Talk:History of Western philosophy

message: The present bold headings at the end of the history of philosophy article constitute a proposed outline of the rest of the article.  I would suggest that we give several introductory paragraphs about philosophy in each period, to be kept consistent with the introductory paragraphs in the articles about each period; the articles can go into more depth.  That's just my idea, though; you might have a better one.
The "general outline" began life on philosophy and should be kept up-to-date with the philosophy page.  I.e., if you make changes to those paragraphs, then please, change the paragraphs on philosophy as well.
By the way, I, as someone who has studied the history of philosophy (esp. Descartes, Hume, and Reid) a fair bit, am very excited about the prospects of writing about the history of philosophy in a wiki/hypertext format.  It really does seem the best way to do it! --LMS
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The following content didn't really fit when the stuff from Philosophy was moved here. But I want it stored for now:
Ancient philosophy was dominated by the trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  In medieval philosophy, topics in metaphysics and philosophy of religion held sway, and the most important names included Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.  Modern philosophy, generally means philosophy from 1600 until about 1900, and which includes many distinguished early modern philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.  Nineteenth-century philosophy is often treated as its own period, as it was dominated by post-Kantian German and idealist philosophers like Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, and F. H. Bradley; other important thinkers were John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
In the twentieth century, philosophers in Europe and the United States took diverging paths.  The so-called analytic philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, were centered in Oxford and Cambridge, and were joined by logical empiricists emigrating from Austria and Germany (e.g., Rudolph Carnap) and their students and others in the United States (e.g., W. V. Quine) and other English-speaking countries.  The continental philosophy was led by the German phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, followed soon by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists; this led via other "isms" to postmodernism, which dominates schools of critical theory as well as philosophy departments in France and Germany.
John Dewey was an American philosopher and founder of the school of philosophy known as pragmatism. He had an enormous influence on American education - indeed, he is sometimes referred to as the "father of American education".
Important contemporary (or almost contemporary) philosophers include Karl Popper who investigated questions surrounding the scientific method, Peter Singer who formulated a radical practical ethics, John Rawls with his theory of distributive justice, and Robert Nozick, a libertarian political philosopher.
Evercat 00:01 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
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Shouldn't this page be the History of Western Philosophy? : ChrisG 12:15, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: The recent editor is correct in saying that Pythagoras did not "invent" the Pythagorean Theorem, though he is often credited with the first abstract proof.  On the other hand, he was based in Italy, in the Greek colony of Crotona. Rick Norwood (talk) 12:42, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pythagoras