Alvin Paolo M.

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John Locke The most important thinker of modern politics is the most directly responsible for Thomas Jeffersons rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence, and the rhetoric in the U. S. Constitution. Locke is referred to as the Father of Liberalism, because of his development of the principles of humanism and individual freedom, founded primarily by #1. It is said that liberalism proper, the belief in equal rights under the law, begins with Locke. He penned the phrase government with the consent of the governed. His three natural rights, that is, rights innate to all human beings, were and remain life, liberty, and estate.

Epicurus Epicurus has gotten a bit of an unfair reputation over the centuries as a teacher of self-indulgence and excess delight. He was soundly criticized by a lot of Christian polemicists (those who make war against all thought but Christian thought), especially during the Middle Ages, because he was thought to be an atheist, whose principles for a happy life were passed down to this famous set of statements: Dont fear god; dont worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure.He advocated the principle of refusing belief in anything that is not tangible, including any god. Such intangible things he considered preconceived notions, which can be manipulated. You may think of Epicureanism as no matter what happens, enjoy life, because you only get one and it doesnt last long. Zeno of Citium You may not be as familiar with him as with most of the others on this list, but Zeno founded the school of Stoicism. Stoicism comes from the Greek stoa, which is a roofed colonnade, especially that of the Poikile, which was a cloistered piazza on the north side of the Athenian marketplace, in the 3rd Century BC. Stoicism is based on the idea that anything which causes us to suffer in life is actually an error in our judgment, and that we should always have absolute control over our emotions. Rage, elation, depression are all simple flaws in a persons reason, and thus, we are only emotionally weak when we allow ourselves to be. Put another way, the world is what we make of it. Avicenna His full name is Ab Al al-usayn ibn Abd Allh ibn Sn, the last two words of which were Latinized into the more common form in Western history. He lived in the Persian Empire from c. 980 AD to 1037. The Dark Ages were not so dark. Aside from his stature as a philosopher, he was also the worlds preeminent physician during his life. His two most well known works today are The Book of Healing (which has nothing to do with physical medicine) and The Canon of Medicine, which was his compilation of all known medical knowledge at that time. Thomas Aquinas

Thomas will forever be remembered as the guy who supposedly proved the existence of God by arguing that the Universe had to have been created by something, since everything in existence has a beginning and an end. This is now referred to as the First Cause argument, and all philosophers after Thomas have wrestled with proving or disproving the theory. He actually based it on the notion of , of #1. The Greek means one who moves while not moving or the unmoved mover.Thomas founded everything he postulated firmly in Christianity, and for this reason, he is not universally popular, today. Even Christians consider that, since he derived all his ethical teachings from the Bible, Thomas is not independently authoritative of any of those teachings. But his job, in teaching the common people around him, was to get them to understand ethics without all the abstract philosophy. He expounded on #2s principles of what we now call cardinal virtues: justice, courage, prudence and temperance. He was able to reach the masses with this simple, four-part instruction.

Confucius

Master Kong Qiu, as his name translates from Chinese, lived from 551 to 479 BC, and remains the most important single philosopher in Eastern history. He espoused significant principles of ethics and politics, in a time when the Greeks were espousing the same things. We think of democracy as a Greek invention, a Western idea, but Confucius wrote in his Analects that the best government is one that rules through rites and the peoples natural morality, rather than by using bribery and coercion. This may sound obvious to us today, but he wrote it in the early 500s to late 400s BC. It is the same principle of democracy that the Greeks argued for and developed: the peoples morality is in charge; therefore, rule by the people.Confucius defended the idea of an Emperor, but also advocated limitations to the emperors power. The emperor must be honest and his subjects must respect him, but he must also deserve that respect. If he makes a mistake, his subjects must offer suggestions to correct him, and he must consider them. Any ruler who acted contrary to these principles was a tyrant, and thus a thief more than a ruler. Rene Descartes

Descartes lived from 1596 to 1650, and today he is referred to as the Father of Modern Philosophy. He created analytical geometry, based on his now immortal Cartesian coordinate system, immortal in the sense that we are all taught it in school, and that it is still perfectly up-to-date in almost all branches of mathematics. Analytical geometry is the study of geometry using algebra and the Cartesian coordinate system. He discovered the laws of refraction and reflection. He also invented the superscript notation still used today to indicate the powers of exponents.

Paul of Tarsus

The wild card of this list, but give him fair consideration. Paul accomplished more with the few letters we have of his, to various churches in Asia Minor, Israel and Rome, than any other mortal person in the Bible, except Jesus himself. Jesus founded Christianity. But without Paul, the religion would have died in a few hundred years at best, or remained too insular to invite the entire world into its faith, as Jesus wanted. Plato

Plato lived from c. 428 to c. 348 BC, and founded the Western worlds first school of higher education, the Academy of Athens. Almost all of Western philosophy can be traced back to Plato, who was taught by Socrates, and preserved through his own writings, some of Socratess ideas. If Socrates wrote anything down, it has not survived directly. Plato and Xenophon, another of his students, recounted a lot of his teachings, as did the playwright Aristophanes. Aristotle

Aristotle topped another of this listers lists, heading the category of philosophy, so his rank on this one is not entirely surprising. But consider that Aristotle is the first to have written systems by which to understand and criticize everything from pure logic to ethics, politics, literature, even science. He theorized that there are four causes, or qualities, of any thing in existence: the material cause, which is what the subject is made of; the formal cause, or the arrangement of the subjects material; the effective cause, the creator of the thing; and the final cause, which is the purpose for which a subject exists.