Series: GREAT PHILOSOPHERS

'Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all' - Aristotle 'Knowing yourself is the mark of all wisdom' 'You will never do anything in this world without courage' Aristotle was one of the greatest philosophers that has ever lived. Taught by Plato, he was the first genuine scientist in history, a true pioneer of both science...

'Courage is knowing what not to fear' - Plato 'One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors' Without the work of Plato, western thought is, quite literally, unthinkable. No single influence has been greater, in every age and in every philosophic field. Even those thinkers who have rejected...

'Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.' Kant In today's increasingly fractured world of oppression and uncertainty, Kant's moral philosophy is more important than ever before. And never has the need for moral absolutes been more pressing than in this age of doubt, disillusion and cynicism. This is where Kant comes in, as his moral philosophy continues...

'What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.' 'What and how much I possess is a matter of indifference so far as rights are concerned.' 'Education is the art of making man ethical.' Without Hegel, modern thought is unthinkable— all those whose ideas have...

'If you put me to death,' Socrates warned his Athenian judges, 'you will not easily find anyone to take my place.' So indeed it would prove, a single cup of hemlock robbing the western philosophical tradition of its founding father. Yet Socrates' influence was not so easily to be done away with. His words were lovingly recorded by his devoted...

'The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts' Bertrand Russell 'Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know' Bertrand Russell discovered mathematics at the age of eleven. It was, he recalled, a transporting experience: 'as dazzling as first love'. From that...

'Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers.' Voltaire Voltaire was one of the first philosophers to be commercially successful internationally. Famous for his strong views on the importance of civil liberties, he was equally renowned for his wit. A prolific letter writer, he was also the author of over 2,000 books and pamphlets, including the novel...

'Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself' - Wittgenstein The Great Philosophers: Wittgenstein by Peter Hacker explores how Wittgenstein overturned centuries of philosophical reflection on the nature of 'the inner', our subjective experience, and our knowledge of self and others. He challenged traditional conceptions of 'the outer' and human behaviour, revealing distortions in the perceived relationship between the inner...

From WW2 code-breaker to Artificial Intelligence - a fascinating account of the remarkable Alan Turing. Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers was a landmark of twentieth-century thought. It not only provided the principle of the post-war computer, but also gave an entirely new approach to the philosophy of the mind. Influenced by his crucial codebreaking work during the war,...