TERM PAPER

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY
ES12FB2 / A-406
MWF / 02:30PM to 03:30PM

SAMPIANO, FROILAND Y.
BSCE – 1710170

DR. L. S. CRUZ
Instructor
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS

1. THALES OF MILETUS

Thales of Miletus (c. 624 BCE – c. 546 BCE) was an ancient (pre-Socratic) Greek
philosopher who is often considered the first philosopher and the father of Western philosophy.
His approach to philosophical questions of course cannot compare to modern or even later Greek
philosophers, however, he is the first known person to use natural explanations for natural
phenomena rather than turning to supernatural world and his example was followed by other
Greek thinkers who would give rise to philosophy both as a discipline and science. In addition to
being viewed as the beginner of Western philosophy, Thales of Miletus is also the first to define
general principles and develop hypotheses. He is therefore sometimes also referred to as the
“father of science” although this epithet is usually used in reference to Democritus, another
prominent ancient Greek philosopher who formulated the atomic theory that states that all matter
is composed of particles called atoms.

Not much is known about the philosopher’s early life, not even his exact dates of birth and death.
He is believed to be born in the city of Miletus, an ancient Greek Ionian city on the western coast
of Asia Minor in today’s Turkey. The time of his life was calculated on the basis of events related
to him in the later sources, most notably in the work “Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers”
by Diogenes Laertius (c. 3rd century BCE) who wrote biographies of ancient Greek philosophers
and one of the most important sources for ancient Greek philosophy. Laertius tells us that
according to the chronicle by Apollodorus of Athens, Thales of Miletus died in the 58th Olympiad
aged 78. Since the 58th Olympiad was the period between 548 and 545 BCE, Thales of Miletus
was born sometime between 626 and 623 BCE.

According to Laertius who quotes Herodotus, Douris and Democritus, Thales’ parents were
Examyes and Cleobuline who are thought to had been of Phoenician origin and well financially
situated. As much as his later life is concerned, there are a lot of conflicting information. According
to some sources, Thales was married and had a son named Cybisthus but according to other, he
never married and adopted his nephew Cybisthus.

Contributions:

Thales of Miletus is said to had written “On the Solstice” and “On the Equinox”, however,
none of the two works survived and some doubt that he left any written works. Even in antiquity,
there were some doubts about Thales’ written works although some authors also connect him
with “The Nautical Star Guide”. The latter, however, is highly unlikely to had been written by
Thales of Miletus considering that Laertius tells us that the very same work is attributed to a lesser
known Phokos of Samos. But despite the scarcity of reliable evidence about Thales of Miletus,
there is little doubt about his – at the time – revolutionary approach to philosophical questions. In
his “Metaphysics”, Aristotle tells us that Thales believed that everything comes out of water and
that the earth floats on water. And according to Seneca, the philosopher used the floating earth
theory to explain earthquakes. This means that Thales of Miletus rejected the supernatural and
mystical theories that were used to explain various phenomena by his predecessors which
justifies his fame as the first philosopher. He is the first known thinker to abandon the supernatural
agenda but he is also the first known thinker to try to explain the world by a unifying hypothesis.

2. ARISTOTLE

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) is considered one of the most influential individuals in history.
He made important contributions to just about all fields of knowledge that existed in his time and
became the founder of many new ones. The ancient Greek philosopher covered a wide range of
subjects including biology, zoology, music, theatre, physics, politics, rhetoric, linguistics and
much, much more. Along Socrates and Plato, Aristotle is one of the key figures in the emergence
of Western philosophy and thought, while his writings in physical sciences profoundly influenced
the intellectual life in medieval Europe.

The celebrated philosopher has written the first known system of logic that still forms the basis of
modern logic. Aristotle’s metaphysics, on the other hand, became an integral part of Christian
theology, especially scholasticism and continues to play an essential role in Christian reasoning
to the present day. His philosophy has also profoundly influenced the Jewish and Muslim thought.
The medieval Muslim thinkers referred to him as ‘the first teacher’.

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in the ancient Greek city of Stagira on the Chalkidiki peninsula east
of the modern city of Thessaloniki. His parents were members of aristocracy (his father
Nicomachus was the physician of the Macedon king Amyntas) and were able to provide their son
the best education. At the age of 18, Aristotle was sent to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy.
After completing education, he stayed at the Academy until 348 or 347 BC. He is said to quit
because he was dissatisfied with the new Academy’s leadership after Plato’s death although
some historians argue that he left before Plato’s death due to the rise anti-Macedonian sentiment
in the city.

After leaving Athens, Aristotle went to the court of Hermias of Atarneus in north-east Asia Minor.
From there, he travelled to the island of Lesbos and focused on study of botany and zoology. He
married Hermias’ adoptive daughter Pythias with whom he had a daughter who was named after
his wife Pythias. In 343 BC, he accepted the invitation of Philip II of Macedon to come to his court
and tutor his son Alexander (the Great).

In Macedonia, Aristotle become the head of the Macedon academy. Besides tutoring Alexander,
he also taught Ptolemy (the founder of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt) and Cassander (the
future King of Macedon). Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BC while his former pupil was
preparing for the conquest of the Persian Empire. While in Athens, Aristotle founded his own
school called the Lyceum and gave lessons at the school for more than a decade. After the death
of his wife Pythias, he started an affair with Herpyllis of Stagira. She bore him a son who was
named Nicomachus after Aristotle’s father. According to the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia
Suda, Aristotle also had an erotic relationship with a young men called Palaephatus of Abydos.

It is believed that Aristotle’s most productive period was after his return to Athens in 335 BC. He
is thought to write many of his works while in Athens for the second time including many dialogues
and treatises such as Physics, Metaphysics, Politics, On the Soul (De Anima) and Nicomachean
Ethics. He also wrote on theology, rhetoric, psychology and economics, and made important
contributions to a wide range physical science including zoology, geography, geology, astronomy
and anatomy, to mention only a few.

In the second half of the 320s, Alexander the Great feared a plot against him and sent threatening
letters to Aristotle. The philosopher indeed openly opposed Alexander’s divine pretences, while
his grandnephew Callisthenes was executed by Alexander for treason. Throughout antiquity,
Aristotle was believed to had been involved in the death of Alexander the Great but there is no
evidence to support this claim. After Alexander’s death, Aristotle once again witnessed the rise of
anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens. He was charged of impiety by Eurymedon the hierophant
and left Athens for the second time in 322 BC, probably fearing for his life. He retreated to Chalcis
on the island of Euboea where he died of natural causes within the same year.

Contributions:

Although Aristotle’s philosophy is the object of academic study worldwide, it is thought that
most of his works have been lost over the centuries. Those that survived through the medieval
manuscripts are thought to represent only one third of works created by the celebrated ancient
Greek philosopher. The surviving works are collected in the so-called Corpus Aristotelicum.
Some, however, are believed not to be composed by Aristotle himself but rather under his
supervision and direction, while some are thought to be a product of his successors at the
Lyceum. The Corpus is broken down into five sections – Logic, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and
politics, and Rhetoric and poetics.

Aristotle’s works are sometimes also divided into exoteric and esoteric. The first group of works
refers to those that were intended for the public, while esoteric works were used mostly within his
school such as the treatises. The Corpus Aristotelicum are exclusively treatises. Esoteric works,
on the other hand, are lost although a few dialogues survived in fragments.
 3. PLATO

Plato (c. 428/427 BC - 348/347 BC) is widely considered as one of the greatest thinkers
of all times and is along his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle regarded as one of the
founders of Western science and philosophy. His thought is preserved in 26 dialogues which
profoundly influenced the Western view of the world. Plato is also renowned as the founder of the
Academy in Athens, the first higher education institution in the Western world.

Diogenes Laertius, a biographer of ancient Greek philosophers reports that Plato’s real name was
Aristocles, just like his grandfather’s. According to Laertius, the ancient Greek philosopher came
to be known as Plato after his wrestling coach dubbed him Platon, allegedly for his robust figure
as the Greek word “platon” translates into “broad”. According to later sources, Plato’s name is
related to the broadness of his eloquence or the width across his forehead. Modern scholars,
however, believe that the story about Plato’s name is a legend, arguing that Plato was a very
common name in his time.

Plato’s exact date and place of birth remain uncertain but he is thought to be born in Athens or
the island of Aegina (17 miles south from Athens) sometime between 429 and 423. The celebrated
ancient Greek philosopher was born into an influential aristocratic family. His father Ariston was
according to the legend a descendant of Cordus, a semi-mythical king of Athens who ruled in the
11th century BC, while his mother was Perictione whose family was related to the renowned
Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet Solon. Plato’s mother was also Charmides’s sister and
Critias’s niece. Both were notable figures during the so-called Thirty Tyrants, a pro-Spartan
oligarchic regime that rose to power after the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404
BC.

Plato grew up two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, sister Potone and half-brother Antiphon.
After the death of Plato’s father, his mother married her uncle Pyrilampes whom she bore her fifth
child. Plato’s father is thought to have died while Plato was a child but the date of his death
remains unknown.

As a member of aristocracy, Plato was educated by the best teachers in Athens. He was initially
a follower of Cratylus who introduced him to Heraclitean philosophy but he later became
Socrates’s pupil and declared himself as his devoted follower in the dialogue ‘Apology of
Socrates’.

Relationship between Plato and Socrates isn’t fully understood but in the ‘Apology’, Socrates
mentions Plato as one of the youths he was accused to have corrupted, asking why their fathers
and brothers didn’t testify against him if the accusations were true. Later, Plato is also mentioned
as one of Socrates’s students who offered to pay a fine in behalf of their tutor to save him from
death penalty.

After Socrates’s execution in 399 BC, Plato left Athens. He is thought to travel around Greece,
Italy, Sicily, the ancient Greek colony of Cyrene (in present-day Libya) and Egypt. He returned to
Athens in 387 BC at the age of 40 and founded the Academy, the first known higher education
institution in the Western world. Plato’s Academy operated until 84 BC when it was destroyed by
Roman general and later dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In the early 5th century AD, the Academy
was reopened by the Neoplatonists but it was permanently closed by Byzantine Emperor Justinian
I in 529. He saw it as a threat to Christianity despite the fact that the latter borrowed much from
its founder’s philosophy.

During his later life, Plato became involved in politics of the city of Syracuse in Sicily which was
at the time a Greek colony. Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato first visited the city during the
reign of the tyrant Dionysius the Elder (c. 432-367 BC) and impressed the tyrant’s brother-in-law
Dion who became his follower. The tyrant, however, eventually turned against the philosopher
and sold him into slavery. He nearly died in Cyrene before he was bought freedom and sent home
by an admirer. However, Plato was asked to return to Syracuse after Dionysius’s death by Dion
to become tutor to his nephew and the new king Dionysius II. The latter is thought to accept his
teachings but the king distrusted Dion whom he had expelled from Syracuse. Plato was kept
against his will by Dionysius II but he was eventually allowed to leave.
Circumstances surrounding Plato’s death remain uncertain. There are several accounts of his
death, however, almost every account offers a different explanation. According to one account,
he died in his bed while a young girl played on a flute, according to the second, he died on a
celebration of a wedding and according to the third, he simply died in sleep.

Contributions:
Although both life and works of Plato are surrounded by a number of legends and myths and
despite the fact that many accounts are dubious, the influence of his thought on science and
religion is perhaps greater than of any other individual. Directly or indirectly (mainly through
Aristotle), Plato’s view of the world dominated until the scientific revolution in the 17th century,
while his arguments to prove that God exists and that human soul is immortal found their way into
Christian theology.

Plato’s works encompass 26 dialogues which are traditionally divided into early, middle and late
period. Some of the most notable works of early period include:
 Apology of Socrates
 Crito
 Protagoras
 Meno

Of middle period dialogues, the most prominent are:

 Republic
 Symposium
 Phaedrus
 Phaedo

Most important late period dialogues include:

 Sophist
 Laws
 Statesman
 Critias
 Timaeus

Plato is also attributed 13 letters of which is best known the so-called Seventh Letter. However,
authenticity of many is disputed which is also the case with some dialogues that are traditionally
associated with Plato.

4. SOCRATES

Socrates (ca. 469-399 BCE) is hailed as one of the founders of Western philosophy,
however, very little is known about him as a historical figure and philosopher. The best account
of life and work of one of the most influential philosophers of all times is given by the later classical
writers, in the first place by his students Plato and Xenophon and the playwright Aristophanes
who was his contemporary. Despite that, the mentioned writers reveal that the ancient Greek
philosopher made important contributions to philosophy as well as epistemology and logic. He is
the inventor of the so-called Socratic method or elenchus which remains one of the most
commonly used approaches not only to answer the fundamental questions of philosophy but it
also serves as a tool for scientific research. Ironically, the most famous Socrates’ saying is “I only
know that I know nothing”.

As mentioned earlier, Socrates’ life and work are surrounded by mystery. He did not write any
philosophical works or left any writings. The knowledge we have about him both as a historical
figure and philosopher is based exclusively on later classical writings. Uncertainty regarding
Socrates’ life and work which is known as the Socratic problem is related to the fact that the
information we have about are philosophical and dramatic rather than historical texts. This makes
it very difficult to create a picture of his life, work and philosophical thought.

Socrates’ student Plato is traditionally considered the best source about the philosopher’s life and
work although many scholars emphasize that it is very difficult to distinguish between Plato’s and
Socrates’ philosophical views and even more difficult to create an accurate account of Socrates’
life. As a result, some consider Xenophon to be more reliable source of information about
Socrates as a historical figure.

Plato and Xenophon are the main sources for Socrates’ personal life. From their writing, we find
out that the renowned ancient Greek philosopher was born to Sophroniscus, a stonemason (or
perhaps a sculptor) and his wife Phaenarete who was a midwife. He spent his life in Athens where
he was born but details of his early life are scarce. He is said to participate in the Peloponnesian
War (431-04 BCE) and that he married relatively late with Xanthippe who was much younger from
him. She bore him three sons – Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus.

It is not certain what Socrates did for a living. According to Xenophon, he was completely devoted
to philosophy, while Aristophanes says that he earned a living by teaching at a school he ran with
Chaerephon. Plato, however, rejects the accounts of Socrates being paid for teaching. Then there
are also accounts of him working as a stonemason, like his father. In the antiquity, he was credited
with the creation of the Three Graces statues near Acropolis but this has been rejected by modern
scholars.

Plato portrays Socrates as the gadfly of Athens. He explains that Socrates loved to “test” the
wisdom of those he considered to be wiser than him. But since most of the people he “tested”
were statesmen and other influential people of Athens, he soon came to be known as the gadfly
of Athens because his methods of testing wisdom made many influential people look everything
but wise in the public. He also came into conflict with the elites and the general public in Athens
by praising the city’s rival of Sparta although he claimed loyalty to Athens. It is speculated that his
role of gadfly might had been one of the leading causes for his trial and execution. However, he
remained the “gadfly of Athens” until the very end. At the trial, he apparently proposed that he
should be paid a wage by the government and free dinners for lifetime when he had been asked
to propose a punishment for his wrongdoing.

Those who persecuted and tried Socrates did not left any records. Again, Plato and Xenophon
are the main sources for the events leading to the philosopher’s trial and execution. They tell us
that Meletus, Lycon and Anytus charged Socrates with impiety and corrupting the minds of the
youth of Athens. In his defence speech, he is said to defend his role as the “gadfly”, making it
easy on his persecutors to sentence him to death. Both Plato and Xenophon tell us that he had
an opportunity to escape and that his friend Crito even bribed the guards in the prison but he
decided to stay. He was given to drink poison hemlock.

Contributions:

Socrates main contribution to Western philosophy is his method of inquiry that was called
after him Socratic method, sometimes also known as elenchus. According to the latter, a
statement can be considered true only if it cannot be proved wrong. The Socratic method which
is dialectic breaks down a problem into a series of questions which are then sought to be
answered. This method which is also used in scientific research by making a hypothesis and then
either proving it correct or false, is by some suggested to be first used by Zeno of Elea (ca. 490-
430 BCE) but it was Socrates who refined it and used it to solve ethical questions.

The philosopher’s beliefs are difficult to distinguish from Plato’s. According to some, they may
have been reinterpreted by Plato but according to the others, the latter perhaps completely
adopted Socrates’ philosophical thoughts and that his beliefs actually reflect those from Socrates.
Thus, the famous philosopher’s saying “I only know that I know nothing” can be in a way also
claimed for his life and work.

5. PYTHAGORAS

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 - 490 B.C.) was an early Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher and
mathematician from the Greek island of Samos. He was the founder of the influential philosophical
and religious movement or cult called Pythagoreanism, and he was probably the first man to
actually call himself a philosopher (or lover of wisdom). Pythagoras (or in a broader sense the
Pythagoreans), allegedly exercised an important influence on the work of Plato.
As a mathematician, he is known as the "father of numbers" or as the first pure mathematician
and is best known for his Pythagorean Theorem on the relation between the sides of a right
triangle, the concept of square numbers and square roots, and the discovery of the golden ratio.

Unfortunately, little is known for sure about him, (none of his original writings have survived, and
his followers usually published their own works in his name) and he remains something of a
mysterious figure. His secret society or brotherhood had a great effect on later esoteric traditions
such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry.

Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos, in the eastern Aegean Sea off the coast of
Turkey, sometime between 580 and 572 B.C. His father was Mnesarchus, a Phoenician merchant
from Tyre; his mother was Pythais, a native of Samos. He spent his early years in Samos, but
also travelled widely with his father.

According to some reports, as a young man he met Thales, who was impressed with his abilities
and advised him to head to Memphis in Egypt and study mathematics and astronomy with the
priests there, which he soon had the opportunity of. He also travelled to study at the temples of
Tyre and Byblos in Phoenicia, as well as in Babylon. At some point he was also a student of
Pherecydes of Syros and of Anaximander (who himself had been a student of Thales).While still
quite a young man, he left his native city for Croton in southern Italy in order to escape the
tyrannical government of Polycrates, the Tyrant of Samos (or possibly to escape political
problems related to an Egyptian-style school called the "semicircle" which he had founded on
Samos).

