Philosophic Classics From Plato to Derrida

768 JEAN-JACQUESROUSSEAU Even if each person could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children; they are born free men; ...

364 WILLIAM OFOCKHAM That the universal is an intention of the soul is clearly expressed by Avicenna in the fifth book of the Me ...

THESOCIALCONTRACT 769 short, each State can have as enemies only other States and not individual men, inasmuch as it is impossib ...

ONUNIVERSALS 365 Again, whenever one thing is distinct from another it is distinguished from that thing either of and by itself ...

770 JEAN-JACQUESROUSSEAU private interest. If he dies, his empire after him is left disconnected and disunited, as an oak dissol ...

366 In the late 1300s, some Italian thinkers began to talk about a rebirth or “renais- sance.” They wrote disparagingly of the “ ...

THESOCIALCONTRACT 771 over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve what we have. If, t ...

INTRODUCTION 367 known as “syncretism.” Syncretism holds that all schools of philosophy have some truth and so should be examine ...

772 JEAN-JACQUESROUSSEAU injure all its members; and we shall see hereafter that it can injure no one as an individual. The sove ...

368 GIOVANNIPICO DELLAMIRANDOLA ORATION ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN (in part) Now the highest Father, God the master-builder, had, by ...

THESOCIALCONTRACT 773 property that he possesses forms part. By this act, possession does not change its nature when it changes ...

ORATION ON THEDIGNITY OFMAN 369 Study of Human Proportions,by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Like Pico, Leonardo enjoyed the pat ...

774 JEAN-JACQUESROUSSEAU the members of the State, as well as maintained by all its power against foreigners, they have, as it w ...

370 GIOVANNIPICO DELLAMIRANDOLA seeds, he will become a plant. If the seeds of sensation, he will grow into brute. If rational, ...

775 Whereas most modern philosophers (such as Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume) arrived at their basic philosophical positions earl ...

To a large extent, modern philosophy begins with a rejection of tradition. Whereas medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas ...

Following his university studies, Kant worked as a private tutor to wealthy families. By 1755, he was back in the university, wh ...

these two approaches and in so doing developed a uniquely influential system of philosophy. Contemporary thinkers in the West ar ...

“shape” of the world outside the mind. Kant argued instead that objects conform to the mind: that how one experiences the world ...

373 René Descartes was born into the family of a minor noble in the town of La Haye in Touraine, France. At age 10, René began a ...