Major philosophers across history paired with their signature idea or contribution, one thinker per card.
40 cards · basic cards · AI-written, checked twice. Edit anything.
- Socrates
- Pursued truth through systematic questioning and dialogue (the Socratic method)
- Plato
- Theory of Forms: unchanging, perfect, abstract ideas exist beyond the material world
- Aristotle
- Virtue ethics: excellence is achieved through reason and habituation, seeking the mean between extremes
- Epicurus
- Simple pleasures, friendship, and modest living lead to the good life, not excessive indulgence
- Zeno of Elea
- Paradoxes demonstrate that motion, change, and plurality are logically impossible or contradictory
- Heraclitus
- Reality is constant flux and change, governed by logos, the universal principle of fire and transformation
- Parmenides
- True being is eternal, unchanging, indivisible, and one; apparent change is illusion
- Augustine
- Divine grace, not human will alone, is necessary for salvation and knowledge of God
- Thomas Aquinas
- Aristotelian reason and Christian revelation both reveal truth; faith and reason are compatible
- Al-Ghazali
- Reason and religious faith are compatible; mystical experience confirms Islamic theology
- Maimonides
- Aristotelian philosophy and Jewish Torah both reveal the same truths about God and the world
- René Descartes
- Mind and body are distinct substances; I am certain of my existence because I think (cogito ergo sum)
- Baruch Spinoza
- God and nature are one infinite substance; everything exists in God and follows from necessity, not free will
- Gottfried Leibniz
- Reality consists of monads, simple indivisible substances arranged by God in pre-established harmony
- John Locke
- Knowledge comes entirely from sensory experience; the mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth