Socrates would ask questions in an attempt to get people to come to proper philosophical conclusions on their own. He was considered subversive and condemned to die, and, rather than appeal for mercy or flee Socrates drank hemlock and died. Socrates believed in principles that he upheld. He knew that he did not know very much, and this made him much smarter than other people. Socrates had faith in human reason and believed that people were only happy when they acted according to their reason. Therefore, if someone knows what the right thing to do is in a situation she will do it, because it will make her happy.
Plato thought that each thing that we see is an approximation of some perfect idea that exists somewhere else. We cannot have true knowledge about things that change, so we cannot actually know the real world, but we can have true knowledge about things that we perceive through our reason. Thus Plato was very fond of mathematics, because it involves solely the use of reason. Plato believed that people were made up of a body that is a part of the natural world but also an immortal soul that is in contact with the world of ideas.
Jesus , Paul
Descartes doubted everything that was not certain and then realized that the very fact of his doubting meant he must be thinking. From there, he decided that the existence of God is also certain, and went on to define the world in terms of thought and matter, which he called extension. The mind and body interact, but the goal is to get the mind to operate solely according to reason.
He had a deterministic view of the world, believing that God controlled all through natural laws. Spinoza felt that only God was truly free but that people could attain happiness through seeing things "from the perspective of eternity."
empiricists, philosophers who felt that everything in our mind comes from our experience through the senses. They were critics of the rationalists. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are the most important
Hume first. He was the greatest of the empiricists and had a tremendous influence on Kant, a later philosopher. Hume was concerned with cleaning up our thoughts. He believed that perception was made up of "impressions" and "ideas". Impressions are how we experience the world, and ideas are what we recall of our impressions. Hume also pointed out that we act in accord with our feelings, not our reason.
Berkeley felt that all of our feelings and ideas can stem from our souls—just like when we are dreaming. But he also thought that all of external reality could come from another spirit. Berkeley believed that we exist only in God's mind
Kant divides the world into things as they are in themselves and as we perceive them. We cannot know things as they are in themselves, but we can know how we perceive them. Kant also believed that everyone has innate moral reason, and that moral actions are ones we perform out of a sense of duty.
The Romantics saw nature as a world spirit, and this was the view of Schelling, the greatest philosopher of the time. After Universal Romanticism, this earlier phase of Romanticism, came National Romanticism, which was concerned with history, language, and culture of the people. Fairy tales and folk songs became important. Writers would write without knowledge of all that they wrote and then at a certain moment directly intervene and retake control of their own story.
##Hegel# Sophie learns, believed the world spirit was just the sum of human interactions. He thought truth was subjective and that human reason changed each generation. Thoughts must be judged in their context, and right and wrong change accordingly. But human knowledge is always increasing through history, so history is progressive.
Marx believed that economic forces caused change in society. He defined society in terms of material bases and a superstructure of culture.
Darwin's major ideas were that all plants and animals had evolved from earlier forms and that this process occurs through natural selection. He used several arguments in favor of biological evolution, and it was a controversial topic, since it contradicted the Creation story in the Bible.
Freud pointed out that we have unconscious drives that can affect our actions without us knowing about them. His psychoanalysis involved studying the human mind in order to help people deal with neuroses or other sorts of problems. Freud found that people had often repressed certain events in their life—buried them deep in their unconscious—and that these events were the cause of their malaise.
Sartre thought that there is no general human nature but rather that we must create our own. He viewed our freedom as a burden, since we arrive in the world free whether we like it or not. We must assume complete responsibility for our actions and find our own meaning in life through the use of our consciousness.
