Antithenes: if one is going to claim any familiarity with the Platonic moment in philosophy, with the moment that produced but did not yet contain Cynicism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, one needs to know the name Antithenes. He was one of Socrates' followers, and so of very much the same philosophic milieu as Plato. But Antithenes went the other way on the issue of universals. He may even be said to be the founder of nominalism, saying thing like, "A horse I can see, but horsehood I cannot see." Too little in known about him. We do know, though, that the later Cynics claimed him as a spirit kindred to their own. They would tell a story of Diogenes of Sinope, as a young man, following Antithenes around to bask in his wisdom. This tale seems unlikely. It was invented to give the Cynics a sort of apostolic succession from Socrates, who by Diogenes' day was seen as the gold standard of philosophical greatness by a number of distinct factions. Socrates to Antithene...
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In anthropology, Hobbes was a thorough-going materialist. He didn’t believe in a ‘ghost within the machine,’ only in the machine. In metaphysics, again, he was a thorough-going materialist. This meant that he disbelieved in any notion of God that would involve a Being transcending in any way the material world. It is possible that he believed in a God in SOME sense, but he statements on the subject are confusing and subject to a lot of interpretive controversy. They may be confusing because he wanted them to be so: his Stuart patrons would hardly have smiled on open atheism. In epistemology, Hobbes was a nominalist and empiricist. “There is nothing universal but names,” he said, and that notion was in his mind a sword with which to slay nonsense. In ethics, Hobbes was of two views. In a state of nature, there is only generalization from psychological egoism. I want power. I have to expect that you, too, want power. What is right for me then is to dominate and perhaps to kill you....
Assuming you, dear reader, were asked to prepare a list of the 10 greatest philosophers produced by the British isles since the Norman Conquest. Who would have to be on the list? We think of certain philosophers in clusters. For example, we think of the triad of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume at the heart of empiricism. But you may not want ALL of them on the list. There's so much ground to cover. If only one of them: which one? Likewise, we think of Duns Scotus and Ockham as a pair, representing realism and nominalism respectively. But you might have to pick only one of them. Or the great analytical philosophers of the early 20th century: they, too, come as a cluster. If you think of Moore, you also think of Russell. If you think of Russell, you also think of Whitehead. But ... only one? The two great apologia for free speech in British history were those penned by Milton and Mill. Should we accordingly include both of those names? or only one? or neither? I've just n...