100 cards
Western philosophy begins in Athens with Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), a figure who never wrote a word yet shaped the entire subsequent tradition through his distinctive method of inquiry. Believing that written words could not adequately convey philosophical truth, Socrates preferred live dialectical conversation, the fa...
After more than a millennium of medieval scholasticism, philosophy was reborn in the seventeenth century with René Descartes (1596–1650), often called the Father of Modern Philosophy. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes introduced Cartesian doubt, a method of systematic skepticism in which he set aside ev...
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) responded to the standoff between rationalism and empiricism with what he called critical philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that although knowledge begins with experience, its structure is shaped by the mind's a priori categories. He drew a sharp line between phenomena, thi...
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the most influential utilitarian of the nineteenth century, refined an ethical tradition inherited from Bentham by adding qualitative distinctions to its quantitative framework. In Utilitarianism, Mill holds that actions are right in proportion as they promote happiness — understood as ple...
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) transformed philosophy of language twice over the course of his career. In the early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he proposed the picture theory of meaning: propositions are logical pictures of facts, and language mirrors the structure of reality. From this view comes the famous propo...
Confucius (551–479 BCE) shaped East Asian civilization through teachings collected in the Analects (Lunyu), a record compiled by his disciples. At the heart of his ethics stands Ren (仁), benevolence or humaneness, the central virtue of compassion and love for others, considered the foundation of all moral behavior. Cl...