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Philosophers
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Philosophers as a topic appears across disciplines including political science, ethics, social theory, and the history of ideas. Courses in philosophy, sociology, and the humanities regularly ask students to engage with foundational thinkers because their frameworks continue to shape how society understands justice, human nature, the individual, and the good life. The breadth of the subject is part of what makes it academically rich — a single concept like justice or the nature of the mind can be traced across radically different traditions and historical moments, from ancient Greek dialogues to Enlightenment political theory to Taoist texts like the Tao Te Ching.

Student papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Some focus on close reading and textual analysis, examining specific arguments such as Epicurus on the fear of death, the riddle of the Meno, or the concept of justice as it appears in the Republic, the Prince, and the Analects. Others are comparative, placing thinkers like Rousseau and Kant alongside each other to evaluate competing recommendations for reducing social conflict, or pairing figures like C. Wright Mills and Hannah Arendt to explore theories of mass society. A smaller set of papers applies philosophical frameworks to contemporary issues, including community reintegration and crisis intervention.

A strong essay on philosophers grounds its thesis in a clearly defined concept or argument rather than attempting to survey an entire thinker's work. Evidence drawn from primary texts carries the most weight, supported by careful interpretation rather than broad generalization. The most common pitfall is treating a philosopher's ideas as a fixed set of opinions rather than as arguments that require analysis, evaluation, and engagement with counterpositions.

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Research Paper Doctorate

Spinoza as a Controversial Figure

Baruch Spinoza was from a Portuguese Jewish family, which had fled to the Netherlands.

Paper Undergraduate

Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein Is Particularly Interesting Because

Ludwig Wittgenstein is particularly interesting because in Philosophical Investigations (PI) he repudiated all of his earlier work in logical positivism and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), along with much of what was traditionally thought of as philosophy, and took a radically new track in the last twenty years of his life. Young Wittgenstein was more certain that he had solved all major philosophical problems, while the older Wittgenstein had completely lost all such certainties. There were even hints in his earlier work of this later, more explicit existential despair, pessimism and even cynicism about the limits of philosophy, which certainly became more profound over the years. He was no longer able to view the world as consisting of facts that were logical representations of objects that really existed or at least had the potential to exist.

Paper Doctorate

Goodman, Some Properties (Like Being Green) Figure

According to Goodman's New Riddle of Induction, the original problem with induction that philosophers tried to solve was that anything can follow anything else. People such as Hume, however, showed this to be impossible and so philosophers, such as Hempel, tried to loosen it to statements that could confirm another (i.e. project one from the other and be to some extent projectable). Goodman showed, however, that inventing a word with an invented term such as ‘grue' does not eliminate the former problem and inductive statements still do not grant us any form of certainty. Not only does one not follow from the other, but we also cannot draw any projectable conclusions. The best that we can do is find a way to validate certain hypotheses (i.e. formulate reasons/ conditions for accepting some above others) and for making a distinction between valid and invalid inferences. Invalid hypothesis would be for the form ‘grue' and, in order to accept inductive statements, we need to distinguish between those that are invalid (namely those that accept illegitimate terms such as ‘grue') and those that are valid.

Research Paper Doctorate

Suicide: causes, risk factors, and prevention strategies

¶ … suicide has been of interest from the beginning of Western civilization. For philosophers, clergy and social scientists, the subject raises myriad of conceptual, theological, moral, and psychological questions, such…

Paper Undergraduate

Personal theory development and application

For thousands of years, philosophers have been searching the truth about the human nature. The complexities and discrepancies of human nature are so bizarre that one cannot exactly define what human nature is. The physical nature of humans is understandable through studying pure sciences. However, the mental, emotional or psychological nature of man varies not only from person to person, but also from time to time. Coming towards the subject of mental illness, it is astounding that almost 45% of illness is mental. The center for economic performance's mental health policy group has affirmed that mental illness is more hazardous and severe than physical illness; and it often leads to physical illness (2012).

Research Paper Undergraduate

Topic selection and research direction guidelines

¶ … Epic of Gilgamesh, considered a "hero-king" of ancient Mesopotamia (Kovacs, 1989). This story like many in ancient texts, often considered mythology, includes encounters and tails of Gilgamesh's experiences with…

Research Paper Undergraduate

Skepticism: philosophical foundations and contemporary perspectives

One of the key problems in the history of epistemological inquiry is that of skepticism. There are some moderate skeptics who have argued that knowledge is theoretically possible. There are some skeptics, however, who…

Paper Undergraduate

Plato\'s Republic Forms of Government

Forms of Government in the Republic by Plato

Paper Doctorate

Classical modernity: conceptualization and understanding

Durkheim is considered the first French academic sociologist and a significant part of the life of this philosopher was surrounded by his work and writing though he also participated a lot in the affairs of the French…

Paper Doctorate

Hidden Connections by Fritjof Capra: A Critical Review

The advent of the information technology brought a revolutionary change in the way we think and apply science. Historically, inquiry in science has been based on a model that is connected point A to point B and closely resembles occam's razor. Fritjof Capra was at the forefront of a new change – a radical way of looking at things – something called "systems thinking". In a way this was a long time coming. After all the defeat of the linear time and the idea of relativity had already transformed and busted many myths that had been taken to be fact.

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