:the ego, or conscious mind; the personal unconscious, which includes anything that is not currently conscious butcan be; and finally, the collective unconscious, or reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledgewith which we are all born but are never directly conscious of. The contents of the collective unconscious are calledarchetypes, unlearned tendencies to experience things in a certain way. The archetype has no form of its own, but itacts as an “organizing principle” on the things we see or do.Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): Kant’s most original contribution to philosophy is his Copernican Revolution thatthe representation makes the object possible, rather than the object making the representation possible. Thisintroduced the human mind as an active originator of experience, rather than a passive recipient of perception.Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751): French philosopher whose naturalism tends toward materialism. HisMan—A Machine extends to its logical conclusion the materialistic drift of Descartes’s own psychology.Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716): Offered a significant critique of the Lockean view in his New Essayson Human Understanding, which concluded that an organizing and rationally functioning mind must be present forthere to be coherent experience and that nothing in the operation of the biological senses can constitute a thought oran idea.Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, engineer, mathematician, and philosopher who is widelyconsidered to represent the Renaissance ideal.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 45