World Congress of Philosophy

Personalities  /  Benjamin Franklin Quotes  /  By person  /  Benjamin Franklin Quotes Benjamin Franklin by David Martin (1737-1797). Oil on canvas, 1767. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin was America’s   scientist,   inventor,   politician ,   philanthropist   and   business man . He is best known as the only Founding Father who signed all three documents that freed America from Britain. Franklin is credited with drafting the   Declaration of Independence   and the   American Constitution.   He also negotiated the   Treaty of Paris   which ended the Independence War against Britain. Born in a middle class family, he was the 15 th  of 17 children and the youngest son. With only 2 years of formal education he rose to the highest level of society. He never forgot where he started and always referred to himself as “B.F. of Philadelphia, Printer” as  in the ...

  Quotes  /  By person  /  Benjamin Franklin Quotes How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts! - Benjamin Franklin

Personalities  /  Al-Kindi Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (ca. 800–870 CE) was the first self-identified philosopher in the Arabic tradition. He worked with a group of translators who rendered works of Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and Greek mathematicians and scientists into Arabic. Al-Kindi’s own treatises, many of them epistles addressed to members of the caliphal family, depended heavily on these translations, which included the famous Theology of Aristotle and Book of Causes, Arabic versions of works by Plotinus and Proclus. Al-Kindi’s own thought was suffused with Neoplatonism, though his main authority in philosophical matters was Aristotle. Al-Kindi’s philosophical treatises include On First Philosophy, in which he argues that the world is not eternal and that God is a simple One. He also wrote numerous works on other philosophical topics, especially psychology (including the well-known On the Intellect) and cosmology. Al-Kindi’s work in mathematics and the scienc...

A medieval Arabic representation of Aristotle teaching a student Islamic illustration of Aristotle teaching a student, c. 1220

Quotes  /  By person  /   Socrates Quotes True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.  -  Socrates

Personalities  /  Socrates Quotes  /  By person  /  Socrates Quotes The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.),[1] an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived. All our information about him is second-hand and most of it vigorously disputed, but his trial and death at the hands of the Athenian democracy is nevertheless the founding myth of the academic discipline of philosophy, and his influence has been felt far beyond philosophy itself, and in every age. Because his life is widely considered paradigmatic not only for the philosophic life but, more generally, for how anyone ought to live, Socrates has been encumbered with the adulation and emulation normally reserved for religious figures – strange for someone who tried so hard to make others do their own thinking and for someone convi...