Giambattista Vico (1668—1744) Giambattista Vico is often credited with the invention of the philosophy of history. Spécifiquement, he was the first to take seriously the possibility that people had fundamentally different schema of thought in different historical eras. Ainsi, Vico became the first to chart a course of history that depended on the way the structure of thought changed over time. To illustrate the difference

Mozi (Mo-tzu, c. 400s—300s B.C.E.) Mo Di (Mo Ti), better known as Mozi (Mo-tzu) or “Master Mo,” was a Chinese thinker active from the late 5th to the early 4th centuries B.C.E. He is best remembered for being the first major intellectual rival to Confucius and his followers. Mozi’s teaching is summed up in ten theses extensively argued for in the text that bears his

Time Travel Time travel is commonly defined with David Lewis’ definition: An object time travels if and only if the difference between its departure and arrival times as measured in the surrounding world does not equal the duration of the journey undergone by the object. Par exemple, Jane is a time traveler if she travels away from home in her spaceship for one hour as

Emmanuel Kant: Aesthetics Immanuel Kant is an 18th century German philosopher whose work initated dramatic changes in the fields of epistemology, métaphysique, éthique, esthétique, and teleology. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, he holds our mental faculty of reason in high esteem; he believes that it is our reason that invests the world we experience with structure. In his works on aesthetics and teleology, he argues that

Johann Georg Hamann (1730—1788) Johann Georg Hamann was the philosophically most sophisticated thinker of the German Counter-enlightenment. Born in 1730 in Königsberg in eastern Prussia, Hamann was a contemporary and friendly acquaintance of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and in many ways Hamann’s career can be seen in parallel to that of his great friend. Like Kant, Hamann attended the University of Königsberg, and in his