In Croton, Pythagoras established a secret religious society very similar to (and possibly
influenced by) the earlier Orphic cult, in an attempt to reform the cultural life of Croton. He formed
an elite circle of followers around himself, called Pythagoreans or the Mathematikoi ("learners"),
subject to very strict rules of conduct, owning no personal possessions and assuming a largely
vegetarian diet. They followed a structured life of religious teaching, common meals, exercise,
music, poetry recitations, reading and philosophical study (very similar to later monastic life). The
school (unusually for the time) was open to both male and female students uniformly (women
were held to be different from men, but not necessarily inferior). The Mathematikoi extended and
developed the more mathematical and scientific work Pythagoras began.

Other students, who lived in neighbouring areas, were also permitted to attend some of
Pythagoras' lectures, although they were not taught the inner secrets of the cult. They were known
as the Akousmatikoi ("listeners"), and they focused on the more religious and ritualistic aspects
of Pythagoras' teachings (and were permitted to eat meat and own personal belongings).

Among his more prominent students were the philosopher Empedocles, Brontinus (who may have
been Pythagoras' successor as head of the school), Philolaus (c. 480 - 385 B.C., who has been
credited with originating the theory that the earth was not the center of the universe), Lysis of
Taras (who is sometimes credited with many of the works usually attributed to Pythagoras
himself), Cercops (an Orphic poet), Hippasus of Metapontum (who is sometimes attributed with
the discovery of irrational numbers), Zamolxis (who later amassed great wealth and a cult
following as a god among the Thracian Dacians) and Theano (born c. 546 B.C., a mathematician,
student, and possibly wife or daughter, of Pythagoras).

Towards the end of his life, Pythagoras fled to Metapontum (further north in the Gulf of Tarentum)
because of a plot against him and his followers by a noble of Croton named Cylon. He died in
Metapontum from unknown causes sometime between 500 and 490 B.C., between 80 and 90
years old.

Contributions:

Because of the secretive nature of his school and the custom of its students to attribute
everything to Pythagoras himself, it is difficult today to determine who actually did which work. To
further confuse matters, some forgeries under his name (a few of which still exist) circulated in
antiquity. Some of his biographers clearly aimed to present him as a god-like figure, and he
became the subject of elaborate legends surrounding his historical persona.
The school that Pythagoras established at Croton was in some ways more of a secret brotherhood
or monastery. It was based on his religious teachings and was highly concerned with the morality
of society. Members were required to live ethically, love one another, share political beliefs,
practice pacifism, and devote themselves to the mathematics of nature. They also abstained from
meat, abjured personal property and observed a rule of silence (called "echemythia"), the
breaking of which was punishable by death, based on the belief that if someone was in any doubt
as to what to say, they should remain silent.

Pythagoras saw his religious and scientific views as inseparably interconnected. He believed in
the theory of metempsychosis or the transmigration of the soul and its reincarnation again and
again after death into the bodies of humans, animals or vegetables until it became moral (a belief
he may have learned from his one-time teacher Pherecydes of Syros, who is usually credited as
the first Greek to teach the transmigration of souls). He was one of the first to propose that the
thought processes and the soul were located in the brain and not the heart.

Another of Pythagoras' central beliefs was that the essence of being (and the stability of all things
that create the universe) can be found in the form of numbers, and that it can be encountered
through the study of mathematics. For instance, he believed that things like health relied on a
stable proportion of elements, with too much or too little of one thing causing an imbalance that
makes a person unhealthy.

In mathematics, Pythagoras is commonly given credit for discovering what is now known as the
Pythagorean Theorem (or Pythagoras' Theorem), a theorem in geometry that states that, in a
right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to
the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Although this had been known and utilized
previously by the Babylonians and Indians, he (or perhaps one of his students) is thought to have
constructed the first proof.

He believed that the number system (and therefore the universe system) was based on the sum
of the numbers one to four (i.e. ten), and that odd numbers were masculine and even numbers
were feminine. He discovered the theory of mathematical proportions, constructed from three to
five geometrical solids, and also discovered square numbers and square roots. The discovery of
the golden ratio (referring to the ratio of two quantities such that the sum of those quantities and
the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller, approximately
1.618) is also usually attributed to Pythagoras, or possibly to his student, Theano.

He was one of the first to think that the Earth was round, that all planets have an axis, and that all
the planets travel around one central point (which he originally identified as the Earth, but later
renounced it for the idea that the planets revolve around a central “fire”, although he never
identified it as the Sun). He also believed that the Moon was another planet that he called a
“counter-Earth".

Pythagoras was also very interested in music, and wanted to improve the music of his day, which
he believed was not harmonious enough and was too hectic. According to legend, he discovered
that musical notes could be translated into mathematical equations by listening to blacksmiths at
work. "Pythagorean tuning" is a system of musical tuning in which the frequency relationships of
all intervals are based on the ratio 3:2 (a stack of perfect fifths), a system which has been
documented as long ago as 3500 B.C. in Babylonian texts, but which is nevertheless often
attributed to Pythagoras. He also believed in the "musica universalis" (or the "harmony of the
spheres"), the idea that the planets and stars moved according to mathematical equations, which
corresponded to musical notes and thus produced a kind of symphony.

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHERS

1. PETER DAMIAN

Saint Peter Damian (c. 1007 – 21 or 22 February 1072 or 1073) was a reforming

Benedictine monk and cardinal in the circle of Pope Leo IX. Dante placed him in one of the highest
circles of Paradiso as a great predecessor of Saint Francis of Assisi and he was declared a Doctor
of the Church in 1828. His feast day is 21 February.
Peter was born in Ravenna around 1007, the youngest of a large noble, but poor family. Orphaned
early, he was at first adopted by an elder brother, who ill-treated and under-fed him while
employing him as a swineherd. After some years, another brother, Damianus, who was archpriest
at Ravenna, had pity on him and took him away to be educated. Adding his brother's name to his
own, Peter made such rapid progress in his studies of theology and canon law, first at Ravenna,
then at Faenza, and finally at the University of Parma, that, around the age of 25, he was already
a famous teacher at Parma and Ravenna.

About 1035, however, he gave up his secular calling and, avoiding the compromised luxury of
Cluniac monasteries, entered the isolated hermitage of Fonte Avellana, near Gubbio. Both as
novice and as monk, his fervor was remarkable but led him to such extremes of self-mortification
in penance that his health was affected, and he developed severe insomnia.

On his recovery, he was appointed to lecture to his fellow monks. Then, at the request of Guy of
Pomposa (Guido d'Arezzo) and other heads of neighboring monasteries, for two or three years
he lectured to their brethren also, and (about 1042) wrote the life of St Romuald for the monks of
Pietrapertosa. Soon after his return to Fonte Avellana he was appointed economus (manager or
housekeeper) of the house by the prior, who designated him as his successor. In 1043 he became
prior of Fonte Avellana and remained so until his death in February 1072.

Subject-hermitages were founded at San Severino, Gamogna, Acerreta, Murciana, San

Salvatore, Sitria and Ocri. A zealot for monastic and clerical reform, he introduced a more-severe
discipline, including the practice of flagellation ("the disciplina"), into the house, which, under his
rule, quickly attained celebrity, and became a model for other foundations, even the great abbey
of Monte Cassino. There was much opposition outside his own circle to such extreme forms of
penitence, but Peter's persistent advocacy ensured its acceptance, to such an extent that he was
obliged later to moderate the imprudent zeal of some of his own hermits.

Another innovation was that of the daily siesta, to make up for the fatigue of the night office. During
his tenure of the priorate a cloister was built, silver chalices and a silver processional cross were
purchased, and many books were added to the library.

Although living in the seclusion of the cloister, Peter Damian closely watched the fortunes of the
Church, and like his friend Hildebrand, the future Pope Gregory VII, he strove for reforms in a
deplorable time. When Benedict IX resigned the pontificate into the hands of the archpriest John
Gratian (Gregory VI) in 1045, Peter hailed the change with joy and wrote to the new pope, urging
him to deal with the scandals of the church in Italy, singling out the wicked bishops of Pesaro, of
Città di Castello and of Fano.

Extending the area of his activities, he entered into communication with the Emperor Henry III.
He was present in Rome when Clement II crowned Henry III and his consort Agnes, and he also
attended a synod held at the Lateran in the first days of 1047, in which decrees were passed
against simony.

After this he returned to his hermitage. About 1050, during the pontificate of Pope Leo IX, he
wrote a scathing treatise on the vices of the clergy, including sexual abuse of minors and actions
by church superiors to hide the crimes. Liber Gomorrhianus was openly addressed to the pope.
Meanwhile, the question arose as to the validity of the ordinations of simoniacal clerics. Peter
Damiani wrote (about 1053) a treatise, the Liber Gratissimus, in favor of their validity, a work
which, though much combatted at the time, was potent in deciding the question in their favor
before the end of the 12th century. Pope Benedict XVI described him as "one of the most
significant figures of the 11th century ... a lover of solitude and at the same time a fearless man
of the Church, committed personally to the task of reform."

Peter often condemned philosophy. He claimed that the first grammarian was the Devil, who
taught Adam to decline deus in the plural. He argued that monks should not have to study
philosophy, because Jesus did not choose philosophers as disciples, and so philosophy is not
necessary for salvation. But the idea (later attributed to Thomas Aquinas) that philosophy should
serve theology as a servant serves her mistress originated with him. However, this apparent
animosity may reflect his view that logic is only concerned with the validity of argument, rather
than the nature of reality. Similar views are found in Al-Ghazali and Wittgenstein.
Damian's tract De divina omnipotentia is frequently misunderstood. Damian's purpose is to defend
the "doctrine of omnipotence", which he defines as the ability of God to do anything that is good,
i.e., God cannot lie. Toivo J. Holopainen identifies De divina omnipotentia as "an interesting
document related to the early developments of medieval discussion concerning modalities and
divine omnipotence." Peter also recognized that God can act outside time, as Gregory of Rimini
later argued.

During his illness the pope died, and Frédéric, abbot of Monte Cassino, was elected pope as
Stephen IX. In the autumn of 1057, Stephen IX determined to make Damian a cardinal. For a long
time, Damian resisted the offer, for he was more at ease as an itinerant hermit-preacher than a
reformer from within the Curia, but was finally forced to accept, and was consecrated Cardinal
Bishop of Ostia on 30 November 1057.

In addition, he was appointed administrator of the Diocese of Gubbio. The new cardinal was
impressed with the great responsibilities of his office and wrote a stirring letter to his brother-
cardinals, exhorting them to shine by their example before all. Four months later Pope Stephen
died at Florence, and the Church was once more distracted by schism. Peter was vigorous in his
opposition to the antipope Benedict X, but force was on the side of the intruder and Damian retired
temporarily to Fonte Avallana.

He rendered valuable assistance to Pope Alexander II in his struggle with the antipope, Honorius
II. In July 1061 the pope died and once more a schism ensued. Peter Damian used all his powers
to persuade the antipope Cadalous to withdraw, but to no purpose. Finally, Anno II, Archbishop
of Cologne and acting regent in Germany, summoned a council at Augsburg at which a long
argument by Peter Damian was read and greatly contributed to the decision in favor of Alexander
II.

In 1063 the pope held a synod at Rome, at which Peter Damian was appointed legate to settle
the dispute between the Abbey of Cluny and the Bishop of Mâcon. He proceeded to France,
summoned a council at Chalon-sur-Saône, proved the justice of the contentions of Cluny, settled
other questions at issue in the Church of France, and returned in the autumn to Fonte
Avellana.[citation needed]

While he was in France the antipope Cadalous had again become active in his attempts to gain
Rome, and Peter Damian brought upon himself a sharp reproof from Alexander and Hildebrand
for twice imprudently appealing to the royal power to judge the case anew. In 1067, the cardinal
was sent to Florence to settle the dispute between the bishop and the monks of Vallombrosa,
who accused the former of simony. His efforts, however, were not successful, largely because he
misjudged the case and threw the weight of his authority on the side of the bishop. The matter
was not settled until the following year by the pope in person.

Having served the papacy as legate to France and to Florence, he was allowed to resign his
bishopric in 1067. After a period of retirement at Fonte Avellana, he proceeded in 1069 as papal
legate to Germany, and persuaded the emperor Henry IV to give up his intention of divorcing his
wife Bertha. He accomplished this task at a council in Frankfurt before returning to Fonte-
Avellana.

Early in 1072 or 1073[1] he was sent to Ravenna to reconcile its inhabitants to the Holy See, they
having been excommunicated for supporting their archbishop in his adhesion to the schism of
Cadalous. On his return thence, he was seized with fever near Faenza. He lay ill for a week at
the monastery of Santa Maria degl'Angeli, now Santa Maria Vecchia. On the night preceding the
feast of the Chair of St. Peter at Antioch, he ordered the office of the feast to be recited and at the
end of the Lauds he died. He was at once buried in the monastery church, lest others should
claim his relics.

During his concluding years he was not altogether in accord with the political ideas of Hildebrand.
He died the year before Hildebrand became pope, as Gregory VII. "It removed from the scene the
one man who could have restrained Gregory", Norman F. Cantor remarked (Civilization of the
Middle Ages, p 251).
Peter Damian is a saint and was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XII in 1828 with a
feast day which is now celebrated on 21 February (Ordinary calendar). Although it was
traditionally given as 23 February, this was using the Roman calendar which had 29 days in
January. So, in 1970, his feast was moved to 21 February, to align it with the ordinary calendar.

His body has been moved six times. Since 1898, Peter Damian has rested in a chapel dedicated
to the saint in the cathedral of Faenza. No formal canonization ever took place, but his cult has
existed since his death at Faenza, at Fonte-Avellana, at Monte Cassino, and at Cluny.

The saint is represented in art as a cardinal bearing a knotted rope (the disciplina) in his hand;
also, sometimes he is depicted as a pilgrim holding a papal Bull, to signify his many legations.

Contributions:

Peter Damian's voluminous writings, including treatises (67 survive), letters, sermons,
prayers, hymns and liturgical texts (though, in a departure from many early medieval monks, no
biblical commentaries) reflect the spiritual conditions of Italy: the groundswell of intense personal
piety that would overflow in the First Crusade at the end of the century, and his Latin abounds in
denunciatory epithets.

His works include:

 His most famous work is De Divina Omnipotentia, a long letter in which he discusses God's
power.
 In the short treatise Dominus vobiscum (The Book of "The Lord be with You") (PL 145:231-
252), he questions whether a hermit praying in solitude should use the plural; Damian
concludes that the hermit should use the plural, since he is linked to the whole church by
faith and fellowship.
 His Life of Romauld and his treatise The Eremitical Order demonstrate his continuing
commitment to solitude and severe asceticism as the ultimate form of Christian life.
 He was especially devoted to the Virgin Mary and wrote an Officium Beatae Virginis.

2. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033 - 1109) was an Italian philosopher and theologian of the
Medieval period. He is often called the founder of Scholasticism and is considered by many to be
the first scholarly philosopher of Christian theology.

He is particularly known for his attempt to elaborate a rational system of faith, and as the originator
of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. He exercised an important influence on
later Scholastics, as well as on subsequent Church doctrine on various theological matters.

He held the important position of Archbishop of Canterbury during a particularly turbulent period
in English and Papal history.

Anselm was born in the city of Aosta in 1033 in what the Kingdom of Burgundy was then (modern-
day northern Italy) to a noble and propertied family. His father, Gundulph, was by birth a Lombard
and seems to have been harsh and violent; his mother, Ermenberga, was prudent and virtuous
and gave Anselm careful religious instruction.

At the age of fifteen, the devout young Anselm tried to become a monk but could not obtain the
consent of either his father or the abbot of the local monastery. In 1059, after his mother died and
his father's harshness became unbearable, he left home, crossed the Alps and wandered through
Burgundy and France. After a short time at Avranches, he entered the Benedictine Abbey of Bec
in Normandy, France as a novice in 1060, where he studied under the eminent theologian and
dialectician Lanfranc (c. 1005 - 1089). Just three years later, he was elected Prior to the Abbey
and then, in 1078, he succeeded Lanfranc as Abbot.

During these quiet years he wrote his first and most important works of philosophy (the
"Monologion", the "Proslogion", the "Dialogues on Truth", "Free Will" and the "Fall of the Devil")
and, under Anselm's jurisdiction, Bec grew in wealth and reputation, becoming one of the first
seats of learning in Europe.
In 1092, at the invitation of Hugh, Earl of Chester, Anselm crossed to England where, against his
will, he was offered the prestigious position of Archbishop of Canterbury. However, his tenure was
not an easy one, with King William II of England constantly trying to appropriate church lands,
offices and incomes, and even to have Anselm deposed. In 1097, Anselm set out for Rome in an
attempt to settle some of the English King's ecclesiastical problems but was refused entry back
into England and remained in exile until King William died in 1100, during which time he continued
to write.

William's successor, Henry I, was no easier to deal with and in 1103 Anselm again set out for
Rome and was again refused re-entry back into England. It was only after King Henry was
threatened with excommunication by the Pope that some reconciliation took place, and Anselm
was able to once again take up his position. However, only three years later, in 1109, he died. He
was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1494 and declared a Doctor of the Church in
1720.

Contributions:

Although Anselm wrote prodigiously throughout his life, his works are generally
unsystematic tracts or dialogues on detached questions, not elaborate treatises like the works of
Saint Thomas Aquinas. He makes very few references to previous thinkers in his work, and his
originality and freshness has often been remarked upon. Arguably, his only major influences are
St. Augustine, and to a lesser extent Boethius.

Anselm sought to understand Christian consciousness through reason, although he insisted that
faith was a prerequisite, and not a result, of such understanding. In "De Veritate" he affirms the
existence of an absolute truth (God) in which all other truth participates, and so, before expanding
on his theories, he first needed to rationalize the existence of God.

