Great Ideas of Philosophy

Socrates (c. 469–399 B.C.): Greek philosopher committed to objectifying the self and holding it up to scrutiny inorder to examine human nature. Developed the Socratic method, which tests every assumption for its grounding andimplications.Sophocles (496–406 B.C.): One of the great playwrights of the Greek golden age; known for his tragedy Antigone.Herbert Spencer (1820–1903): British philosopher and sociologist who supplied the phrase “survival of the fittest”and gave Darwinism its most portentous set of social implications.Alan Turing (1912–1954): Mathematician and cryptographer who developed the concept of the computablealgorithm.Voltaire (1694 –1778): French Enlightenment writer and philosopher who maintained that our experience is the keyto understanding human nature and the nature of the world around us. His real name was François Marie Arouet.Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913): Worked with Charles Darwin to develop the theory of evolution by naturalselection. Wallace concluded that he could not see natural selection at work in three domains: (1) abstract thought,which seems to serve no evolutionary purpose; (2) art, in which resources are willingly squandered in the service ofthe merely beautiful; and (3) moral thought and ethics, where we sacrifice our own most cherished interests in theservice of others.Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951): Austrian philosopher whose The Tractatus stated that the world consistsentirely of independent, simple facts out of which complex ones are constructed. Language has as its purpose thestating of facts by picturing these facts.48©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership