World Congress of Philosophy

Personalities  /  Judith Jarvis Thomson Allegories  /  Allegory of the Trolley Problem ,  Philippa Foot -  Judith Jarvis Thomson Judith Thomson’s work is primarily in moral theory and metaphysics. Her most recently published book is entitled “Normativity” (and that’s, of course, its topic), published in 2008. Her most recently published article is on the trolley problems; it is a response to Frances Kamm’s Tanner Lectures, and was published in Kamm’s “Trolley Problem Mysteries” in 2015. Judy is currently working on a book entitled “Ethics”, which is concerned with moral theory and the metaphysics underlying certain assumptions that moral theory rests on. Judith Jarvis Thomson (October 4, 1929 – November 20, 2020) was an American philosopher who studied and worked on ethics and metaphysics. She is credited with having contributing to invent (along with Philippa Foot) the trolley proble. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. ...

Personalities  /  Aleister Crowley Quotes  /  By person  /  Aleister Crowley  Quotes Aleister Crowley, original name Edward Alexander Crowley, (born October 12, 1875, Royal Leamington Spa, England—died December 1, 1947, Hastings), British occultist, writer, and mountaineer, who was a practitioner of “magick” (as he spelled it) and called himself the Beast 666. He was denounced in his own time for his decadent lifestyle and had few followers, but he became a cult figure after his death. Crowley’s father was an heir to a brewing fortune who became an evangelist for the Plymouth Brethren, a Nonconformist religious denomination. The younger Crowley, however, formed an aversion to Christianity early in life. As a student at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, he began to use the name Aleister and gained a reputation for skill at chess. In 1898 he left the university without taking a degree. His own inheritance left him free to travel widely and to arr...

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 ...

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...

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...