Anselm's philosophical proofs of God are the main contents of his "Monologion" and "Proslogion".
Following from St. Augustine, he believed that relative concepts like "good", "great" and "just"
would be meaningless without some absolute standard, and the absolute being which represents
these absolute standards is what we know as God. However, Anselm was aware that this
argument uses inductive reasoning from posteriori grounds and was dissatisfied with it.

What has become known as the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, Anselm's attempt
to prove the existence of God through a priori abstract reasoning alone, was presented in his
"Proslogion". Briefly, if (as he believed) God can be defined as "that than which nothing greater
can be conceived", then God cannot be a merely abstract, intellectual notion because a God that
really exists would be greater. Therefore, God’s existence is implied by the very concept of God,
and to say that God does not exist is a contradiction in terms.

The argument is certainly ingenious, but has the appearance of a linguistic trick, and the same
ontological argument could be used to prove the existence of any perfect thing at all. For example,
Anselm's contemporary, the monk Gaunilo, used it to show that a perfect island must exist.
Anselm’s responses to Gaunilo were long, detailed and dense, but the argument has been
contentious ever since.

Anselm also authored a number of other arguments for the existence of God, based on
cosmological and teleological grounds, but this was not his only contribution of Christian theology.
In other works, he strove to state the rational grounds of the Christian doctrines of the creation,
the Trinity, original sin, free will and atonement.

Discussing the mystery of the Trinity, for example, he started from the standpoint that human
beings could not know God from Himself but only from analogy (the memory and intelligence of
man represent the relation of the Father to the Son, and the relation they hold to one another
symbolizes the Holy Spirit). Regarding atonement, he argued in his "Cur Deus Homo" that,
because God is infinite, any wound to his honor caused by the sins of Man must also be infinite,
and the only way infinite satisfaction for these sins can be granted on behalf of man is by the
voluntary death of Jesus, who is both God and Man.
His works were copied and disseminated during his lifetime, and he exercised an important
influence on later Scholastics, including St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus
and William of Ockham, as well as on subsequent Church

3. PETER ABELARD

Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142) was a 12th Century French philosopher, theologian and
logician of the Medieval period. He is mainly associated with the dominant Medieval movement
of Scholasticism. He is probably most famous, however, for the story of his love affair with his
student Héloïse which has become legendary as a romantic tale.

Abelard was born in 1079 in the small village of Le Pallet (about 16km east of Nantes, in Brittany,
France), the eldest son of a minor noble Breton family. He was a quick learner and his father
encouraged him to study the liberal arts (dialectic, rhetoric and grammar). He particularly excelled
in dialectic (or logic, which at that time consisted chiefly of the logic of Aristotle), and soon
becoming a wandering Peripatetic academic rather than pursuing a military career like his father.

His early teacher was Roscellinus of Compiegne (c. 1050 - 1125), who is often regarded as the
founder of Nominalism (the doctrine that abstract concepts, general terms or universals have no
independent existence but exist only as names). In Paris, he was taught for a while by William of
Champeaux (c. 1070 - 1122), a prominent Realist, and Abelard's arguments against Realism (and
in favour of Nominalism and his own Conceptualism), were instrumental in the decline of Realism
in the Middle Ages.

While still a young man, Abelard set up his own school at Melun and then at Paris, which proved
very successful and, in 1115, at the age of 36, he was nominated canon of Notre-Dame Cathedral
in Paris. At the peak of his fame, he attracted thousands of students from many countries of
Europe.

One of those students was Héloïse (d. 1164), and Abelard fell madly in love with her and caused
a great scandal when she became pregnant. Héloïse has a son in secret and reluctantly agreed
to Abelard's suggestion of a secret marriage. Her guardian, the canon Fulbert, found out about
the marriage, broke into Abelard's chamber by night and castrated him. Héloïse, still only in her
twenties, then became a nun for many years.

Aberlard returned to his teaching work but was charged with heresy in 1121 over his rationalistic
interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma (God in three persons), and he was confined to the convent
of St. Medard at Soissons. Later he became a hermit, living in a cabin of reeds in a deserted part
of the country, although students followed him even there. Gradually he recovered his
respectability, and managed to establish Héloïse at Paraclete, and they continued a passionate
but Platonic relationship, recorded in Abelard's autobiographical "Historia Calamitatum".

In 1141, Abelard was again accused of heresy by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 - 1153) in an
attempt to crush Abelard's rationalistic inquiries, and he collapsed and died before being able to
fully clear himself of the accusations.

Contributions:

Much of Abelard's legacy lies in the quality of his Scholastic philosophizing and his attempt to give
a formally rational expression to the received ecclesiastical doctrine. Although much of his work
was condemned at the time, he paved the way for the ascendancy of the philosophical authority
of Aristotle (rather than the Realism of Plato), which became firmly established in the half-century
after his death.

Aberlard's attempt to bridge the gap between Realism and Nominalism became known as
Conceptualism, the doctrine that universals (qualities or properties of an object which can exist in
more than one place at the same time e.g. the quality of "redness") exist only within the mind and
have no external or substantial reality. Immanuel Kant later developed a modern Conceptualism,
holding that universals have no connection with external things because they are exclusively
produced by our a priori mental structures and functions.
In theology, Pope Innocent III (1161 - 1216) accepted Abelard's Doctrine of Limbo, which
amended St. Augustine's Doctrine of Original Sin, and which held that unbaptized babies did not,
as at first believed, go straight to Hell, but to a special area of limbo, where they would feel no
pain but no supernatural happiness either (because they would not yet be able to behold God).

Perhaps Abelard's best known work is "Sic et Non" ("Yes and No"), dating from between about
1121 and 1132, in which he pointed out apparently contradictory quotations from the Church
Fathers on many of the traditional topics of Christian theology (such as multiple significations of
a single word), and outlined rules for reconciling these contradictions. This work rekindled interest
in the dialectic as a philosophical tool, and Abelard argued that dialectic (in addition to the
Scriptures) was the road to the truth, as well as being good mental exercise.

He made contributions to the field of Ethics, an area rarely touched on in Scholastic teaching,
anticipating something of modern speculation with his idea that the moral character or value of
human action is, at least to some extent, determined by subjective intention.

Abelard was also long known as an important poet and composer, although very little remains of
his work in this field.

4. ALBERTUS MAGNUS

Albertus Magnus (c. 1200 - 1280) was a 13th Century German philosopher, theologian
and scientist of the Medieval period. He is mainly associated with the dominant Medieval
movement of Scholasticism, and his influence on the development of Scholastic philosophy in the
13th Century was enormous, especially his incorporation of Aristotelianism into the Christian west.
He is also known as an early advocate for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion.

Albertus was born, sometime between 1193 and 1206, to the knightly family of the Count of
Bollstädt in Lauingen in Bavaria, Germany. He was educated principally at Padua in Italy, where
he received instruction in Aristotle's writings. In 1223 he became a member of the Dominican
Order, against the wishes of his family, and studied theology at Bologna in Italy and elsewhere.
Later, he returned to Germany to teach at Cologne, Regensburg, Freiburg, Strasbourg and
Hildesheim.

In 1245 Albertus went to Paris to receive his doctorate and to become provincial of the Dominican
Order. He taught for some time as a master of theology in Paris with great success, and it was
during this period that his most famous student St. Thomas Aquinas began to study under him.
He fulfilled duties as Bishop of Regensburg from 1260 to 1263, walking rather than riding across
his huge diocese, and then spent the reminder of his life in semi-retirement, studying and
preaching throughout southern Germany.

He died in 1280 in Cologne, Germany, after two years of ill health. Contemporaries such as Roger
Bacon and Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321) applied the term "Magnus" ("the Great") to Albertus
during his own lifetime, referring to his immense reputation as a scholar and philosopher, and he
remained steadfast in his defense of the orthodoxy of his former pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas,
whose death in 1274 greatly grieved Albertus. He was beatified in 1622 and honored by the
Catholic Church as a Doctor of the Church in 1931.

Contributions:

Albertus wrote prolifically (his collected writings were collected into 38 volumes in 1899) and was
perhaps the most widely read author of his time. He was famed for his literally encyclopedic
knowledge of topics as diverse as logic, theology, psychology, botany, geography, astronomy,
astrology, mineralogy, chemistry, zoology, physiology, phrenology and others.

Most modern western knowledge of the works of Aristotle was preserved and presented by
Albertus, and he digested, interpreted and systematized the whole of Aristotle's works (from the
Latin translations and notes of Arabian commentators such as Averroës and Avicenna) in
accordance with church doctrine, and with occasional divergences from the opinions of the
master. His approach to this task, however, was clearly influenced by Neo-Platonism. His principal
theological works are a commentary in three volumes on the "Books of the Sentences" of Peter
Lombard (c. 1100 - 1160), and his "Summa Theologiae" in two volumes.

Albertus's knowledge of physical science was considerable and (for the age) remarkably
accurate, aided by his protracted study of Aristotle, which gave him great powers of systematic
thought and exposition. He is credited with the discovery of the element arsenic, and there is
much speculation on his work as an alchemist. He was certainly deeply interested in astrology,
as were many scientists of the time, arguing that an understanding of the celestial influences
affecting us could help us to live our lives more in accord with Christian precepts.

Albertus is also known for his enlightening commentary on the musical practice of his times, and
wrote extensively on proportions in music, on the ways in which music worked on the human soul,
and on his categorical rejection of the popular notion of the "music of the spheres".

5. THOMAS AQUINAS

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 - 1274) was an Italian philosopher and theologian of the Medieval
period. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology at the peak of Scholasticism
in Europe, and the founder of the Thomistic school of philosophy and theology.

The philosophy of Aquinas has exerted enormous influence on subsequent Christian theology,
especially that of the Roman Catholic Church, but also Western philosophy in general. His most
important and enduring works are the "Summa Theologica", in which he expounds his systematic
theology of the "quinquae viae" (the five proofs of the existence of God), and the "Summa Contra
Gentiles".

Aquinas was born around 1225 to a noble family in the small town of Roccasecca, near Aquino,
Italy, in what was then the Kingdom of Sicily. His father was Count Landulph and his mother was
Theodora, Countess of Theate. His uncle, Sinibald, was abbot of the original Benedictine
monastery at Monte Cassino and Aquinas was expected to follow his uncle into that position. At
the age of 5, Aquinas began his early education at a monastery, and at the age of 16 he continued
his studies at the University of Naples.

At Naples, Aquinas soon began to veer towards the Dominican Order, much to the deep chagrin
of his family (who at one point seized and held him captive in an attempt to force him to toe the
family line). However, after the intervention of Pope Innocent IV, he became a Dominican monk
in 1242.

In 1244, the promising young Aquinas was sent to study under Albertus Magnus in Cologne and
then in Paris, where he distinguished himself in arguments against the University's celebrated
champion Guillaume de St Amour (c. 1200 - 1272). Having graduated as a bachelor of theology
in 1248, he returned to Cologne as second lecturer and magister studentium and began his literary
activity and public life.

In 1256 Aquinas began many years of travel and lecturing on theology throughout France and
Italy, along with his friend St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221 - 1274). During this period, he
was often called upon to advise the reigning pontiff and the French King Louis VIII on affairs of
state, and to represent the Dominican Order in meetings and discussions. Despite preaching
every day, he found time to write homilies, disputations and lectures, and continued to work
diligently on his great literary work, the "Summa Theologica".

Aquinas was characterized as a humble, simple, peace-loving man, given to contemplation, and
a lover of poetry. He always maintained self-control and won over his opponents by his personality
and great learning. There were various reports by friars and monks of minor miracles concerning
Aquinas (ranging from levitation to voices from Heaven). He refused to participate in mortification
of the flesh, which as a Dominican Friar he was supposed to observe. He also refused out of hand
such prestigious positions as Archbishop of Naples and Abbot of Monte Cassino (although he
was persuaded back to the University of Naples in 1272).

In 1270, the Bishop of Paris issued an edict condemning a number of teachings derived from
Aristotle or from Arabic philosophers such as Averroės which were then current at the university,
and the teachings of Aquinas were among those targeted. The Dominican Order prudently moved
him to Italy while the investigations proceeded in Paris. In 1274, en route to attend the Second
Council of Lyons to attempt to settle the differences between the Greek and Latin churches,
Aquinas fell ill and eventually died at the nearby Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova.

In 1277, three years after Aquinas' death, the Bishop of Paris and the Bishop of Oxford issued
another, more detailed, edict which condemned a series of Thomas's theses as heretical, on the
grounds of the orthodox Augustinian theology which considered human reason inadequate to
understand the will of God. As a result of this condemnation, Aquinas was excommunicated
posthumously (a landmark in the history of medieval philosophy and theology), and it took many
years for his reputation to recover from this censure.

In 1324, fifty years after Thomas Aquinas' death, Pope John XXII in Avignon pronounced him a
saint of the Catholic church, and his theology began its rise to prestige. In 1568, he was named
a Doctor of the Church. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII stated that Aquinas' theology was a definitive
exposition of Catholic doctrine and directed clergy to take the teachings of Aquinas as the basis
of their theological positions. Today, he is considered by many Catholics to be the Catholic
church's greatest theologian and philosopher.

Contributions:

Aquinas was a Christian theologian, but he was also an Aristotelian and an Empiricist, and he
substantially influenced these two streams of Western thought. He believed that truth becomes
known through both natural revelation (certain truths are available to all people through their
human nature and through correct human reasoning) and supernatural revelation (faith-based
knowledge revealed through scripture), and he was careful to separate these two elements, which
he saw as complementary rather than contradictory in nature. Thus, although one may deduce
the existence of God and His attributes through reason, certain specifics (such as the Trinity and
the Incarnation) may be known only through special revelation and may not otherwise be
deduced.

His two great works are the "Summa Contra Gentiles" (often published in English under the title
"On the Truth of the Catholic Faith"), written between 1258 and 1264, and the "Summa
Theologica" ("Compendium of Theology"), written between 1265 and 1274. The former is a
broadly-based philosophical work directed at non-Christians; the latter is addressed largely to
Christians and is more a work of Christian theology.

Aquinas saw the raw material data of theology as the written scriptures and traditions of the
Catholic church, which were produced by the self-revelation of God to humans throughout history.
Faith and reason are the two primary tools which are both necessary together for processing this
data in order to obtain true knowledge of God. He believed that God reveals himself through
nature, so that rational thinking and the study of nature is also the study of God (a blend of
Aristotelian Greek philosophy with Christian doctrine).

From his consideration of what God is not, Aquinas proposed five positive statements about the
divine qualities or the nature of God:

 God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.
 God is perfect, lacking nothing.
 God is infinite, and not limited in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually,
and emotionally limited.
 God is immutable, incapable of change in repect of essence and character.
 God is one, such that God's essence is the same as God's existence.

Aquinas believed that the existence of God is neither self-evident nor beyond proof. In the
"Summa Theologica", he details five rational proofs for the existence of God, the "quinquae viae"
(or the "Five Ways"), some of which are really re-statements of each other:

The argument of the unmoved mover (ex motu): everything that is moved is moved by a mover,
therefore there is an unmoved mover from whom all motion proceeds, which is God.
The argument of the first cause (ex causa): everything that is caused is caused by something
else, therefore there must be an uncaused cause of all caused things, which is God.
The argument from contingency (ex contingentia): there are contingent beings in the universe
which may either exist or not exist and, as it is impossible for everything in the universe to be
contingent (as something cannot come of nothing), so there must be a necessary being whose
existence is not contingent on any other being, which is God.
The argument from degree (ex gradu): there are various degrees of perfection which may be
found throughout the universe, so there must be a pinnacle of perfection from which lesser
degrees of perfection derive, which is God.
The teleological argument or argument from design (ex fine): all natural bodies in the world (which
are in themselves unintelligent) act towards ends (which is characteristic of intelligence), therefore
there must be an intelligent being that guides all natural bodies towards their ends, which is God.
Aquinas believed that Jesus Christ was truly divine and not simply a human being or God merely
inhabiting the body of Christ. However, he held that Christ had a truly rational human soul as well,
producing a duality of natures that persisted even after the Incarnation, and that these two natures
existed simultaneously yet distinguishably in one real human body.

Aquinas defined the four cardinal virtues as prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude, which
he held are natural (revealed in nature) and binding on everyone. In addition, there are three
theological virtues, described as faith, hope and charity, which are supernatural and are distinct
from other virtues in that their object is God. Furthermore, he distinguished four kinds of law:
eternal law (the decree of God that governs all creation), natural law (human "participation" in
eternal law, which is discovered by reason), human law (the natural law applied by governments
to societies) and divine law (the specially revealed law in the scriptures).

For St. Thomas Aquinas, the goal of human existence is union and eternal fellowship with God.
For those who have experienced salvation and redemption through Christ while living on earth, a
beatific vision will be granted after death in which a person experiences perfect, unending
happiness through comprehending the very essence of God. During life, an individual's will must
be ordered toward right things (such as charity, peace and holiness), which requires morality in
everyday human choices, a kind of Virtue Ethics. Aquinas was the first to identify the Principle of
Double Effect in ethical decisions, when an otherwise legitimate act (e.g. self-defense) may also
cause an effect one would normally be obliged to avoid (e.g. the death of another).

MODERN PHILOSOPHERS

1. RENE DESCARTES

René Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and
writer of the Age of Reason. He has been called the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of
subsequent Western philosophy can be seen as a response to his writings. He is responsible for
one of the best-known quotations in philosophy: "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").

He was a pioneer and major figure in 17th Century Continental Rationalism (often known as
Cartesianism) later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the
British Empiricist school of thought of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He represents a major
break with the Aristotelianism and Scholasticism of the Medieval period.

His contribution to mathematics was also of the first order, as the inventor of the Cartesian
coordinate system and the founder of analytic geometry, crucial to the invention of calculus and
mathematical analysis. He was also one of the key figures in the scientific revolution of the 16th
and 17th Centuries.

Descartes was born in the town of La Haye en Touraine (since renamed Descartes) in the Loire
Valley in central France on 31 March 1596. His father, Joachim Descartes, was a busy lawyer
and magistrate in the High Court of Justice, and his mother, Jeanne (née Brochard), died of
tuberculosis when René was just one year old. René and his brother and sister, Pierre and
Jeanne, were therefore mainly raised by their grandmother.

