Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide to the Ideas of 100 Great Thinkers

by Jeremy Harwood

Overview

From philosophy’s founding fathers like Thales, Socrates, and Plato to great minds of the post-modern era like Sartre, Ayer, and Feyerabend, this essential guide distills the thoughts of the world’s most influential minds and explains their answers to some of philosophy’s key questions. Is there a Supreme Being? Who am I? What is truth? Do we have free will? Why do bad things happen? How should we live? Is death the end of everything? What is the meaning of life?

Arranged from the ancient world to the present day, each philosopher’s key ideas, notable works and pronouncements are encapsulated in a series of succinct , easy-to-read biographies, accompanied by illustrations, at-a-glance fact panels and thought-provoking quotations, making this the ideal beginner’s guide for those wanting to get to grips with this fascinating but often daunting subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623652647
Publisher:	Quercus
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jeremy Harwood has written widely on many historical topics, ranging from key developments in human thought to history's unresolved mysteries. Among his recent books are five volumes surveying the political and social history of Britain from mid-Victorian times to the end of the 20th century and a study of the philosophic origins of Freemasonry.

Table of Contents

Introduction: What is Philosophy? 6

The Ancient World 9

Thales of Melitus 10

Anaximander 11

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha 12

Confucius 14

Heraclitus 16

Parmenides 17

Lao-tzu 18

Zeno of Elea 20

Socrates 22

Democritus 24

Plato 26

Aristotle 28

Epicurus 30

Marcus Aurelius 32

Sextus Empiricus 34

Tertullian 36

Origen 37

Plotinus 38

St Augustine 40

The Middle Ages 43

Avicenna 44

St Anselm of Canterbury 46

Peter Abelard 48

Averroes 50

Moses Maimonides 52

St Thomas Aquinas 54

John Duns Scotus 56

William of Ockham 58

The Early Modern Era 61

Niccolò Machiavelli 62

Michel de Montaigne 64

Sir Francis Bacon 66

Thomas Hobbes 68

René Descartes 70

Blaise Pascal 72

Baruch Spinoza 74

John Locke 76

Gottfried Leibniz 78

George Berkeley 79

Voltaire 80

David Hume 82

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 84

Adam Smith 86

Immanuel Kant 88

Edmund Burke 90

Thomas Paine 92

Jeremy Bentham 94

Mary Wollstonecraft 95

The Modern Era 97

Johann Gottlieb Fichte 98

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 100

James Mill 102

Arthur Schopenhauer 103

Alexis de Tocqueville 104

John Stuart Mill 105

Soren Kierkegaard 106

Karl Marx 108

Friedrich Engels 110

Henry Sidgwick 112

Charles Sanders Pierce 113

William James 114

Friedrich Nietzsche 116

Gottlob Frege 118

Émile Durkheim 120

Edmund Husserl 122

John Dewey 124

Henri Louis Bergson 126

Alfred North Whitehead 127

George Santayana 128

Max Weber 129

J.M.E. McTaggart 130

Bertrand Russell 132

G.E. Moore 134

Ludwig Wittgenstein 136

Martin Heidegger 138

Rudolf Carnap 140

The Post-Modern Era 143

Max Horkheimer 144

Herbert Marcuse 145

Gilbert Ryle 146

Hans-Georg Gadamer 148

Jacques Lacan 149

Karl Popper 150

Jean-Paul Sartre 152

Ayn Rand 154

Hannah Arendt 156

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 158

Simone de Beauvoir 160

Willard Van Orman Ouine 162

Claude Lévi-Strauss 163

Simone Weil 164

A.J. Ayer 165

Alan Turing 166

Donald Davidson 168

Peter Strawson 170

John Rawls 172

Thomas Kuhn 174

Paul Feyerabend 176

Michel Foucault 178

Noam Chomsky 180

Bernard Williams 182

Jacques Derrida 184

Robert Nozick 186

Saul Kripke 187

Glossary 188

Index 190

Acknowledgements 192