Memorize Famous Philosophers: 79 Flashcards from Socrates to Peter Singer
Memorize 45 famous philosophers from Socrates to Singer with 79 flashcards: key works, ideas and schools, plus tips to group rationalists, Stoics and more.
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Famous Philosophers (deck MY5582, 79 cards) covers 2,500 years in chronological order, from Socrates to Peter Singer. Most cards follow one pattern: a name card (nationality, dates, school), then one or two cards on a famous work, saying or life event. That makes it a good deck for building a mental timeline.
Study this deck: Famous Philosophers
1 / 10Socrates
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
Sample cards
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Zeno of Citium | Greek philosopher (333-263 BCE) who founded Stoicism |
| Hume's famous problem | The problem of induction: how can we justify inferring general principles from specific observations? |
| Rousseau's famous opening line | Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains (from The Social Contract) |
| Kant's three Critiques | Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment |
| Unusual about Wittgenstein's career | He gave away his inheritance and worked as a schoolteacher and hospital porter |
| Hannah Arendt's famous concept | The banality of evil (from the Eichmann trial) |
| Kuhn's influential book | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) |
| Karl Popper | Austrian-British philosopher of science (1902-1994) who developed falsificationism |
Who and what you will cover
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Laozi, the Buddha, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, William James, Dewey, Husserl, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Arendt, Popper, Foucault, Derrida, Rawls, Kuhn, Habermas, Rorty, Nussbaum, Ayn Rand and Singer. Key ideas include the Socratic method, the syllogism, Stoicism, pantheistic monism, the dialectic, existentialism, utilitarianism, phenomenology, absurdism, deconstruction, paradigm shifts and the capabilities approach.
Learn it by schools, not one name at a time
Forty-five names blur together if you study them card by card. Give each name one tag and review the tags as small groups:
- Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Empiricists: Locke, Hume. Kant (card 31) tries to combine the two.
- Stoics: Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius (a founder, a former slave and an emperor).
- Existentialists: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, with Camus next to them as the absurdist.
- Pragmatists: James, Dewey, Rorty.
The deck has one ordering quirk: Mill (born 1806) comes after Marx (1818). Swap them when you draw your timeline.
Cards that need repair
- Card 12 is reversed. The answer ("Siddhartha Gautama, c. 480-400 BCE, founder of Buddhism") sits on the front, and the back asks the question. Swap the two sides.
- Cards 11, 15 and 33 have mangled fronts ("Laozi and when did he supposedly live", "Kant famous for never doing"). Read them as fill-in-the-blank prompts.
- Card 10: Confucius' maxim is the negative form of the Golden Rule, often called the Silver Rule. Exams like to test that difference.
- Card 33: Kant did leave Königsberg. As a young man he worked as a private tutor in nearby villages. The accurate version is "never travelled far from it."
Tip: for each name, write one extra card that runs in reverse: idea → philosopher ("falsificationism → ?", "leap of faith → ?"). The deck only goes from name to idea, and essay questions usually go the other way.
Next step
For more detail after Kant, continue with Modern and Contemporary Philosophy: 132 flashcards from Aquinas to Rawls.
Find MY5582 in the library on Flip It and tag your first ten names today.
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