From 1604 until 1612, he attended the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche, Anjou,
studying classics, logic and traditional Aristotelianism philosophy. His health was poor and he was
granted permission to remain in bed until 11 o'clock in the morning, a custom he maintained for
the rest of his life. He then spent some time in Paris studying mathematics, before studing law at
the University of Poitiers, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer,
obtaining his law degree in 1616.

However, he then abandoned his education and spent several years travelling and experiencing
the world (he later claimed that his formal education provided little of substance). It was during
this time (in 1618) that he met the Dutch philosopher and scientist Isaac Beeckman (1588 - 1637)
while walking through Breda in Holland, who sparked his interest in mathematics and the new
physics.

In 1622, he returned to France, and soon afterwards sold all his property at La Haye, investing
the proceeds in bonds which provided him with a comfortable income for the rest of his life. He
returned to settle in Holland in 1628. The next year, he joined the University of Franeker; the year
after that, Leiden University; and, in 1635, he is recorded as attending Utrecht University. He had
a daughter, Francine, after a relationship in Amsterdam with a servant girl, Helène Jans, although
Francine died at the age of fve. In fact, in the years between 1828 and 1649, he lived at 14
separate addresses in 10 different Dutch cities.

It was during this 20-year period of frequent moves that he wrote almost all of his major works on
philosophy, mathematics and science. He shrewdly held off publication of his first work, "Le
Monde" ("The World"), written between 1629 and 1633, due to the condemnation of the works of
Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) and Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543) by the Roman Catholic
Church in 1633. The most famous of his works include: the "Discours de la méthode pour bien
conduire sa Raison et chercher la Vérité dans les Sciences" ("Discourse on the Method") of 1637,
his first rationalist vision of the progress of human knowledge; the "Meditationes de Prima
Philosophia" ("Meditations on First Philosophy") of 1641, a more formal exposition of his central
tenets, in Latin; and the "Principia Philosophiae" ("Principles of Philosophy") of 1644, an even
more systematic and comprehensive exposition of his views. For a time, in 1643, Cartesian
philosophy was condemned by the University of Utrecht.

Descartes died of pneumonia on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been
invited as a teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. Later, his remains were taken to France and
buried in the church of Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris, and then, during the French
Revolution, disinterred for burial in the Panthéon among the other great thinkers of France.
Currently, his tomb is in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, and his brain is in the
Musée de l'Homme.

Contributions:

Descartes lived during a very skeptical period, at a time before science as we know it
existed, and after a long period of relative stagnation in philosophical thought during the Church-
dominated and Aristotle-influenced late Middle Ages. He had been impressed, in both his
academic work and in his experience of the world at large, by the realization that there appeared
to be no certain way of acquiring knowledge, and he saw his main task as the epistemological
one of establishing what might be certain knowledge as a stepping stone towards the ultimate
pursuit of truth. His more immediate aim in this was to put scientific enquiry in a position where it
was no longer subject to attack by Skeptics, and he tried to do this by a kind of pre-emptive
Skepticism, essentially by being more skeptical than the Skeptics.

At the heart of Descartes' philosophical method was his refusal to accept the authority of previous
philosophers, and even of the evidence of his own senses, and to trust only that which was clearly
and distinctly seen to be beyond any doubt (a process often referred to as methodological
skepticism or Cartesian doubt or hyperbolic doubt). Only then did he allow himself to reconstruct
knowledge (piece by piece, such that at no stage was the possibility of doubt allowed to creep
back in) in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge and to dispel any Skepticism.

He outlined four main rules for himself in his thinking:

 Never accept anything except clear and distinct ideas.

 Divide each problem into as many parts are needed to solve it.
 Order your thoughts from the simple to the complex.
  Always check thoroughly for oversights.

Using this process, which he detailed in his epochal "Discourse on the Method" of 1637 and
expanded in the "Meditations on First Philosophy" of 1641, Descartes attempted to narrow down,
by what is sometimes called the method of doubt, what was certain and what contained even a
shadow of a doubt. For example, he realized that he could doubt even something as apparently
fundamental as whether he had a body (it could be that he was just dreaming of it or that it was
an illusion created by an evil demon), but he could not, under any circumstances, doubt whether
he had a mind or that he could think. He followed this up with a pure, abstract thought experiment.
He imagined an evil spirit (or "deceiving demon") whose sole intention was to mislead him and
asked whether there was anything about which the demon would not be able to mislead him. His
conclusion was the act of thinking, that the demon could never make him believe that he was
thinking when he was not (because, after all, even a false thought is still a thought).

Having identified this single indubitable principle, that thought exists, he then argued that, if
someone was wondering whether or not he existed, then the very act of thinking was, in and of
itself, proof that he did in fact exist: the famous "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am")
- the similar statement in Latin, "Cogito ergo sum" is found in his later "Principles of Philosophy".
It is worth mentioning here that, by "thinking", Descartes did not just mean conceptual thought,
but all forms of consciousness, experience, feelings, etc.

Having dispelled all doubt by this process, Descartes then worked to build up, or reconstitute, the
world again. But he was careful not to do this willy-nilly, but only according to his own very strict
rules, so that the "reconstituted world" was not the same as the original one which he had
dismantled piece by piece due to doubts. The way he achieved this (which, it must be said,
appears from a modern viewpoint like something of a conjuring trick) was to argue that among
the contents of our (certain) consciousness was the idea of God, which in itself he saw as proof
of the existence of God. He then argued that, if we have the overwhelming impression of the
existence of a concrete world around us, as we do, then an omnipotent, omniscient and
omnibenevolent God would ensure that such a world does in fact exist for us. Furthermore, he
asserted that the essence of this physical world was extension (that it takes up space), contrary
to the extensionless world of the mind.

Paradoxically, this was an essential step forward in 17th Century science as it established a
physical world which was of a mathematical character and permitted mathematical physics to be
used to explain it. Also important is that, as we have seen, although God was indispensable to
Descartes' method of arriving at a physical world, once such a world was accepted, it was no
longer necessary to involve God in the description and measurement and explanation of how
things work. Thus, the process of science was freed from theological constraints and interference.

Descartes dismissed the senses and perception as unreliable, and to demonstrate this he used
the so-called Wax Argument. This revolves around the idea that a wax object, which has certain
properties of size, color, smell, temperature, etc., appears to change almost all of these properties
when it is melted, to the extent that it appears to our senses to be a completely different thing.
However, we know that it is in fact still the same piece of wax. Descartes concluded from this that
the senses can be misleading and that reason and deduction is the only reliable method of
attaining knowledge, which is the essence of Rationalism.

Descartes further argued that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily (not willed by him)
and are therefore external to his senses and therefore evidence of the existence of an external
world outside of his mind. He argued that the things in the external world are material because
God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted and has given him the
propensity to believe that such ideas are caused by material things. Because of this belief that
God is benevolent and does not desire to deceive him, he can therefore have some faith in the
account of reality his senses provide him.

Descartes believed that the human body works like a machine, that it has the material properties
of extension and motion, and that it follows the laws of physics. The pieces of the human machine,
he argued, are like clockwork mechanisms, and that the machine could be understood by taking
its pieces apart, studying them, and then putting them back together to see the larger picture (an
idea referred to as Reductionism). The mind or soul, on the other hand, is a non-material entity
that lacks extension and motion and does not follow the laws of physics.
Descartes was the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it exists today
(see the section on Philosophy of Mind), and the first to clearly identify the mind with
consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the physical
seat of intelligence (Dualism). In his epistemological work in the "Discourse on the Method", he
had realized that, although he could doubt that he possessed a body, he could not under any
circumstances doubt that he possessed a mind, which led him to conclude that the mind and the
body were two very different and separate things. His particular form of Dualism (known as
Cartesian Dualism) proposed that the mind controls the body, but that the body also influences
the otherwise rational mind (such as when people act out of passion) in a kind of two-way
interaction, which he claimed, without much evidence, occurred in the pineal gland. Gilbert Ryle
later described this kind of Dualism (where mental activity carries on in parallel to physical action,
but where their means of interaction are unknown or, at best, speculative) as the "ghost in the
machine". Although his own solution was far from convincing, this kind of Cartesian Dualism set
the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem for many years after Descartes'
death.

It should be noted, however, that for all Descartes' innovation and boldness, he does not abandon
the traditional idea of God. He defined "substance" (essentially meaning what the world really
consists of) as "that which requires nothing other than itself in order to exist", but he concluded
that the only true substance was God himself, because everything else (from souls to material
objects like the human body) was dependent on God for its existence. He used his own variations
of the causal argument, the ontological argument and the cosmological argument for the
existence of God in his "Meditations" (see the section on Philosophy of Religion), and the
existence of God played a major role in his validation of reason and in other parts of Descartes’
system. Given the important role God plays in his work, suggestions that Descartes was really a
closet atheist, and that he includes the arguments for the existence of God as window dressing,
appear extremely unlikely.

In mathematics, Descartes realized that a graph could be drawn to show a geometrical

interpretation of a mathematical function using points known as Cartesian coordinates, and
thereby founded analytic geometry or Cartesian geometry (using algebra to describe geometry),
which was crucial to the subsequent development of calculus by Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)
and Gottfried Leibniz. He also invented the notation which uses superscripts to indicate powers
or exponents, and his rule of signs is also a commonly used method to determine the number of
positive and negative zeros of a polynomial. It can be argued that his reflections on mind and
mechanism, impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine
intelligence, blossomed into the Turing test of a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence.

In optics, he showed by using geometric construction and the law of refraction (also known as
Descartes' law) that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees. He also independently
discovered the law of reflection (that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection).

In physics, Descartes introduced (before Newton) the concept of momentum of a moving body
(what he termed the "amount of motion"), which he defined as the product of the mass of the body
and its velocity or speed. His three "laws of nature" became the basis of Newton's later laws of
motion and the modern theory of dynamics: that each thing tries to remain in the same state and,
once moved, continues to move; that all movement is along straight lines; and that when a body
comes into contact with another body the combined "quantity of motion" remain the same (his
conservation of motion principle).

In an attempt to explain the orbits of planets, Descartes also constructed his vortex theory which
would become the most popular theory of planetary motion of the late 17th Century (although
subsequently discredited). However, he continued to cling to the traditional mechanical
philosophy of the 17th Century, which held that everything physical in the universe to be made of
tiny "corpuscles" of matter (although, unlike Atomism, the theory maintained that there could be
no vacuum, just a mass of swirling matter).

2. VOLTAIRE
 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694 - 1778) was a French philosopher and writer of the
Age of Enlightenment. His intelligence, wit and style made him one of France's greatest writers
and philosophers, despite the controversy he attracted.

He was an outspoken supporter of social reform (including the defense of civil liberties, freedom
of religion and free trade), despite the strict censorship laws and harsh penalties of the period and
made use of his satirical works to criticize Catholic dogma and the French institutions of his day.
Along with John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his works and ideas
influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions. He was a prolific
writer and produced works in almost every literary form (plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical
and scientific works, over 21,000 letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets).

Voltaire was born on 21 November 1694 in Paris, France, the youngest of five children in a middle-
class family. His father was François Arouet, a notary and minor treasury official; his mother was
Marie Marguerite d'Aumart, from a noble family of Poitou province.

Voltaire was educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris from 1704 to 1711, where
he showed an early gift for languages, learning Latin and Greek as a child, and later becoming
fluent in Italian, Spanish and English as well. He, however, claimed that he learned nothing but
"Latin and the Stupidities".

By the time he left college, Voltaire had already decided he wanted to become a writer. However,
his father very much wanted him to become a lawyer, so Voltaire pretended to work in Paris as
an assistant to a lawyer, while actually spending much of his time writing satirical poetry. Even
when his father found him out and sent him to study law in the provinces, he nevertheless
continued to write.

Voltaire's wit soon made him popular among some of the aristocratic families of Paris and he
became a favorite in society circles. When Voltaire's father obtained a job for him as a secretary
to the French ambassador in the Netherlands, Voltaire fell in love with a French refugee named
Catherine Olympe Dunoyer, but their scandalous elopement was foiled by Voltaire's father and
he was forced to return to France.

From an early age, Voltaire had trouble with the French authorities for his energetic attacks on
the government and the Catholic Church, which resulted in numerous imprisonments and exiles
throughout his life. In 1717, still in his early twenties, he became involved in the Cellamare
conspiracy of Giulio Alberoni against Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (then Regent for King Louis XV
of France), and his writings about the Regent led to him being imprisoned in the infamous Bastille
for eleven months. While there, however, he wrote his debut play, "Oedipe", whose success
established his reputation. In 1718, following this incarceration, he adopted the name "Voltaire"
(a complex anagrammatically play on words), both as a pen-name and for daily use, which many
have seen as marking his formal separation from his family and his past.

When he offended a young nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan, in 1726 a lettre de cachet was
issued to exile Voltaire without a trial and he spent almost three years in England from 1726 to
1729. The experience greatly influenced his ideas and experiences, and he was particularly
impressed by Britain's constitutional monarchy, its support of the freedoms of speech and religion,
as well as the philosophy of John Locke and the scientific works of Sir Isaac Newton (1642 - 1726)
on optics and gravity. After he returned to Paris, he published his views on British government,
literature and religion in a collection entitled "Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais"
("Philosophical letters on the English"), which met great controversy in France (including the
burning of copies of the work), and Voltaire was again forced to leave Paris in 1734.

His second exile, from 1734 until 1749, was spent at the Château de Cirey (near Luneville in
northeastern France). The Château was owned by the Marquis Florent-Claude du Châtelet and
his wife, the intellectual Marquise Émilie du Châtelet (1706 - 1749), although Voltaire put some of
his own money into the building's renovation. He began a fifteen-year relationship with the
Marquise, both as lovers and as collaborators in their intellectual pursuits, during which they
collected and studied over 21,000 books and performed experiments in the natural sciences in a
laboratory. He continued to write, often in collaboration with the Marquise, both fiction and
scientific and historical treatises, as well as on more philosophical subjects (especially
Metaphysics, the justification for the existence of God and the validity of the Bible). He renounced
religion and called for the separation of church and state and for more religious freedom.
Nevertheless, he was voted into the Academie Francaise in 1746.

After the death of the Marquise in 1749 (and continuing disputes over his work "Zadig" of 1747),
Voltaire moved to Potsdam (near Berlin) to join Frederick the Great (1712 - 1786), a great friend
and admirer of his, with a salary of 20,000 francs a year. After a promising start, Voltaire attracted
more controversy in 1753 with his attack on the president of the Berlin Academy of Science, which
greatly angered Frederick. Once again, documents were burned and he fled toward Paris to avoid
arrest, but Louis XV had banned him from returning to Paris, so instead he turned to Geneva,
Switzerland, where he bought a large estate. Although he was welcomed at first, the law in
Geneva banned theatrical performances and the publication of his works and Voltaire eventually
left the city in despair.

In 1759, he finally settled at an estate called Ferney, close to the Swiss border, where he lived
most of his last 20 years until just before of his death, and where he continued to receive all the
intellectual elite of his time. His frustrating experiences of recent years inspired his best-known
work, "Candide, ou l'Optimisme" ("Candide, or Optimism") of 1759, a satire on the philosophy of
Gottfried Leibniz and on religious and philosophical optimism in general.

Voltaire returned to a hero's welcome in Paris in 1778, at the age of 83. However, the excitement
of the trip was too much for him and he died on 30 May 1778 in Paris. His last words are said to
have been, "For God's sake, let me die in peace". Because of his criticism of the church, he was
denied burial in church ground, although he was finally buried at an abbey in Champagne and, in
1791, his remains were moved to a resting place in the Panthéon in Paris. His heart was removed
from his body and now lies in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and his brain was also removed
(although, after a series of passing-on over 100 years, it apparently disappeared after an auction).

Contributions:

Voltaire was a prolific writer and produced works in almost every literary form (plays,
poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, over 21,000 letters and over two thousand
books and pamphlets). Many of his prose works and romances were written as polemics and
were often preceded by his caustic yet conversational prefaces. "Candide" (1759), one of the best
known and most successful, for example, attacked the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and his
religious and philosophical optimism in a masterpiece of satire and irony. However, Voltaire also
rejected Blaise Pascal's pessimistic philosophy of man's depravity and tried to steer a middle
course in which man was able to find moral virtue through reason.

Voltaire's largest philosophical work was the "Dictionnaire philosophique" ("Philosophical

Dictionary"), published in 1764 and comprising articles contributed by him to the "Encyclopédie,
ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers" ("Encyclopedia, or a systematic
dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts") (1751 - 1772) and several minor pieces. It directed
criticisms at French political institutions, Voltaire's personal enemies, the Bible and the Roman
Catholic Church.

He is remembered and honoured in France as a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought

for civil rights (the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech and freedom of religion) and who
denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the Ancien Régime, which involved an unfair balance
of power and taxes between the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobles), and the
Third Estate (the commoners and middle class, who were burdened with most of the taxes).
Voltaire saw the French bourgeoisie as too small and ineffective, the aristocracy as parasitic and
corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force useful only
to provide backing for revolutionaries.

Although he argued on intellectual grounds for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in

France, suggesting a bias towards Liberalism, he actually distrusted democracy, which he saw
as propagating the idiocy of the masses. He saw an enlightened monarch or absolutist (a
benevolent despotism, similar to that advocated by Plato), advised by philosophers like himself,
as the only way to bring about necessary change, arguing that it was in the monarch's rational
interest to improve the power and wealth of his subjects and kingdom.
Voltaire is often thought of as an atheist, although he did in fact take part in religious activities and
even built a chapel at his estate at Ferney. The chief source for the misconception is a line from
one of his poems (called "Epistle to the author of the book, The Three Impostors") which is usually
translated as: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him". Many commentators
have argued that this is an ironical way of saying that that it does not matter whether God exists
or not, although others claim that it is clear from the rest of the poem that any criticism was more
focused towards the actions of organized religion, rather than towards the concept of religion
itself.

