Philosophy Topics
The philosophers in this collection have written across many subjects, but a small set of perennial themes recurs throughout the tradition: love, death, virtue, justice, knowledge, freedom, and a handful of others. The pages below collect the most-quoted philosophers on each topic, drawing together voices across two and a half millennia. Browse a topic to see how thinkers from very different traditions have approached the same question.
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Philosopher Quotes on Love
Love has been a central concern of philosophy from Plato's Symposium through medieval Christian thought to twentieth-century existentialism. Philosophers have asked whether love is an emotion, a virtue, a kind of know...
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Philosopher Quotes on Death
Death has been a recurring problem in philosophy since Socrates argued that philosophy itself is a preparation for dying. Philosophers have debated whether death is an evil, a deprivation, a liberation, or simply a li...
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Philosopher Quotes on Life
The question of what makes a life worth living runs through almost every philosophical tradition. Ancient philosophers identified the good life with virtue, contemplation, or the absence of disturbance; medieval think...
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Philosopher Quotes on Happiness
Happiness — eudaimonia in the ancient sources — is one of philosophy's oldest organizing concepts. Aristotle defined it as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, the Epicureans identified it with stable pleas...
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Philosopher Quotes on Virtue
Virtue has been a central category of ethics since the Greeks treated it as the excellence proper to a human being. Plato analyzed the cardinal virtues, Aristotle developed virtue ethics as habituated dispositions of ...
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Philosopher Quotes on Knowledge
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. Philosophers have asked what distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion, whether it requires certainty or can be pro...
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Philosopher Quotes on Truth
The question of truth — what it is, how we recognize it, and whether it is one or many — has been central to philosophy since Parmenides. Classical correspondence theories hold that truth is agreement between thought ...
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Philosopher Quotes on Justice
Justice is among the oldest topics in political philosophy, framed in Plato's Republic as the right ordering of soul and city. Aristotle distinguished distributive justice from corrective justice, medieval natural-law...
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Philosopher Quotes on Freedom
Freedom — political, metaphysical, and existential — has been one of the principal preoccupations of modern philosophy. Political philosophers debate the conditions under which a person is free from interference or ge...
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Philosopher Quotes on God
The philosophical study of God ranges across arguments for divine existence, the divine attributes, the problem of evil, and the relation between faith and reason. Medieval philosophers within Jewish, Christian, and I...
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Philosopher Quotes on Nature
Philosophy's reflection on nature ranges from Greek inquiries into the principles of physical change to contemporary debates about the human relation to the non-human world. Ancient and medieval philosophers asked wha...
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Philosopher Quotes on Time
Time has been one of philosophy's persistent puzzles since Augustine confessed that he knew what time was until someone asked him. Ancient and medieval philosophers debated whether time is the measure of motion, a fea...
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Philosopher Quotes on the Mind
Philosophy of mind asks what mental states are, how they relate to bodies and brains, and how thought, perception, and feeling are possible at all. Classical sources from Plato through Descartes treated the mind as a ...
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Philosopher Quotes on Politics
Political philosophy investigates the basis and limits of political authority, the principles of just institutions, and the duties citizens owe one another. From Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, an...