Socrates

Socratic Paradoxes
A significant number of the beliefs generally credited to Socrates are deliberately confusing because they
present ideas which, at first, appear contradictory. These are called paradoxes. The most famous paradox
is: “I know that I know nothing“.
In that paradox Socrates claims that he knows nothing, but if that’s true, then how could he even know
that he knows nothing.
The expression “catch 22” can be applied to all of Socrates’ paradoxes, as problems which cannot be
easily solved as they do not have an obvious answer.

PLATO

Platonic Love
In his work Symposium, Plato attempts to explain adoration and excellence. In this philosophical work,
seven characters give addresses on the commendation of Eros, the divine force of affection and want.
Plato investigates different perspectives through these characters. The character of Socrates talks about
how men should begin with an attachment to a specific individual, which then leads to love and
admiration of their physical and moral excellence. One should also adore an individual for their
knowledge and, lastly, cherish and welcome their individuality.
 St. Augustine

Language learning
Augustine of Hippo brought great thoughts on human language, making reference in the way in which children learn
to speak through the environment and association.

Likewise, he said that through speech only seeks to teach, because when asking even for something unknown, the
person who has the answer is allowed to reflect on what he will say and expose his point of view freely.

On the other hand, he pointed out that through language it is taught and learned through memory, which is stored in
the soul and externalized with thought, to communicate with people.

He also stressed that prayer was a method of communication that was already in the soul, and that served only to
communicate directly with God, to calm concerns and hope.

St. Thomas

Law The Theory of Law

Within the field of law, the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas plays a very important and respected role.
His thinking is taken as one of the axes of the theory of law and is exposed in all university chairs as a
starting point for the reflection of future lawyers.
His idea of the divine order, present in each exposition of his legacy, affirms that law is made up of laws
which are but instruments for the common good. However, these laws are valid as long as they are right
to the right.
 Descartes

Father of geometry
Another of its great contributions was in the field of mathematics, given its investigations on geometry,
since it contributed to that the analytical geometry was systematized.

John Locke
PHILOSOPHICAL EMPIRICISM
Empiricism is a theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. In the Essay,
John Locke made the most elaborate and influential presentation of empiricism. Thus, even though the
concept had been explored earlier, he is regarded by many as the founder of modern
philosophical empiricism. Locke postulated that, at birth, the mind was a tabula rasa, a Latin phrase
meaning “blank slate”. He maintained that humans are born without innate ideas; and data is added and
rules for processing are formed solely by one’s sensory experiences. He also emphasized the freedom of
individuals to author their own soul. It must be noted that Locke was clear that the mind had inherent
capacities, predispositions and inclinations prior to receiving any ideas from sensation. However, these
are triggered only when it receives ideas from sensations. Empiricism remains a major view
in epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with study of human knowledge.
 David Hume

David Hume’s Perception of Education

David Hume who is a philosopher believes that nature has a noble role in aiding people to gain some
things, which cannot be gained through reason. He does this by deploying empirical philosophical
approaches that are enshrined within the scientific methodological rigor in his philosophical approach of
reasoning. He argues, “anything we can say about the world is a matter of fact, thus can be justified only
through experience, and can be denied without contradiction” (Hume, 1985, p.205). This way, education
should enable people to develop the capacity to relate ideas to gain fundamental truths. However, this
cannot enable people to learn about the existence of both God and the world. 

Immanuel Kant

Transcendental Idealism
Transcendental idealism is one of the major beliefs that Kant postulated in his philosophical approaches.
Kant claimed that human beings focused too much on appearance but not on their feelings and their inner
world (Guyer, 2010). He ascertained that space and time were only immanent forms of human hunch. To
advance that reasoning, Kant referred to it as “transcendental idealism”. (Guyer, 2010)
In his view, Kant appreciated that one’s experience of some phenomenon in life was based on how such
things appeared to the individual, but not on the way the things precisely were. He based his approach on
the acknowledgement of a priori mental function (Guyer, 2010). The appearance of these spectacles,
according to Kant, existed outside nature.
 Gilbert Ryle
The Concept of Mind
In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle argued that the traditional conception of the human mind—that it is
an invisible ghostlike entity occupying a physical body—is based on what he called a “category mistake.”
The mistake is to interpret the term mind as though it were.

Merleau Ponty

The Structure of Behavior

Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior (SC), resumes the project of synthesizing and
reworking the insights of Gestalt theory and phenomenology to propose an original understanding of the
relationship between “consciousness” and “nature”. Whereas the neo-Kantian idealism then dominant in
France (e.g., Léon Brunschvicg, Jules Lachelier) treated nature as an objective unity dependent on the
synthetic activity of consciousness, the realism of the natural sciences and empirical psychology assumed
nature to be composed of external things and events interacting causally. Merleau-Ponty argues that
neither approach is tenable: organic life and human consciousness are emergent from a natural world that
is not reducible to its meaning for a mind; yet this natural world is not the causal nexus of pre-existing
objective realities, since it is fundamentally composed of nested Gestalts, spontaneously emerging
structures of organization at multiple levels and degrees of integration. 
 George Mead

The “I” and the “Me”

One of Mead's most significant contributions to social psychology is his distinction between the “I” and
the “Me.” It's worth emphasizing that while this distinction is utilized in sociological circles, it is
grounded philosophically for Mead. His target, in part, is no less than the idea of the transcendental ego,
especially in its Kantian incarnation. It is also important to note that the “I” and “Me” are functional
distinctions for Mead, not metaphysical ones. He refers to them as phases of the self (MSS 178, 200),
although he more typically uses the word self to refer to the “Me” (Aboulafia 2016).