In fact, like many other key figures during the European Enlightenment, Voltaire considered
himself a Deist, and he was instrumental in Deism's spread from England to France during his
lifetime. He did not believe that absolute faith, based upon any particular or singular religious text
or tradition of revelation, was needed to believe in God. He wrote, "It is perfectly evident to my
mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of
faith, but of reason". Indeed, his focus on the idea of a universe based on reason and a respect
for nature reflected the Pantheism which was increasingly popular throughout the 17th and 18th
Centuries.

While not an atheist as such, he was however, opposed to organized religion. Certainly, he was
highly critical of the prevailing Catholicism, and in particular he believed that the Bible was an
outdated legal and/or moral reference, that it was largely metaphorical anyway (although it still
taught some good lessons), and that it was a work of Man and not a divine gift, all of which gained
him somewhat of a bad reputation in the Catholic Church. His attitude towards Islam varied from
"a false and barbarous sect" to "a wise, severe, chaste, and humane religion". He also showed at
one point an inclination towards the ideas of Hinduism and the works of Brahmin priests.

Voltaire is known for many memorable aphorisms, although they are often quoted out of context.
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him", as has been mentioned, is still hotly
debated as to its meaning and intentions. "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds",
from his novella "Candide", is actually a parody of the optimism of Leibniz and religion. The most
often cited quotation of Voltaire is actually totally apocryphal: “I disapprove of what you say, but I
will defend to the death your right to say it” was actually written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her
1906 biography of Voltaire and others, although it does capture the spirit of Voltaire’s attitude.

3. IMMANUEL KANT

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) was a German philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. He
is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of modern Europe, and his influence on Western
thought is immeasurable. He was the starting point and inspiration for the German Idealism
movement in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and more specifically for the Kantianism
which grew up around him in his own lifetime.

His works, especially those on Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ethics, such as his masterworks
the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the "Critique of Practical Reason", achieved a complete
paradigm shift and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the Rationalists and Empiricists
which had dominated the Age of Reason and the early Age of Enlightenment, and indeed to
combine those two apparently contradictory doctrines.

His ideas and original thought have informed almost every philosophical movement since, and he
continues to challenge and influence philosophy (in both the Analytic and Continental Philosophy
camps) to this day.

Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in the city of Königsberg (then the capital of Prussia,
now modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia). He spent his entire life in and around his hometown, never
travelling more than a hundred miles from Königsberg. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a
German craftsman and harness maker from Memel, Prussia; his mother, Anna Regina Porter,
was born in Nuremberg, but was the daughter of a Scottish saddle and harness maker. He was
the fourth of eleven children (five of whom reached adulthood). He was baptized as "Emanuel"
but later changed his name to "Immanuel" after he learned Hebrew.
He was raised in a Pietist household (a strict Lutheran sect that stressed intense religious
devotion, personal humility and a literal interpretation of the Bible), and accordingly received a
strict, punitive and disciplinary education that favoured Latin and religious instruction over
mathematics and science.

Kant's elementary education was undertaken at Saint George's Hospital School, after which he
was educated at the Pietist Collegium Fredericianum, where he remained from 1732 until 1740,
and where he studied theology and excelled in the classics. Kant showed great application to
study early in his life and was enrolled in the University of Königsberg in 1740, at the age of 16.

There, under the influence of a young instructor, Martin Knutzen, Kant became interested in
philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences, and, through the use of Knutzen's private
library, grew familiar with the Rationalist philosophy of Gottfied Leibniz and Christian Wolff (1679
- 1754), as well as the natural philosophy and new mathematical physics of Sir Isaac Newton
(1643 - 1727). Knutzen dissuaded the young scholar from traditional Idealism (i.e. the idea that
reality is purely mental), which was negatively regarded by the whole philosophy of the 18th
Century, and a chance reading of David Hume also raised his suspicions against Rationalism and
he was soon to move away from his early Rationalist beliefs. He later admitted that reading Hume
was what "first interrupted my dogmatic slumber".

The death of Kant's father in 1746 left him without income and interrupted his studies. For seven
years, he worked as a private tutor in the smaller towns surrounding Königsberg, but he continued
his scholarly research, and published several early works, mainly on scientific topics. 1749 saw
the publication of his first philosophical work, "Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der
lebendigen Kräfte" ("Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces").

In 1755, he presented a Latin treatise, "On Fire", to qualify for his doctoral degree, and he spent
the next 15 years as a non-salaried lecturer at the University of Königsberg (dependent on fees
from the students who attended his lectures). He lectured on Metaphysics, Logic, mathematics,
physics and physical geography, and, despite a large teaching burden, continued to publish
papers on various topics, including "Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration
des Daseins Gottes" ("The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the
Existence of God") in 1763 and other works on Logic and Aesthetics. He finally achieved a
professorship of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg in 1770, at the age of 46, an established
scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher.

For the next decade, Kant published almost nothing, and applied himself to the vexing issues of
the Philosophy of Mind and to a resolution of the contradictions inherent in perception and
conception as explained by the Rationalists and Empiricists, resisting all his friends' attempts to
bring him out of his isolation.

The result was the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" ("Critique of Pure Reason") of 1781, now widely
regarded one of the most important and difficult books in Western philosophical thought. However,
this long (over 800 pages in the original German edition) and dense book, written in a somewhat
convoluted style was largely ignored upon its initial publication, and Kant, who was by then quite
a popular author, was dismayed. He wrote the "Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen
Metaphysik" ("Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics") in 1783 as a summary and clarification
of its main views, but it was only as a result of a series of widely read public letters on the Kantian
philosophy published by Karl Reinhold in 1786, as a response to the the Pantheism Dispute (a
central intellectual controversy of the time), that Kant's reputation spread, making him the most
famous philosopher of his era.

Undaunted by the negative initial response to his masterwork, Kant continued to publish papers
throughout the 1780s, including a heavily revised second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason".
He also continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1785's "Grundlegung zur
Metaphysik der Sitten" ("Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals"), 1788's "Kritik der
praktischen Vernunft" ("Critique of Practical Reason", known as the "second Critique") and 1797’s
"Metaphysik der Sitten" ("Metaphysics of Morals"). The 1790 "Kritik der Urteilskraft" ("Critique of
Judgment", the "third Critique") applied the Kantian system to Aesthetics and teleology (the
philosophical study of design and purpose).
By the 1790s, there were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian
philosophy. But, despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction, and
many of Kant's most important disciples (including Karl Reinhold, Jakob Sigismund Beck and
Johann Gottlieb Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of
Idealism, marking the emergence of the German Idealism movement. Kant opposed these
developments and even publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799.

Kant continued writing until shortly before his death, although the Critiques remain the real
sources of his influence. Only a life of extraordinary self-discipline enabled him to accomplish his
task: he kept to such a strict routine that the residents of Königsberg quite literally set their
watches by his schedule. He never married, was barely 5 feet tall, and extremely thin, and his
health was never robust, but he attributed his longevity and his prodigious output to his invariable
daily routine. Contrary to his dour reputation, though, Kant was actually very sociable, a witty and
amusing conversationalist, an elegant dresser, and his lectures at the University of Königsberg,
where he taught for over 30 years, were famous for their brilliance.

Towards the end of his life, Kant became increasingly anti-social and bitter over the growing loss
of his memory and capacity for work. He became totally blind and finally died on 12 February
1804 in the beloved Königsberg where he had spent his entire life. He was buried in Königsberg
Cathedral.

Contributions:

Kant wrote a number of well-received and semi-popular essays on a variety of topics from
science to history to religion to politics to anthropology, and by the 1770s he had become a
popular author of some note, despite the difficulty and obscurity of his style. The philosophy for
which he has become justifiably famous, though, dates largely from his middle and old age.

His first real philosophical work was 1749's "Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen
Kräfte" ("Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces"), and he continued publishing books
and papers for the rest of his life, although with an eleven-year gap betwen 1770 and 1781 leading
up to the publication of his masterwork, "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" ("Critique of Pure Reason").
This and the two succeeding Critiques, 1788's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft" ("Critique of
Practical Reason") and 1790's "Kritik der Urteilskraft" ("Critique of Judgment"), remain the real
sources of his lasting influence.

In his Epistemology, Kant started with the traditional distinction between "truths of reason" (which
Kant called analytic propositions, ones which are true simply by virtue of their meaning, and only
elucidate or explain words e.g. "all bachelors are unmarried") and "truths of fact" (which Kant
called synthetic propositions, ones which make claims beyond that e.g. "all bachelors are happy").
He added to these two other concepts: a priori knowledge (which comes purely from reasoning,
independent of experience, and typically applies to analytic propositions) and a posteriori
knowledge (which comes from experience alone, and typically applies to synthetic propositions).

On the one hand, Empiricism allows for synthetic propositions and a posteriori knowledge, and,
on the other hand, Rationalism allows for analytic propositions and a priori knowledge. However,
Kant maintained that the two could be combined, and that synthetic a priori statements were in
fact possible, that there existed propositions which applied to the physical world but were not
derived from the world, but which were established simply by argument. He argued that
knowledge comes from a synthesis of experience and concepts: without the senses, we would
not become aware of any object, but without understanding and reason we would not be able to
form any conception of it.

He maintained that, although space and time are given to us as a priori pure intuitions, we grasp
reality and make sense of the world through a basic conceptual apparatus, which involves several
categories of thought. He divided these categories into four groups of three: quantity (unity,
plurality, totality); quality (reality, negation, limitation); relation (substance, cause, community) and
modality (possibility, existence, necessity).

Perhaps Kant's most original contribution to philosophy was the idea that it is the representation
that makes the object possible, rather than the object that makes the representation possible.
This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive
recipient of perception and placed the role of the human subject or knower at the center of inquiry
into our knowledge.

However, he also set limits to knowledge. He distinguished between appearance (the world of
phenomena) and reality (the world of noumena). Although our senses tell us that things exist
outside of ourselves, the actual real substance of an object (what he called the "ding-an-sich" or
thing-in-itself") was essentially unknowable. Thus, there may exist many things in the universe
which we do not have the sensory or intellectual capacity to apprehend, and, although these
things are real in themselves, they are not real "for us". We have certain predispositions as to
what exists, and only those things that fit into these predispositions can be said to exist for us.
This was something of a radical and revolutionary idea which does not seem to have occurred to
anyone before Kant.

The (simplified) argument of the first "Critique", then, is that, while empirical objects, like books
and chairs, are in some sense very real, they might not be "transcendentally real". Chairs are real
insofar as they are objects that have to conform to our concepts, to our perceptual categories, but
we cannot be sure that they are transcendentally real, because to be sure of this we would
ourselves have to transcend our own perceptual limitations to confirm the "transcendental"
existence of objects. Thus, "real objects", in Kant's view, are simply those that are subject to our
perceptual categories: we cannot be sure that other non-empirical objects do not exist, but this
should not worry us.

His doctrine of the "primacy of practical over pure reason", led to the later 19th Century doctrine
of Voluntarism. He argued that, intellectually, humans are incapable of knowing ultimate reality,
but this need not (and, Kant argues, must not) interfere with the duty of acting as though the
spiritual character of this reality were certain. Thus, while Kant freely admitted that Newtonian
physics was a clear and accurate depiction of the world of appearances, the world we are able to
physically perceive, there was still room in his system for other concepts completely (such as free
will, rational agency, God, good and bad, etc.), but that these concepts could not be subjects of
definite knowledge.

Kant argued that, while reason can be a helpful tool, it must be properly controlled so that we do
not unreflectively accept things for which we have no evidence. What he calls the "critical method"
is a philosophical approach that allows people to discover which questions reason can answer,
and which ones it cannot. Thus, in his 1793 "Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft"
("Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason"), Kant again encouraged us to give up things
we do not need, namely religious practices that are unnecessary for true moral conduct.

Similarly, although reason can help us supplant unjust political regimes with better ones, for
example, Kant did not believe that reason is an unqualified good but must be employed critically
in order to avoid heading down the wrong path. Although he objected to direct democracy as
"necessarily a despotism", Kant foreshadowed Democratic Peace Theory in his 1795 essay "Zum
ewigen Frieden" ("Perpetual Peace"), in which he posits that constitutional republics were one of
several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. Unlike many Enlightenment thinkers, he
argued that real democracy is not only humane, but also in keeping with the basic human desire
to pursue collective ends.

Like many philosophers before (and after) him, Kant was deeply dissatisfied with the purported
solutions of other philosophers to the perennial problem of how to reconcile the apparently
deterministic character of the physical world with the existence of human free will, which was
necessary for the resolution of moral and ethical questions. These contradictions seemed
especially stark in the wake of the great leap forward in the physical sciences during the 17th
Century, in which scientists seemed largely agreed on the new findings, as compared to the
chaotic battlefield of philosophy, where no philosopher seemed able to agree with any other. He
was also concerned with how a God could fit in with an essentially mechanical and determined
universe, and he was eager to confront the serious doubts about philosophy as an intellectual
enterprise that the skepticism of David Hume had recently sown in the philosophical community
as a whole.

Kant developed his moral philosophy in three main works: "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der
Sitten" ("The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics": 1785), "Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft" ("Critique of Practical Reason": 1788), and "Metaphysik der Sitten" ("Metaphysics of
Morals": 1797). He started by observing that it is an observable empirical fact that people do in
fact have moral and ethical views and, for them to have any meaning at all, people must have
some element of free will.

His view of Ethics is deontological (i.e. it focuses on the rightness or wrongness of the actions
themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions or
the character of the actor, and holds that ethical rules bind people to an ethical duty). It is founded
on his view of rationality as the ultimate good, and his belief that all people are fundamentally
rational beings. He believed that morality was derived from rationality and that, just as rational
thought leads us to an objective reality, it also leads us to an objective morality, which could be
rationally supported.

His major contribution to Ethics was the theory of the Categorical Imperative, an absolutely
universal, non-negotiable moral law which holds up regardless of context. At its simplest, it states
that one should act only in such a way that you would want your actions to become a universal
law, applicable to everyone in a similar situation (a kind of Moral Universalism or Moral
Absolutism). Additionally, one must strive to treat others not as mere means, but as ends in
themselves, so that (in stark contrast to Utilitarianism) it can never be right to manipulate, abuse
or lie to individuals, even in the interests of others or even the perceived greater good. This latter
maxim was, and remains, highly controversial when taken to extremes, but Kant insisted that it
should remain sacrosanct. He asserted that each person is his own moral agent, and we should
only be responsible for our own actions, not those of others.

According to Kant's "critical method", as described above, any attempts to prove God's existence
are necessarily a waste of time, because our concepts only work properly in the empirical world
and God is, by definition, a non-empirical entity. However, he justifies his own faith by arguing
that, although it would be superstitious or irrational to have a belief on something which can
actually be empirically proven or demonstrated, it is not irrational to have a belief on something
that clearly cannot be proven either way (like the existence of God). This amounts to a kind of
Fideism.

This, however, is very different from Kant's early metaphysical arguments in his pre-critical period.
In his 1763 "Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes" ("The
Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God"), he first
questions both the ontological argument and the argument from design for the existence of God
(see the section on the Philosophy of Religion), before proposing his own solution (sometimes
called the Kantian Moral Argument), that moral behaviour would only be rational in our manifestly
unfair world if there is a next life in which justice is administered.

Kant produced an early treatise on Aesthetics, "Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen
und Erhabenen" ("Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime": 1763) and did not
write on the subject again until the end of his career, in the "Kritik der Urteilskraft" ("Critique of
Judgment": 1790). He claimed that judgments of taste are both subjective and universal:
subjective in that they are responses of pleasure, and do not essentially involve any claims about
the properties of the object itself; universal in that they are not merely personal but must in a
crucial way be disinterested. He divided the kinds of aesthetic response into those of the Beautiful
(a pleasure in order, harmony, delicacy and the like) and the Sublime (a response of awe before
the infinite or the overwhelming).

Although less well known, Kant also wrote on the sciences throughout his life. In an early scientific
paper entitled "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels" ("General Natural History
and Theory of the Heavens") of 1755, Kant postulated the origin of the solar system as a result
of the gravitational interaction of atoms, anticipating Pierre-Simon Laplace's hypothesis by more
than 40 years. He also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he
theorized was also formed from a much larger spinning cloud of gas.

4. JOHN LOCKE

John Locke (1632 - 1704) was an English philosopher of the Age of Reason and early Age
of Enlightenment. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of Epistemology and
Political Philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential early Enlightenment
thinkers.

He is usually considered the first of the British Empiricists, the movement which included George
Berkeley and David Hume, and which provided the main opposition to the 17th Century
Continental Rationalists. He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately derived from experience,
and the knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely limited in its scope and certainty.

His Philosophy of Mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the
self". He also postulated, contrary to Cartesian and Christian philosophy, that the mind was a
"tabula rasa" (or "blank slate") and that people are born without innate ideas.

Along with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also one of the originators of
Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical groundwork of
democracy, republicanism and modern Liberalism and Libertarianism. He is sometimes referred
to as the "Philosopher of Freedom", and his political views influenced both the American and
French Revolutions.

Locke was born on 29 August 1632 in the small rural village of Wrington, Somerset, England. His
father, also named John Locke, was a country lawyer and clerk to the Justices of the Peace in
nearby town of Chew Magna and had served as a captain of cavalry for the Parliamentarian forces
during the early part of the English Civil War. His mother, Agnes Keene, was a tanner's daughter
and reputed to be very beautiful. Both parents were Puritans, and the family moved soon after
Locke's birth to the small market town of Pensford, near Bristol.

In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London (sponsored by the local
MP Alexander Popham) as a King's Scholar. After completing his studies there, he was admitted
to Christ Church, Oxford. Although a capable student, Locke was irritated by the largely classical
(Aristotelian) undergraduate curriculum of the time and found more interest in the works of modern
philosophers such as René Descartes, and the more experimental philosophy being pursued at
other universities and within the embryonic Royal Society.

