Time: to 469 BC
Main concerns: How is change possible? What is
everything made of?
Philosopher: Socrates
Time: 469-399 BC
Main concerns: How should one live?
Philosopher: Plato
Time: 427-347 BC
Main concerns: What is knowledge and how is it
possible? What is the relationship between mathematical objects and everyday
objects? Is the world as it appears to be?
Philosopher: Aristotle
Time: 384-322 BC
Main concerns: Everything!
Philosophers: early Christians
Time: 100-500 AD
Main concerns: How does God want people to live?
What is the nature of the divine order?
Philosophers: Medieval philosophers
Time: 500-1200 AD
Main concerns: How can God and his properties be
made logically comprehensible?
Philosophers: Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic
doctors
Time: 1250-1500
Main concerns: How can Aristotle’s philosophy be
reconciled with Christian doctrine?
Philosophers: Early modern pre-Newtonians
(Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz)
Time: 1530-1716
Main concerns: How can knowledge be built on new
foundations that will guarantee truth? What is the relationship between reason
and material causation?
Philosophers: Post-Newtonians (Berkeley, Smith,
Hume, Kant)
Time: 1716-1804
Main concerns: What is the relationship between
the scientific (Newtonian) picture of the world and the common sense picture?
Philosophers: 19th century moralists
(Hegel, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche)
Time: 1800-1910
Main concerns: What is the place of humanity and
its moral concerns in the wider intellectual landscape, and in the modern
state?
Philosophers: Analytic philosophers (Russell,
Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, Austin)
Time: 1910-1960
Main concerns: Can all non-scientific problems
be dissolved by examining logic and/or language?
Philosophers: Contemporary philosophers
Time: since 1960
Main concerns: What is the relationship between
the scientific (post-Newtonian) picture of the world and the everyday (moral,
social, religious) picture? What is social justice and how can it be increased
in the contemporary state?