The Philosophers: The 100 Greatest Thinkers of All Time

Enroll in a course with the greatest professors in the world. The 100 thinkers featured in this book speak directly to us. Through the power of their ideas their voices carry across distances of time and place. They invite us to wrestle with issues of morality, ethics, and government, the relationships between myth, religion, and science, and questions of language and perception, asking us what it means to learn, grow, and think. In addition to the fully elaborated systems put forth in their major works, these philosophers have played an important role in the formation of Western ideals and aspirations through brief phrases that they or others on their behalf have bequeathed to posterity. The more than 1,000 quotations found in this book constitute an authentic school of philosophy, providing a panorama of ideas and reflections to challenge conventional modes of thought and spur a deeper engagement with ourselves and the world around us. From Socrates to Sartre, meeting along the way such thinkers as Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and Thoreau, as well as living champions of philosophical thinking, this book is a tribute to 100 prominent voices that have sought to formulate questions, if not provide answers for what Hannah Arendt called the human condition.