Locke was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1656, and a master's degree in 1658. He was elected
lecturer in Greek in 1660 and then in Rhetoric in 1663, but he declined the offer of a permanent
academic position in order to avoid committing himself to a religious order. During his time at
Oxford, he also studied medicine extensively, and worked with such noted scientists and thinkers
as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and his friend from Westminster School, Richard
Lower. He later obtained a bachelor of medicine qualification in 1674.

It was through his medical knowledge that he obtained the patronage of the controversial political
figure, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury), and in 1667 he moved to
Shaftesbury's London home to serve as his personal physician. He was credited with saving
Shaftesbury's life after a liver infection became life-threatening. In London, Locke continued his
medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham, who also had a major influence on
Locke's natural philosophical thinking.

During the 1670s, Locke served as Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary
to the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas, helping to shape his ideas on international trade
and economics. Locke became more involved in politics (and further developed his political ideas)
when Shaftesbury, a founder of the Whig movement in British politics, became Lord Chancellor
in 1672. It was also during this time in London that he worked on early drafts of his "An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding", eventually published in 1690 and considered one of the
principal sources of Empiricism in modern philosophy.

After some time travelling across France following Shaftesbury's fall from favour in 1675, he
returned to England in 1679 (when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn) and
began the composition of his famous work of Political Philosophy, the "Two Treatises of
Government", which was published anonymously (in order to avoid controversy) in 1689, and
whose ideas about natural rights and government were quite revolutionary for that period in
English history.
In 1683, Locke fled to Holland, under strong (but probably unfounded) suspicion of involvement
in the Rye House Plot. He did not return to England until 1688's Glorious Revolution and the
overthrow of King James II by the of the Dutchman William of Orange (King William III of England),
which Locke saw as the ultimate triumph of his revolutionary cause. The publication of "An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding", the "Two Treatises of Civil Government" and "A Letter
Concerning Toleration" all occurred in quick succession upon his return from exile. His "Essay" in
particular brought great fame, and Locke spent much of the rest of his life responding to admirers
and critics by making revisions in later editions of the book.

In 1691, he moved to his close friend Lady Masham's country house at Oates, Essex. During this
period, he became something of an intellectual hero of the Whigs, and he discussed matters with
such figures as John Dryden and Sir Isaac Newton. He continued to work at the Board of Trade
from 1696 until his retirement in 1700.

However, his health deteriorated, marked by regular asthma attacks, and he died on 28 October
1704, and was buried in the churchyard of High Laver. He never married and had no children.

Contributions:

Locke wrote on philosophical, scientific and political matters throughout his life, in a
voluminous correspondence and ample journals, but the public works for which he is best known
were published in a single, sudden burst in 1689 - 1690.

The fundamental principles of Locke's Epistemology are presented in his monumental "An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding" of 1690, the culmination of twenty years of reflection on the
origins of human knowledge. In it he argued the empiricist approach that would be adopted by
the British Empiricism movement: that all of our ideas, whether simple or complex, are ultimately
derived from experience and sensory input. The knowledge of which we are capable is therefore
severely limited in its scope and certainty, in that we can never know the inner nature of the things
around us, only their behavior and the way in which they affect us and other things (a kind of
modified Skepticism). One of the ways in which they affect us is through our senses, giving us
experiences (or representations or images) of their properties or qualities.

Locke saw the properties of things as being of two distinct kinds. Their real inner natures derive
from the primary qualities, which we can never experience and so never know. Our knowledge of
material substances, therefore, depends heavily on their secondary qualities (by reference to
which we also name them), which are mind-dependent and of a sensory or qualitative nature. He
therefore believed in a type of Representationalism, that these primary qualities are "explanatorily
basic" in that they can be referred to as the explanation for other qualities or phenomena without
requiring explanation themselves, and that these qualities are distinct in that our sensory
experience of them resembles them in reality.

He claimed that "the mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone" (an idea being something
within the mind that represents things outside the mind). However, he also argued that a proper
application of our cognitive capacities is enough to guide our action in the practical conduct of life,
and that it is in the process of reasoning that the mind confronts the raw ideas it has received (an
approach not dissimilar to the Dualism of Descartes). His definition of knowledge might be stated,
then, as the perception of the relationship between ideas.

Where Locke differed markedly from Descartes and other predecessors, though, was in the status
he granted to the senses. Descartes held that the senses incline us to have certain beliefs, but
that this alone does not amount to actual knowledge (which requires interpretation and
explanation by reason and the intellect). For Locke, however, the senses themselves are a basic
and fundamental faculty which deliver knowledge in their own right. Indeed, his whole conception
of an idea differed from that of Descartes: for Descartes, an idea was fundamentally intellectual;
for Locke it was fundamentally sensory, and all thought involved images of a sensory nature.

In later editions of the treatise, he also included detailed accounts of human volition and moral
freedom, the personal identity on which our responsibility as moral agents depend, and the
dangers of religious enthusiasm.
With his "Two Treatises of Civil Government", published anonymously in 1690 in order to avoid
controversy, Locke established himself as a political theorist of the highest order. The "First
Treatise" was intended merely to refute Sir Robert Filmer's support of the Divine Right of Kings,
arguing that neither scripture nor reason supports Filmer's contentions. The "Second Treatise",
however, offered a systematic account of the foundations of political obligation. In Locke's view,
all rights begin in the individual property interest created by an investment of labor. The social
structure (or "commonwealth") depends for its formation and maintenance on the express consent
of those governed by its political powers (the so-called Social Contract or Contractarianism). He
believed that majority rule thus becomes the cornerstone of all political order, although dissatisfied
citizens reserve a lasting right to revolution.

Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Locke started from a belief that humans have absolute natural
rights, in the sense of universal rights that are inherent in the nature of Ethics, and not contingent
on human actions or beliefs (a kind of Deontology). However, much of his political work is
characterized by his opposition to authoritarianism, and particularly to the tendency towards
Totalitarianism advocated by Hobbes. Locke believed that no one should be allowed absolute
power, and introduced the idea of the separation of powers, whereby the Church and the judicial
system operate independently of the ruling class. In particular, he defined our civil interests (those
which the State can and should legitimately protect) as life, liberty, health and property,
specifically excluding religious concerns, which he saw as outside the legitimate concern of civil
government. If much of this seems familiar from the American Declaration of Independence, that
is no coincidence as the American founding fathers freely admitted their debt to Locke's Political
Philosophy.

His "Letter Concerning Toleration" of 1689 came in the wake of King Louis XIV of France's
revocation of the Edict of Nantes (and the religious persecution which followed it). It argued for a
broad (though not limitless) acceptance of alternative religious convictions, as well as a strict
separation between Church and State. In his 1695 "The Reasonableness of Christianity", he
argued that the basic doctrines of Christianity are relatively few and entirely compatible with
reason.

In 1693, Locke produced his contribution to the Philosophy of Education, his influential "Some
Thoughts Concerning Education". In it, he claimed (influenced by Avicenna and the Medieval
Avicennist movement) that a child's mind is a tabula rasa (or blank slate) and does not contain
any innate ideas, nor anything that might be described as human nature. Thus, all men are
created equal, and each of us can be said to be the author of our own character. These ideas
flowed logically and seamlessly from Locke's underlying belief in Empiricism, that all human
knowledge derives from the senses and that therefore there can be no knowledge that precedes
observation.

According to Locke, the mind was to be educated by a three-pronged approach: the development
of a healthy body; the formation of a virtuous character; and the choice of an appropriate academic
curriculum. He maintained that a person is to a large extent a product of his education, and also
pointed out that knowledge and attitudes acquired in a child's early formative years are
disproportionately influential and have important and lasting consequences.

5. FRIEDRICH NIETZCHE

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a 19th Century German philosopher and
philologist. He is considered an important forerunner of Existentialism movement (although he
does not fall neatly into any particular school), and his work has generated an extensive
secondary literature within both the Continental Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy traditions of
the 20th Century.

He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, famously asserting that
"God is dead", leading to (generally justified) charges of Atheism, Moral Skepticism, Relativism
and Nihilism. His original notions of the "will to power" as mankind's main motivating principle, of
the "Übermensch" as the goal of humanity, and of "eternal return" as a means of evaluating one’s
life, have all generated much debate and argument among scholars.
He wrote prolifically and profoundly for many years under conditions of ill-health and often intense
physical pain, ultimately succumbing to severe mental illness. Many of his works remain
controversial and open to conflicting interpretations, and his uniquely provocative and aphoristic
writing style, and his non-traditional and often speculative thought processes have earned him
many enemies as well as great praise. His life-affirming ideas, however, have inspired leading
figures in all walks of cultural life, not just philosophy, especially in Continental Europe.

Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in the small town of Röcken bei Lützen, near Leipzig in
the Prussian province of Saxony (modern-day Germany). His father was Carl Ludwig Nietzsche
(a Lutheran pastor and former teacher) and his mother was Franziska Oehler, and the couple had
two other children, Elisabeth (born in 1846) and Ludwig Joseph (born in 1848). He was born with
severe myopia and was always a delicate and sickly child.

Nietzsche's father died from a brain ailment in 1849 (when Nietzsche was only five), after more
than a year of pain and suffering, and his younger brother died soon after, in 1850. These events
caused Nietzsche to question why God would make good people suffer so and were a decisive
factor in his early doubts about Christianity. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived
with Nietzsche's paternal grandmother and his two unmarried aunts. After the death of Nietzsche's
grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house.

Nietzsche attended a boys' school and later a private school, before beginning to attend the
Domgymnasium in Naumburg in 1854. Although a solitary and taciturn youth, he showed
particular talents in music and language and, paradoxically, also in religious education. The
internationally-recognized Schulpforta school admitted him as a pupil in 1858, and he continued
his studies there until 1864, receiving an important introduction to literature (particularly that of
the ancient Greeks and Romans) and a taste of life outside his early small-town Christian
environment.

After graduating in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology (the
study of literary texts and linguistics) at the University of Bonn, ostensibly with a view to following
his father into the priesthood. After just one semester, though, (much to the dismay of his mother),
he stopped his theological studies and announced that he had lost his faith (although, two years
earlier, he had already argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of
Christianity). Nietzsche then concentrated on philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl
(1806 - 1876), whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year, producing his first
philological publications soon thereafter.

In 1865, Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and, in 1866, he read
Friedrich Albert Lange's "Geschichte des Materialismus" ("History of Materialism"). These works,
as well as Europe's increasing concern with science, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection,
and the general rebellion against tradition and authority greatly intrigued Nietzsche, and he looked
to expand his horizons beyond philology and to study more philosophy.

After his one-year voluntary service with the Prussian army was curtailed by a bad riding accident
in March 1868, he returned to his studies and graduated later in 1868. Although he was
considering giving up philology for science at that time, he nevertheless accepted an offer to
become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He renounced
his Prussian citizenship and remained officially stateless thereafter. Although he did serve in the
Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly (witnessing
there something of the horrors of war, as well as contracting diphtheria and dysentery), he
observed the establishment of the German Empire and the militaristic era of Otto von Bismarck
as a skeptical outsider.

During his time at Basel, Nietzsche frequently visited Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, and
was accepted into their inner circle. Wagner was a strong believer in Schopenhauer's theory that
great art was the only way to overcome the misery inherent in human existence, and he became
something of a surrogate father to Nietzsche. In 1872, he published his first book, "The Birth of
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music", a profoundly pessimistic work in the style of Schopenhauer
and Wagner, in which he asserted among other things that the best thing was not to have been
born and the second best thing was to die young. His one-time teacher and mentor, Professor
Ritschl, however, berated its lack of philological rigour. Gradually, from 1876 onwards, his
increasing friendship with Paul Rée influenced him in dismissing the pessimism of his early
writings, and he soon broke definitively with Wagner, whose growing Nationalism nauseated
Nietzsche.

He pursued his own individualistic philosophy and, in 1878, published the controversial and
isolating "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" ("Human, All Too Human"). In 1879, hopelessly out
of touch with his colleagues at the University of Basel and after a significant decline in health
which forced him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical,
Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. His health had always been precarious, with
moments of acute shortsightedness, migraine headaches and violent stomach upsets, possibly
as a result of syphilis contracted in a brothel as a student. In search of a palliative for his delicate
health, he travelled frequently over the next ten years, living (on his pension from Basel, but also
on aid from friends) as an independent author near St. Moritz in Switzerland, in the Italian cities
of Genoa, Rapallo and Turin, and in the French city of Nice. Between 1881 and 1888, he returned
repeatedly to a sparsely-furnished rented room in Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps, where he wrote
some of his most important work, writing until noon and then walking in the mountains in the
afternoon. He occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and his past students, Peter
Gast (Heinrich Köselitz: 1854 - 1918) and Franz Overbeck (1837 - 1905), who remained
consistently faithful friends.

This, then, marked Nietzsche's most productive period and, starting with 1878's "Menschliches,
Allzumenschliches", he would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888,
his last year of writing. He had little or no luck with romantic relationships, many women apparently
put off by his huge moustache. In 1882, as well as publishing the first part of "Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft" ("The Gay Science"), he met Lou Andreas Salomé (1861 - 1937), a gifted student
and friend of Wagner, Freud and Rilke among others. They travelled together round Italy, together
with his great friend Paul Rée, but Nietzsche's spirits were severely dampened when she refused
his offer of marriage.

In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister
regarding Salomé, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote
the first part of "Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra") in just ten days. The book
was published in in four parts between 1883 and 1885, but the market received it only to the
degree required by politeness and the book remained largely unsold. The poor reception of the
new alienating style and atheistic content of "Zarathustra" increased his isolation and made him
effectively unemployable at any German University. He nursed feelings of revenge and
resentment, and broke with his anti-Semitic German editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, printing "Jenseits
von Gut und Böse" ("Beyond Good and Evil") at his own expense in 1886, despite a severe
shortage of funds.

Very slowly, his work attracted more interest, but he continued to have frequent and painful
attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. Georg Brandes, who had started to
teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, delivered one of the first lectures on
Nietzsche's philosophy in the late 1880s. In 1887, he published "Zur Genealogie der Moral" ("On
the Genealogy of Morality"), considered by many academics to be his most important work.
"Götzen-Dämmerung" ("Twilight of the Idols") and "Der Antichrist" ("The Antichrist") were both
written in 1888, and his health and his spirits seemed to improve somewhat. Late in 1888, he
penned his autobiographical and eccentrically self-laudatory "Ecce Homo".

However, in Turin, early in 1889, Nietzsche first exhibited apparent signs of mental illness. He
sent bizarre short writings, known as the "Wahnbriefe" (or "Madness Letters") to various friends,
in which he claimed to be Jesus, Napoleon, Dionysus, Buddha and Alexander the Great among
others, and saw himself almost as a God figure taking on the suffering of all mankind. Eventually,
his old friend Overbeck travelled to Turin and brought Nietzsche back to a psychiatric clinic in
Basel. Now, fully in the grip of insanity (variously attributed to syphilis, brain cancer and
frontotemporal dementia), he was transferred to a a clinic in Jena where he was looked after by
his mother and sister, and where various unsuccessful attempts at a cure were made, until his
mother finally took him back to her home in Naumburg.

Ironically, Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge during this period, as
Overbeck and Gast published some of his still unpublished work (although they witheld "The
Antichrist" and "Ecce Homo" due to their more radical content). During the late 19th Century,
Nietzsche's ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements and appear to have had
influence within them, particularly in France and the United States. He had some following among
left-wing Germans in the 1890s; German conservatives, however, wanted to ban his work as
subversive.

After the death of his mother in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where his sister Elisabeth cared
for him. Many people, including Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925), came to visit him, but he remained
uncommunicative. In 1898 and 1899, he suffered from at least two strokes which partially
paralyzed him and left him unable to speak or walk and, after another stroke the next year,
combined with pneumonia, he died on August 25 1900. He was buried beside his father at the
church in Röcken.

Contributions:

Nietzsche's books tend to be more self-consciously literary than those of most

philosophers, and often read more like novels than like closely-argued philosophical treatises.
The philosophy within them, therefore, often needs to be "teased out", leaving them open to a
variety of interpretations (a notorious and perennial problem with Nietzsche's work).

He also wrote in a uniquely provocative style (he called himself a "philosopher of the hammer"),
and he frequently delivered trenchant critiques of Christianity and of great philosophers like Plato
and Kant in the most offensive and blasphemous terms possible (given the context of 19th
Century Europe). His arguments often employed ad-hominem (or personal) attacks and emotional
appeals, and he tended to jump from one grand assertion to another with little sustained logical
support or elucidation of the connection between his ideas. All these aspects of Nietzsche's style
ran counter to traditional values in philosophical writing, and they alienated Nietzsche from the
academic establishment both in his time and, to a lesser extent, today, when he is still often
dismissed as inconsistent and speculative.

Many of his works remain controversial, and the meanings and relative significance of some of
his key concepts remain contested. His distinctive German language style, his fondness for
aphorism and the distance he maintained from the major existing schools of philosophy, have led
to his subsequent adoption by many and varied political movements on both the right and the left.
The political dictators of the 20th Century, including Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, all read
Nietzsche, and the Nazis made (admittedly selective) use of Nietzsche's philosophy, an
association which caused Nietzsche's reputation to suffer after World War II.

Unusually for a major philosopher, his influences were as much non-philosophical as

philosophical, including the philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806 - 1876), the Swiss art
historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818 -1897), the Russian novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881)
and Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), the composer Richard
Wagner (1813 - 1883) and the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882). The influences of
philosophers such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and Arthur Schopenhauer, while
perhaps important, were almost totally negative. Nevertheless, Nietzsche's ideas themselves
exercised a major influence on several prominent European philosophers, including Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995), Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus (1913
- 1960), and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on leading figures in other walks of cultural life.

His most important books include "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" ("Human, All Too Human")
of 1878, "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" ("The Gay Science") of 1882, "Also sprach Zarathustra"
("Thus Spoke Zarathustra") of 1883 - 1885, "Jenseits von Gut und Böse" ("Beyond Good and
Evil") of 1886, "Zur Genealogie der Moral" ("On the Genealogy of Morality") of 1887, and "Götzen-
Dämmerung" ("Twilight of the Idols") and "Der Antichrist" ("The Antichrist"), both of 1888. It is in
these books that Nietzsche develops some of his major themes (which are discussed in more
detail below), including his "immoralism", his view that "God is dead", his notions of the "will to
power" and of the "Übermensch", and his suggestion of "eternal return".

