Intro Sir Francis Bacon marked the turning point in European intellectual history where natural philosophy gave way to natural science. Since the ancient Greeks, the prevailing method of inquiry had been the use of logic, or argumentation. Aristotle had formulated a system of logic by which arguments could be evaluated and their implications teased out. It was a way of discovering the truth by rat... »
Intro If there is only one God, and the world is God’s creation, then the world must reflect God’s unity: there must be a single, unified cosmos under Divine rule. That has been the central theme of Islamic philosophy for over a millennium and a half, since the religion’s founding. In their insistence on unity, Islamic philosophers laid the groundwork for future attempts to synthesize various stra... »
Intro Archimedes was a Greek polymath: a major innovator in mathematics, geometry, physics, and engineering. He formulated the principle of leverage. He proved that fluids falling toward a central point will eventually form themselves into a sphere, an important contribution to the Ancient Greek hypothesis that the Earth was round (Christopher Columbus was by no means the first to this insight – b... »
I. Intro Historians have often pointed out that European intellectual culture has two origin stories: one sees Christianity as the guiding principle of Western philosophy, and finds its roots in Jerusalem; another sees the pagan Greek philosophers as its founders, and thus roots itself in Athens. Athens and Jerusalem suggest very different outlooks on life and the universe, and make very different... »
Intro A. Bronson Alcott was a teacher, social reformer a mentor to Transcendentalism’s movement’s leading figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Jane Addams. He was also the father of Louisa May Alcott, whose novel Little Women was based on her upbringing in his house. Alcott’s primary work was as a teacher, not a philosopher. His close friends, including Emerson and the editor Mar... »
I. Intro Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was the definition of a polymath. He was a prolific thinker whose ideas covered not only philosophy but mathematics, physics, biology, politics, medicine, religion, technology, and language. Some historians have dubbed him “the last universal genius” because of the sheer breadth of his thinking. He’s most famous for two things: his optimistic philosophical ou... »
I. Introduction For 2,400 years, Plato’s writings have been interpreted, re-interpreted, debated, and taught as the foundational issues and methods of Western philosophical discourse. Plato studied with, and represented in writing, Socrates, “the wisest man in the world.” He founded what some consider the first institution for higher learning, the Academy, where he taught Aristotle, whose ideas ... »
I. Intro René Descartes was the first modern rationalist, and one of the greatest practitioners of that school of thought. His most important contributions were in the field of mathematics, where he was the first to fuse algebra with geometry, single-handedly inventing the modern field of analytic geometry. This was a revolution in mathematics, and to this day we use a “Cartesian coordinate system... »
I. Intro Immanuel Kant was one of history’s most important philosophers, a broad-minded thinker who reconciled divergent strains of thought and influenced every generation of thinkers to come after him. He’s best remembered for his moral and epistemological ideas (more on that later), but he also set the stage for the rise of psychology, anthropology, and modern neuroscience. The modern scientific... »
I. Intro Aristotle may have been the most influential scientist and philosopher in the western world before Isaac Newton — for about 2,000 years that is — Aristotle’s empirical observations and careful analyses modeled the scientific method for all subsequent scientists. Moreover, his observations, such as in biology, were so extensive that some of them, such as the reproductive arm ... »