This Stunning Multi-mission Picture Shows Off The Many Sides Of The Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A. It

This stunning multi-mission picture shows off the many sides of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. It is made up of images taken by three of NASA’s Great Observatories, using three different wavebands of light. Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope are colored red; visible data from the Hubble Space Telescope are yellow; and X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are green and blue.

Image credit: NSA/JPL

Galileo Galilei, February 15, 1564 / 2019

(image: Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius, facsimile of the 1610 edition)

Study Guide to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I have been interested in self-studying philosophy for a long time, and I am now taking it up as my minor in college. I have compiled this systematic guide to philosophy for my own benefit, however, it may prove beneficial to others as well.

Obviously, I am talking about Western philosophy, and not Eastern philosophy, which is a subject all of its own (and a very interesting one at that).

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent source of philosophical articles that are both thorough, and accessible. However, I have not been able to find any systematic index of articles from the SEP which make reading through it chronologically possible. Therefore, I have written an outline of important thinkers beginning with the pre-socratics, and I am linking them to respective entries in the SEP.

This guide is a work in progress, and currently has the major disadvantage of not categorizing various philosophers into specific schools of thought. I may try to work these in at a later time, but for now I am focusing on chronology rather than fitting them into categories. The SEP should do that by itself.

The Pre-Socratics

Thales of Miletus

Anaximenes

Heraclitus

Anaximander

Parmenides

Zeno of Elea

Empedocles

Democritus

Pythagoras

Diogenes

Classical Philosophy

(These three thinkers are extremely important, and intimately connected to one another)

Socrates

Plato

Aristotle

Ancient Non-Socratic Schools of Philosophy

Sophism

Protagoras

Gorgias

Skepticism

Pyrrho

Epicureanism

Epicurus

Hedonism

Aristippus of Cyrene

Democritus (although a pre-socratic, he is often associated with this school)

Stoicism

Zeno of Citium (NOT to be confused with Zeno of Elea, a pre-socratic)

Epictetus

Marcus Aurelius (although he came significantly later)

Neoplatonism

Plotinus

St. Augustine (although he came much later, he is a very important and influential figure)

Medieval Philosophy

Scholasticism

St. Anselm

St. Thomas Aquinas

Peter Abelard

Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great)

John Duns Scotus

William of Ockham

Renaissance Philosophers

Roger Bacon (Okay, technically, Bacon was a Franciscan Friar in the 14th century, so he doesn’t belong here. But he definitely doesn’t belong with the Scholastics, so he goes here.)

Erasmus

Machiavelli

Thomas More

Francis Bacon

Islamic Philosophers (no SEP links :( )

Avicenna

Averröes

Jewish Philosopher(s)

Maimonides

Early Modern Philosophy (it isn’t medieval, but it also isn’t modern)

Two competing schools of thought, and those who did not strictly belong to either school.

Rationalism

René Descartes

Baruch Spinoza

Gottfried Leibniz

Nicolas Malebranche

Empiricism

John Locke

Bishop George Berkeley

David Hume

Non-Aligned (Not strictly empiricist or rationalist)

Thomas Hobbes

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Blaise Pascal

Voltaire

Adam Smith

Edmund Burke

Immanuel Kant (signaled the shift from early modern to 19th century philosophy)

19th Century Philosophy

German Idealism

Johann Fichte

Arthur Schopenhauer 

Georg Hegel

Marxism

Karl Marx (of course he gets his own category)

British Empiricism

Jeremy Bentham

John Stuart Mill

American Philosophy

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

C.S Peirce

William James

John Dewey

European Philosophers

Auguste Comte

Søren Kierkegaard

Nietzsche

20th Century Philosophy

Characterized once again by two large and competing traditions.

Analytical Philosophers

Gottlob Frege

Bertrand Russell

Alfred North Whitehead

A.J Ayer

Ludwig Wittgenstein

W.V.O Quine

G.E. Moore

Continental Philosophers

Edmund Husserl

Martin Heidegger

Jean-Paul Sartre

Michel Foucault

Jacques Derrida

sometimes i think about how constellations are an entirely man-made construct and don’t actually exhist inherently in nature. i mean, the universe just gave us stars, and we saw art and myths and stories in them. the capacity that humans have for seeing purpose in the incidental makes me realize just how lonely we are on this planet, desperately searching for meaning elsewhere in the universe.

This wobbly chess set would drive me insane. Definitely need it.

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