In Ethics, Nietzsche called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticized the prominent moral
schemes of his day, including Christianity, Kantianism and Utilitarianism. However, rather than
destroying morality, Nietzsche wanted a re-evaluation of the values of Judeo-Christianity,
preferring the more naturalistic source of value which he found in the vital impulses of life itself.
In his "Beyond Good and Evil" in particular he argued that we must go beyond the simplistic
Christian idea of Good and Evil in our consideration of morality. Nietzsche saw the prevailing
Christian system of faith as not only incorrect but as harmful to society, because it effectively
allowed the weak to rule the strong, stifled artistic creativity, and, critically, suppressed the "will to
power" which he saw as the driving force of human character. He had an ingrained distrust of
overarching and indiscriminate rules, and strongly believed that individual people were entitled to
individual kinds of behavior and access to individual areas of knowledge.

In the absence of God, then, all values, truths and standards must be created by us rather than
merely handed to us by some outside agency, which Nietzsche (and the Existentialists who later
embraced this idea) as a tremendously empowering, even if not a comforting, thing. His solution
to the vacuum left by the absence of religion was essentially to "be yourself", to be true to oneself,
to be uninhibited, to live life to the full, and to have the strength of mind to carry through one's
own project, regardless of any obstacles or concerns for other people, the weak, etc. This was
his major premise, and also the goal towards which he thought all Ethics should be directed.

However, it was not only the values of Christianity that Nietzsche rebelled against. He was also
critical of the tradition of secular morality; the "herd values", as he called them, of the everyday
masses of humanity; and at least some of the traditions deriving from Ancient Greece, principally
those of Socrates and Plato.

He posited that the original system of morality was the "master-morality", dating back to ancient
Greece, where value arises as a contrast between good (the sort of traits found in a Homeric
hero: wealth, strength, health and power) and bad (the sort of traits conventionally associated
with slaves in ancient times: poor, weak, sick, and pathetic). "Slave-morality", in contrast, came
about as a reaction to master-morality, and is associated with the Jewish and Christian traditions,
where value emerges from the contrast between good (associated with charity, piety, restraint,
meekness and subservience) and evil (associated with cruelty, selfishness, wealth, indulgence
and aggressiveness). Initially a ploy among the Jews and Christians dominated by Rome to
overturn the values of their masters, to justify their situation and to gain power for themselves,
Nietzsche saw the slave-morality as a hypocritical social illness that has overtaken Europe, which
can only work by condemning others as evil, and he called on the strong of the world to break
their self-imposed chains and assert their own power, health and vitality on the world.

The famous statement "God is dead" occurs in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in "The Gay
Science" of 1882) and has led most commentators to regard Nietzsche as an Atheist. He argued
that modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively "killed"
the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than
thousand years. He claimed that this would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective
on things and any coherent sense of objective truth, leaving only our own multiple, diverse and
fluid perspectives, a view known as Perspectivism, a type of Epistemological Relativism. (Among
his other well-known quotes of a relativistic nature are: "There are no facts, only interpretations"
and "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths"). However, some commentators
have noted that the death of God may lead beyond bare Perspectivism to outright Nihilism, the
belief that nothing has any importance and that life lacks purpose, and even Nietzsche himself
was concerned that the death of God would leave a void where certainties once existed.

At the heart of many of Nietzsche's ideas lies his belief that in order to achieve anything
worthwhile, whether it be scaling a mountain to take in the views or living a good life, hardship
and effort are necessary. He went so far as to wish on everyone he cared about a life of suffering,
sickness and serious reversals in life, so that they could experience the advantage of overcoming
such setbacks. His was the original "no pain, no gain" philosophy, and he believed that in order
to harvest great happiness in life, it was necessary to live dangerously and take risks. For
Nietzsche, therefore, sorrows and troubles were not to be denied or escaped (he particularly
despised people who turned to drink or to religion), but to be welcomed and cultivated and thereby
turned to one's advantage. This is exemplified by a famous quote from his book "Ecce Homo":
"what does not kill me, makes me stronger".

An important element of Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the concept of the "will to power",
which provides a basis for understanding motivation in human behavior. His notion of the will to
power can be viewed as a direct response and challenge to Schopenhauer's "will to live".
Schopenhauer regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to
live, resulting in the desire of all creatures to avoid death and to procreate. He also saw this as
the source of all evil and unhappiness in the world. Nietzsche, on the other hand, appeals to many
instances in which people and animals willingly risk their lives in order to promote their power
(most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare). He suggested that the struggle
to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals and humans, less important than the
desire to expand one’s power. He even went so far as to posit matter itself as a center of the will
to power. In Nietzsche's view, again in direct opposition to Schopenhauer, the will to power was
very much a source of strength and a positive thing.

He contrasted his theory with several of the other popular psychological views of his day, such as
Utilitarianism (which claims that all people want fundamentally to be happy, an idea Nietzsche
merely laughed at) and Platonism (which claims that people ultimately want to achieve unity with
the good or, in Christian Neo-Platonism, with God). In each case, Nietzsche argued that the "will
to power" provides a more useful and general explanation of human behavior.

Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is that of the

"Übermensch", introduced in his 1883 book "Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus Spoke
Zarathustra"). Variously translated as "superman", "superhuman" or "overman" (although the
word is actually gender-neutral in German), this refers to the person who lives above and beyond
pleasure and suffering, treating both circumstances equally, because joy and suffering are, in his
view, inseparable. The Übermensch is the person who lives life to the full according to his own
values, a free spirit, unihibited and confident, although exhibiting an underlying generosity of spirit,
and avoiding instinctively all those values which Nietzsche considered negative. Perhaps a better
translation of Übermensch, in some ways, is that of "overcoming", which better describes the idea
of mankind seeking a new way ahead in total freedom and without the need for God, and also
reflects the need Nietzsche saw for conquering and overcoming all that is comfortable,
unadventurous and cowardly within oneself.

Nietzsche saw this as a goal for all of humanity to set for itself, and its relation to later Nazi
interpretations and eugenics is highly debatable. The idea of the Übermensch was to some extent
co-opted by the Nazi regime, largely based on a re-edited version of some of Nietzsche's later
works by his sister Elisabeth to promote German Fascist ideology and Aryan ideals, although this
is generally held to be a gross (and probably deliberate) misinterpretation of a man who abhorred
all forms of Nationalism and always promoted individualism.

Likewise, his notion of "eternal return" (or "eternal recurrence") has generated much argument
among scholars. Nietzsche suggested that if a person could imagine their life repeating over and
over again for all eternity, each moment recurring in exactly the same way, then those who could
embrace the idea cheerfully are, ipso facto, leading the right sort of life, and those who recoil with
horror from this idea have not yet learned to love and value life sufficiently. Nietzsche is almost
certainly not proposing that this is literally the way the real world works (as some have suggested),
but he is using it as a kind of metaphor to show how we should judge our moral conduct. Some
scholars (particularly the later Existentialists) have interpreted the idea as as a perpetually
recurring condition of human existence, as one faces, in every moment, infinite possibilities or
modes of interpretation.

Another idea which Nietzsche came back to several times in his works, beginning with his very
first book "The Birth of Tragedy", is that the best, and perhaps the only, way in which life can be
justified is as an aesthetic phenomenon. His point was that, if there is nothing outside this world
(no God, no transcendental realm of any sort), then any justification or meaning that life has must
be derived from within itself, in the same way as the meaning of a painting or a poem comes only
from within itself. In fact, he comes close to suggesting that maybe life itself is just a great cosmic
drama, similar to Shakespeare's notion that "all the world's a stage".

Until the last years of his life, Nietzsche made no attempt to build a system of any kind. However,
his final project, begun in his last books, "Twilight of the Idols", "The Antichrist" and "Ecce Homo",
was to be nothing less than what he called the "re-valuation (or trans-valuation) of all values", a
prescription for morality in a post-God world and a path towards the realization of man as his own
God. This was to be Nietzsche's attempt to draw all his main themes together into a single
comprehensive work, tentatively entitled "The Will to Power". But by this time his intellectual
abilities were severely disrupted by his illness, and he was not able to continue and complete the
works.
ASIAN PHILOSOPHERS:

1. CONFUCIUS

Confucius (551/552-479 BC) was a Chinese teacher, philosopher and politician during the
so-called Hundred Schools of Thought era. He was the founder of Confucianism, ethical and
philosophical system that still has many followers in China. The philosopher is thought to write or
edit many Chinese classic texts but modern scholars have expressed doubt that he is really the
author/editor of all the works that are traditionally attributed to him. But there is no doubt that
Confucius’ philosophical system dominated the Chinese thought for many centuries.

Confucius’ name is a Latinised version of Kong Fuzi that was coined by Jesuit missionaries in
China sometime in the 16th century. In Chinese, the philosopher is usually referred to as Kongzi.
But he is also known by the names such as “the Master”, “First Teacher”, “Model Teacher for Ten
Thousand Ages” and “the Laudably Declarable Lord Ni”.

Confucius’ life and work are surrounded by many myths and legends which make objective
appraisal of historical Confucius very difficult. Only in the recent years the scholars managed to
discard some records as mythical and create a clearer picture of the philosopher’s life and work.

The most extensive account of the philosopher’s life is provided by the Records of the Historian,
written by Sima Qian in the late 2nd and early 1st century BC. Unfortunately, Sima Qian’s account
is thought to be romanticised. Nevertheless, Sima Qian’s as well as other sources that are
generally dismissed as fictionalised provide a solid basis for the philosopher’s biography when
used with the Analects – the collection of Confucius’ conversations with his followers.

According to Sima Qian, Confucius was a descendant of the Shang dynasty that preceded the
Chou. The year of his birth is traditionally dated to 551 or 552 BC with the latter being thought to
be more likely. His father, King He was a military officer who died when Confucius was only three
years old. He was raised by his mother Yan Zhengzai and is said to live in poverty. According to
the traditional belief, Confucius was forced to do all kinds of works from being a shepherd to book-
keeping. Modern scholars believe that his family probably was not wealthy but they doubt that
young Confucius was affected by poverty. They emphasise that he belonged to the class of shi
which was ranked lower from aristocracy but higher from the commoners. And during his time,
most shih were scholars, court officials and teachers. As a result, Confucius is thought to be work
in occupations that were consistent with his class status.

Confucius’ life and thought were influenced greatly by the decline of central authority in China in
the 6th century BC. The Chou dynasty officially ruled the entire China but in reality, the Chou
kingdom was a confederation of city-states that competed among each other for influence and
power.

Confucius lived in the state of Lu that was officially ruled by a duke under whom were three
aristocratic families – Meng, Ji and Shu. And it were the three families who de facto held power
in the state of Lu. In 501 BC, the three families joined forces and expelled Duke Yang Hu but soon
thereafter, Gongshan Furao who served the Ji family took the capital of Lu. He invited Confucius
to enter his government but after some consideration, the philosopher refused. But in the same
year, the philosopher entered politics under a legitimate government. After serving as a
magistrate, he was promoted to the position of the minister of justice. The scholars speculate that
he owed his political promotion to the Ji family which was the strongest of the three families. But
the scholar also believe that he was working on reducing the families’ power. This clearly reveals
his initiative to dismantle the walls of the three families’ seats of power. He managed to extract a
promise from all three families but the Meng family changed its mind and the initiative failed.

In 497, probably due to the failure to achieve his political objectives, Confucius decided to go in a
self-exile. He left the state of Lu and travelled through the kingdoms of central and north-east
China including the states of Song, Cai, Chen and Wei. He returned to Lu in 483 BC as an old
man. The philosopher was warmly received but the last years of his life were not happy. He lost
his only son and his favourite disciple Yen Hui. Probably devastated by the deaths of his son and
disciple as well as the inability to persuade the rulers of the state of Lu to accept his political ideas,
Confucius died in 479, aged 71 or 72.
Contributions:

It remains uncertain how many and if any works that are attributed to Confucius were
written by him. The account of his life and work is mostly based on the Analects, a collection of
the philosopher’s conversations with his students and a few rulers. The Analects were compiled
by Confucius’ followers shortly after his death and offer a valuable insight into his thought.

Confucius’ philosophical system reveals the influence of the Chinese tradition such ancestor
worship, loyalty to the family, respect of the elders, etc. It was Confucius who introduced the
concepts of benevolence (jen), ritual (li) and proprietary (yi). He is also remembered for the so-
called Golden Rule that is based on the principle “Do not do to others what you do not want done
to yourself”.

The philosopher’s political thought was centred around a strong central government and the
Mandate of Heaven which, however, also included his moral concepts. According to Confucius,
the principle of succession should not be based on blood line but on moral merits instead. He
argued that the society can progress only if it is led by virtue and as a result, the rulers should be
an example of virtue to their people.

2. LAO TZU

Lao Tzu or Laozi, who existed in the 6th century B.C, was the founder of the Chinese
philosophical ‘School of the Tao’ or ‘Taoism’. He was known to be a contemporary of the great
and the most revered Chinese teacher and philosopher ‘Confucius’, but some legends believe
that they both were same person, whereas according to some he existed before Confucius. The
origin and life of Laozi is extremely ambiguous and even after centuries of research very little is
known about his life. Nevertheless, his teachings have been handed down through centuries and
today his followers are manifold. Laozi’s philosophy was particularly known have been prominent
during the Han Dynasty, though the philosopher lived in the Zhou Dynasty, the longest surviving
dynasty in primeval China. It was in the Han Dynasty that Taoism was strongly established and
was religiously followed. However, none of the original texts about Taoism have any reference
about Laozi’s life. Due to less information, several speculations, confusions and also conflicts
about the life and death of Laozi, have arisen in the past few decades. Many researchers are of
the view that ‘Tao te ching’ the religious and philosophical book written by Laozi, was in fact not
written by him alone. Some others are even of the opinion that the philosopher never existed and
Laozi can be referred to any old wise man of the ancient China who preached philosophy.

Lao Tzu’s personal life is still shrouded in mystery and there are many legends associated with
his birth and life. The only reliable biography of him is the ‘Shiji’ written by historian Sima Qian of
145 BC. According to the Shiji (his biography), Lao Tzu was born in the Ku County of the state of
Chu, the present day Luyi County of the Henan Province. His family name was ‘Li’ while, ‘Dan’
was his designation. Legend says that he was born after spending eight or eighty years in his
mother's womb, for which he was called the ‘the old child’. At that time, the Zhou Dynasty
flourished and he worked as a ‘shi’ or historian at the royal court. Somewhere around this time,
he was known to have met the great Confucius and, supposedly, criticized his arrogance.
Confucius on the other hand, was so fascinated by the scholar that he drew a comparison
between him and a dragon which glides on the winds and through the clouds in the sky.

Lao Tzu embarked on a voyage to the west, after an early realization that the Zhou Dynasty was
on the verge of collapse. He traveled to the Xiangu pass to enter the state of Qin, where he met
the guardian of the pass Yinxi, who insisted the philosopher to write a book. Upon his request, he
began writing a book the ‘Daodejing’, which is the combination of ‘Dao’, which means, ‘way’ and
‘de’ ‘its virtue’. The book is a philosophical account and can be literally translated as ‘Classic of
the Way of Power’. Following the completion of the book, the wise old man left Xiangu pass, and
nothing was known about his whereabouts, thereafter.

Contributions:

Lao Tzu is primarily known for his book ‘Tao Te Ching’ or ‘Daodejing’, which contains
philosophical and religious scripts about ‘Taoism’, depicted through 81 short poems. ‘Taoism’ or
‘Daoism’, a way of life which is all about harmonious living, was founded by him. It is divided into
two categories: philosophical and religious Taoism. Philosophical Taoism or the ‘school of Dao’
is based on the ancient Chinese texts of both ‘Daodejing’ by Lao Tzu and ‘Zhuangzi’, written by
a philosopher of the same name. Religious Taoism, on the other hand, refers to a family of
systematized religious movements sharing thoughts derived from Daojia (family of Dao).

According to many popular legends, the philosopher got married and also had a son named
‘Zong’, who later became a legendary soldier. The teachings of Lao Tzu and ‘Daoism’ influenced
the Han Dynasty the most. It was there that Lao Tzu was held synonymous with God, a belief,
which gave rise to the Daoist movement called ‘Way of the Celestial Masters’ or ‘Tianshi Dao’ in
142 C.E. The movement controlled the legislation of present-day Sichuan, which suggests that
ancient state of Sichuan was theocratic. Through ‘Tao Te Ching’, the philosopher preached the
essence of ‘nature’ in human lives and that everyone should go back to it. Naturalness is the
mainstay of the book which talks about the primitive state of all things that exist. Over time, Lao
Tzu came to be seen as a personification of ‘Tao’ meaning the ‘path’ or ‘principle’ in order to
reinstate the ‘Way’. He emphasized on simplicity of life, spontaneity and detachment from desires.
Taoism believes in "the One, which is natural, spontaneous, eternal, nameless, and indescribable.
It is at once the beginning of all things and the way in which all things pursue their course." The
‘path’ or the ‘way’, it talks about is often referred to "flow of the universe".

3. SUN TZU

Sun Tzu was an ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher, who is
believed to have written the famous ancient Chinese book on military strategy, “The Art of War”.
Through his legends and the influential “The Art of War”, Sun Tzu had a significant impact on
Chinese and Asian history and culture. The book drew immense popularity during the 19th and
20th centuries when the Western Society saw its practical use. This work still has continued its
impact on both Asian and Western culture and politics. Sun Tzu’s authenticity is still a question of
debate, but the traditional Chinese accounts place him in the Spring and Autumn Period of China
(722–481 BC), where he was a military general serving under King Helü of Wu. Based on the
description of warfare in “The Art of War” and the striking similarity of the text’s prose to other
works from Warring States period led the modern scholars to place the completion of “The Art of
War” in the Warring States Period (476–221 BC).

The exact birth of Sun Tzu is still uncertain, due to unreliability of the oldest available sources.
The official chronicle of the State of Lu, The Spring and Autumn Annals states that Sun Tzu was
born in Qi whereas The Records of the Grand Historian or Shiji states that Sun Tzu was a native
of Wu. Both sources agree on the fact that he was born in the late Spring and Autumn Period of
China (722–481 BC), where he was a general and strategist, serving under the king of Wu, King
Helü. His victories at the wars inspired Sun Tzu to write “The Art of War”. In the subsequent
Warring States Period (475-221 BC), “The Art of War” became the most widely read military
treatise. Warring States Period was period of constant war fought between seven nations (Zhao,
Qi, Qin, Chu, Han, Wei and Yan) to gain control over the vast expanse of fertile territory in Eastern
China. Sun Tzu proved his theories were effective on the battlefield as he had a successful military
career. Sun Tzu’s descendant, Sun Bin, also became a famous scholar of the military arts.

Contributions:

The famous military treatise, “The Art of War” written by Sun Tzu depicts a philosophy of
war for managing conflicts and winning battles. Some modern philosophers believe that apart
from the writings of the author, it also contains commentary and clarifications from later military
philosophers, such as Li Quan and Du Mu. This masterpiece, since its first publication, has been
translated and distributed internationally, and was frequently referred and used by generals and
theorists. There are numerous theories concerned with the completion of the text but it has been
archeological proved that the Art of War was composed by at least the early Han dynasty. Since
it is nearly impossible to predict the correct date of its completion, the differing theories regarding
the work's author(s) and date of completion will never resolve. It was one of the six survived major
works written before the unification of China in the 2nd century BC. In the late 1st millennium AD,
during the Song Dynasty, these six major works were combined with a Tang Dynasty text into a
collection also known as the Seven Military Classics. Being the central part of the collection, “The
Art of War” formed the bases of orthodox military theory in China. The language used in the book
can be distinguishable from a Western text on warfare and strategy. It was said that the text had
recurrent mentions such as a leader must be “serene and inscrutable” and capable of
comprehending “unfathomable plans”, which was confusing for Western readers who lack the
awareness of the East Asian context. These statements will make clear sense if studied with
Taoist thought and practice.

According to Sun Tzu, an ideal general was an enlightened Taoist master which led to “The Art
of War” to become a prime example of Taoist strategy. It is different from the other Western works,
such as Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz's On War on its spiritual dimension. To have well
understanding of this text, it is essential to have awareness on Taoism. This book also gained
popularity among the political leaders and those in business management. Today, it is also used
in public administration and planning. Apart from describing the theories of battles, this text also
discusses the diplomacy and developing relationships with other nation’s importance for the
sovereignty of a state. It is now listed on the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program and is
recommended to be read by all United States Military Intelligence personnel. CIA officers are also
required to read this book. Scholars discovered a collection of ancient texts written on unusually
well-preserved bamboo slips in early 1970s. These texts included “The Art of War” and Sun Bin's
“Military Methods”. Sun Bin's “Military Methods” was written by a descendant of Sun and was lost
since then. It is considered very important because of Sun Bin's relationship to Sun Tzu and also
due to its addition to the body of military thought in late Chinese antiquity. This discovery led to
the significant expansion of the body of surviving Warring States military theory. Sun Bin’s text,
apart from being the only surviving military text from the Warring States period discovered in the
twentieth century, also contains the closest similarity to “The Art of War” among all surviving texts.

Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” influenced many prominent figures from the history. One of the earliest
accounts was of the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, who considered the book
had ended the Age of Warring States. This text was introduced in Japan around AD 760 and
quickly became popular among Japanese generals. This book played a significant role in the
unification of Japan. Samurai were known to have honored the teachings of this book. The history
states that the French emperor Napoleon studied Sun's military writings and used it effectively in
the war against the rest of Europe. His ignorance to the central principles such as attentiveness
to temporal conditions led to his defeat in Russia. There were accounts of Admiral of the Fleet
Tôgô Heihachirô, who led Japan's forces to victory against Russia in the Russo-Japanese War,
being an avid reader of “The Art of War”. Even the communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong
partially credited his victory over Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in 1949 to this text. General
Vo Nguyen Giap, who was the military mastermind behind victories over French and American
forces in Vietnam, was believed to be an avid student and practitioner of Sun Tzu's ideas. It was
the American defeat in Vietnam which brought attention of American military leaders to the
writings of Sun Tzu. It is now listed on the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program. Its
significance was proved again during the Persian Gulf War in the 1990s, where both General
Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. and General Colin Powell used Sun Tzu's principles of deception,
speed, and attacking the enemy's weakness.

4. ZHUANG ZHOU

Zhuangzi, (Chinese: “Master Zhuang”)Wade-Giles romanization Chuang-tzu, original

name Zhuang Zhou, (born c. 369 BCE, Meng [now Shangqiu, Henan province], China—died 286
BCE), the most significant of China’s early interpreters of Daoism, whose work (Zhuangzi) is
considered one of the definitive texts of Daoism and is thought to be more comprehensive than
the Daodejing, which is attributed to Laozi, the first philosopher of Daoism. Zhuangzi’s teachings
also exerted a great influence on the development of Chinese Buddhism and had considerable
effect on Chinese landscape painting and poetry.

In spite of his importance, details of Zhuangzi’s life, apart from the many anecdotes about him in
the Zhuangzi itself, are unknown. The “Grand Historian” of the Han dynasty, Sima Qian (died c.
87 BCE), incorporated in his biographical sketch of Zhuangzi only the most meagre information.
It indicates that Zhuangzi was a native of the state of Meng, that his personal name was Zhou,
and that he was a minor official at Qiyuan in his home state. He lived during the reign of Prince
Wei of Chu (died 327 BCE) and was therefore a contemporary of Mencius, an eminent Confucian
scholar known as China’s “Second Sage.” According to Sima Qian, Zhuangzi’s teachings were
drawn primarily from the sayings of Laozi, but his perspective was much broader. He used his
literary and philosophical skills to refute the Confucians and Mohists (followers of Mozi, who
advocated “concern for everyone”).
Zhuangzi is best known through the book that bears his name, the Zhuangzi, also known as
Nanhua zhenjing (“The Pure Classic of Nanhua”). At about the turn of the 4th century CE, Guo
Xiang, the first and perhaps the best commentator on the Zhuangzi, established the work as a
primary source for Daoist thought. It is composed of 33 chapters, and evidence suggests that
there may have been as many as 53 chapters in copies of the book circulated in the 4th century.
It is generally agreed that the first seven chapters, the “inner books,” are for the most part from
the hand of Zhuangzi himself, whereas the “outer books” (chapters 8–22) and the miscellany
(chapters 23–33) are largely the product of his later followers. A vivid description of Zhuangzi’s
character comes from the anecdotes about him in the book’s later chapters.

Zhuangzi appears in these passages as an unpredictable and eccentric sage who seems careless
about personal comforts or public esteem. His clothing is shoddy and patched, and his shoes
have to be tied to his feet with string in order to keep them from falling apart. Nevertheless, he
does not consider himself to be miserable, only poor. When his good friend Hui Shi comes to
console him upon the death of his wife, he finds the sage sitting on a mat, singing and beating on
a basin. Hui Shi reprimands him, pointing out that such behavior is improper at the death of
someone who has lived and grown old with him and has borne him children.

When she died, how could I help being affected? But as I think the matter over, I realize that
originally, she had no life; and not only no life, she had no form; not only no form, she had no life
force (qi). In the limbo of existence and non-existence, there was transformation and the life force
emerged. The life force was transformed to be form, form was transformed to become life, and
now birth has transformed to become death. This is like the rotation of the four seasons, spring,
summer, fall, and winter. Now she lies asleep in the great house (the cosmos). For me to go about
weeping and wailing would be to show my ignorance of destiny. Therefore, I desist. When
Zhuangzi himself was at the point of death, his disciples began to talk about an elaborate burial
for him. Zhuangzi immediately stopped the discussion by declaring that he did not need the
paraphernalia of a great funeral, that nature would be his inner and outer coffin, the sun and the
moon his jade rings, and the stars and the planets his jewelry. All creation would make offerings
and escort him. He needed no more. Somewhat taken aback, his disciples declared that they
were afraid that the crows and the buzzards might eat him. To this Zhuangzi replied,

Above the ground it’s the crows and the kites who will eat me; below the ground it’s the worms
and the ants. What prejudice is this, that you wish to take from the one to give to the other?
Zhuangzi’s eccentricities stem directly from his understanding of the processional nature of
human experience. Insight for Zhuangzi comes with the realization that everything in life is both
dynamic and continuous—what he calls dao.

5. MENCIUS

Mencius or Mengzi (372–289 BC or 385–303 or 302 BC) was a Chinese philosopher who
has often been described as the "second Sage", that is after only Confucius himself.

Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Meng Ko (孟轲), was born in the State of Zou,
now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng (originally Zouxian), Shandong
province, only thirty kilometres (eighteen miles) south of Qufu, Confucius' birthplace.

He was an itinerant Chinese philosopher and sage, and one of the principal interpreters of
Confucianism. Supposedly, he was a pupil of Confucius' grandson, Zisi. Like Confucius,
according to legend, he travelled throughout China for forty years to offer advice to rulers for
reform. During the Warring States period (403–221 BC), Mencius served as an official and scholar
at the Jixia Academy in the State of Qi (1046 BC to 221 BC) from 319 to 312 BC. He expressed
his filial devotion when he took three years leave of absence from his official duties for Qi to mourn
his mother's death. Disappointed at his failure to effect changes in his contemporary world, he
retired from public life.

Mencius is buried in the "Mencius Cemetery" (孟子林, Mengzi Lin, also known as 亚圣林, Yasheng
Lin), which is located 12 km to the northeast of Zoucheng's central urban area. A stele carried by
a giant stone tortoise and crowned with dragons stands in front of his grave.
Mencius's mother is often held up as an exemplary female figure in Chinese culture. One of the
most famous traditional Chinese four-character idioms is 孟母三遷 (pinyin: mèngmǔ-sānqiān;
literally: "Mencius's mother, three moves"); this saying refers to the legend that Mencius's mother
moved houses three times before finding a location that she felt was suitable for the child's
upbringing. As an expression, the idiom refers to the importance of finding the proper environment
for raising children.

Mencius's father died when he was very young. His mother Zhǎng (仉) raised her son alone. They
were very poor. At first, they lived by a cemetery, where the mother found her son imitating the
paid mourners in funeral processions. Therefore, the mother decided to move. The next house
was near a market in the town. There the boy began to imitate the cries of merchants (merchants
were despised in early China). So, the mother moved to a house next to a school. Inspired by the
scholars and students, Mencius began to study. His mother decided to remain, and Mencius
became a scholar.

Another story further illustrates the emphasis that Mencius's mother placed on her son's
education. As the story goes, once when Mencius was young, he was truant from school. His
mother responded to his apparent disregard for his education by taking up a pair of scissors and
cutting the cloth she had been weaving in front of him. This was intended to illustrate that one
cannot stop a task midway, and her example inspired Mencius to diligence in his studies.

There is another legend about his mother and his wife, involving a time when his wife was at
home alone and was discovered by Mencius not to be sitting properly. Mencius thought his wife
had violated a rite and demanded a divorce. His mother claimed that it was written in The Book
of Rites that before a person entered a room, he should announce his imminent presence loudly
to let others prepare for his arrival; as he had not done that in this case, the person who had
violated the rite was Mencius himself. Eventually Mencius admitted his fault.

She is one of 125 women of which biographies have been included in the Lienü zhuan, written by
Liu Xiang.

Duke Huan of Lu's son through Qingfu (慶父) was the ancestor of Mencius. He was descended
from Duke Yang of the State of Lu 魯煬公 Duke Yang was the son of Bo Qin, who was the son of
the Duke of Zhou of the Zhou dynasty royal family. The genealogy is found in the Mencius family
tree (孟子世家大宗世系).

Mencius' descendants lived in Zoucheng in the Mencius Family Mansion, where the Mencius
Temple was also built and also a cemetery for Mencius' descendants. Meng Haoran and Meng
Jiao were descendants of Mencius who lived during the Tang dynasty.

During the Ming dynasty, one of Mencius' descendants was given a hereditary title at the Hanlin
Academy by the Emperor. The title they held was Wujing Boshi (五经博士; 五經博士; Wǔjīng
Bóshì). In 1452 Wujing Boshi was bestowed upon the offspring of Mengzi-Meng Xiwen 孟希文
56th generation and Yan Hui-Yan Xihui 顔希惠 59th generation, the same was bestowed on the
offspring of Zhou Dunyi-Zhou Mian 週冕 12th generation, the two Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao
and Cheng Yi-Chen Keren 程克仁 17th generation), Zhu Xi-Zhu Ting 朱梴 (Zhu Chan?) 9th
generation, in 1456-1457, in 1539 the same was awarded to Zeng Can's offspring-Zeng Zhicui 曾
質粹 60th generation, in 1622 the offspring of Zhang Zai received the title and in 1630 the offspring
of Shao Yong.

One of Mencius's direct descendants was Dr. Meng Chih (Anglicised as Dr. Paul Chih Meng)
former director of China House, and director of the China Institute in 1944. Time magazine
reported Dr. Meng's age that year as 44. Dr. Meng died in Arizona in 1990 at the age of 90. North
Carolina's Davidson College and Columbia University were his alma mater. He was attending a
speech along with Confucius descendant H. H. Kung. The most current descendent of Mencius
is Meng Fan Kai.

In the Republic of China there is an office called the "Sacrificial Official to Mencius" which is held
by a descendant of Mencius, like the post of "Sacrificial Official to Zengzi" for a descendant of
Zengzi, "Sacrificial Official to Yan Hui" for a descendant of Yan Hui, and the post of "Sacrificial
Official to Confucius, held by a descendant of Confucius. The descendants of Mencius still use
generation poems for their names given to them by the Ming and Qing Emperors along with the
descendants of the other Four Sages 四氏. Confucius, Zengzi, and Yan Hui. Historical sites
related to his descendants include the Meng family mansion 孟府, Temple of Mencius 孟廟, and
Cemetery of Mencius 孟林.

Contributions:

On Human Nature

While Confucius himself did not explicitly focus on the subject of human nature,
Mencius asserted the innate goodness of the individual, believing that it was society's
influence – its lack of a positive cultivating influence – that caused bad moral character.
"He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature" and "the way of learning is none
other than finding the lost mind."[29]

The Four Beginnings (or Sprouts)

To show innate goodness, Mencius used the example of a child falling down a
well. Witnesses of this event immediately feel “alarm and distress, not to gain friendship
with the child's parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor because
they dislike the reputation [of lack of humanity if they did not rescue the child] …

The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike
is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the
beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four
Beginnings but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.”

Human nature has an innate tendency towards goodness, but moral rightness cannot be
instructed down to the last detail. This is why merely external controls always fail in
improving society. True improvement results from educational cultivation in favorable
environments. Likewise, bad environments tend to corrupt the human will. This, however,
is not proof of innate evil because a clear-thinking person would avoid causing harm to
others. This position of Mencius puts him between Confucians such as Xunzi who thought
people were innately bad, and Taoists who believed humans did not need cultivation, they
just needed to accept their innate, natural, and effortless goodness. The four
beginnings/sprouts could grow and develop, or they could fail. In this way Mencius
synthesized integral parts of Taoism into Confucianism. Individual effort was needed to
cultivate oneself, but one's natural tendencies were good to begin with. The object of
education is the cultivation of benevolence, otherwise known as Ren.

Education

According to Mencius, education must awaken the innate abilities of the human mind. He
denounced memorization and advocated active interrogation of the text, saying, "One who
believes all of a book would be better off without books" (盡信書，則不如無書, from 孟子.
盡心下). One should check for internal consistency by comparing sections and debate the
probability of factual accounts by comparing them with experience.

Destiny

Mencius also believed in the power of Destiny in shaping the roles of human beings in
society. What is destined cannot be contrived by the human intellect or foreseen. Destiny
is shown when a path arises that is both unforeseen and constructive. Destiny should not
be confused with Fate. Mencius denied that Heaven would protect a person regardless of
his actions, saying, "One who understands Destiny will not stand beneath a tottering wall".
The proper path is one which is natural and unforced. This path must also be maintained
because, "Unused pathways are covered with weeds." One who follows Destiny will live a
long and successful life. One who rebels against Destiny will die before his time.
Views on politics and economics

Mencius emphasized the significance of the common citizens in the state. While
Confucianism generally regards rulers highly, he argued that it is acceptable for the
subjects to overthrow or even kill a ruler who ignores the people's needs and rules harshly.
This is because a ruler who does not rule justly is no longer a true ruler. Speaking of the
overthrow of the wicked King Zhou of Shang, Mencius said, "I have merely heard of killing
a villain Zhou, but I have not heard of murdering [him as] the ruler."

This saying should not be taken as an instigation to violence against authorities but as an
application of Confucian philosophy to society. Confucianism requires a clarification of
what may be reasonably expected in any given relationship. All relationships should be
beneficial, but each has its own principle or inner logic. A Ruler must justify his position by
acting benevolently before he can expect reciprocation from the people. In this view, a
King is like a steward. Although Confucius admired Kings of great accomplishment,
Mencius is clarifying the proper hierarchy of human society. Although a King has
presumably higher status than a commoner, he is actually subordinate to the masses of
people and the resources of society. Otherwise, there would be an implied disregard of
the potential of human society heading into the future. One is significant only for what one
gives, not for what one takes.

Mencius distinguished between superior men who recognize and follow the virtues of
righteousness and benevolence and inferior men who do not. He suggested that superior
men considered only righteousness, not benefits. That assumes "permanent property" to
uphold common morality. To secure benefits for the disadvantaged and the aged, he
advocated free trade, low tax rates, and a more equal sharing of the tax burden.