Heussi, Karl (1956), Kompendium der Kirchengeschichte (in German), Tübingen, DE {{ citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) The political philosophies hitherto surveyed contained little idea of progress. In antiquity the idea of cyclic recurrence predominated, and even 18th-century Christians believed that the world had been created in 4004 bce and would end in the Second Coming of Christ. The 14th-century Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldūn had pioneered a vast sociological view of the historical process, but in western Europe it was a neglected Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico, who first interpreted the past in terms of the changing consciousness of humankind. His Scienza nuova (1725; New Science) interpreted history as an organic process involving language, literature, and religion and attempted to reveal the mentality or ethos of earlier ages: the age of the gods, the heroic age, and the human age, its climax and decadence. These ages recur, and each is distinguished by mythology, heroic poetry, and rational speculation, respectively. In contrast to the legalistic, contractual, and static political philosophies then prevalent, Vico had discerned new horizons. Montesquieu

Plato, pictured above on the left pointing upward, was a rationalist idealist philosopher: he believed ideas to be the sources of our knowledge. Aristotle, pictured on the right with his hand outstretched in front of him, is the father of practical empiricism: he believed that sense experience was the source of our knowledge.Some Considerations on the consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money

Wills, Garry (2002), Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co Along with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also one of the originators of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical groundwork of democracy, republicanism and modern Liberalism and Libertarianism. He is sometimes referred to as the "Philosopher of Freedom", and his political views influenced both the American and French Revolutions. Life The next highest degree of probability belongs to propositions that hold not universally but for the most part, such as “people prefer their own private advantage to the public good.” This sort of proposition is typically derived from history. A still lower degree of probability attaches to claims about specific facts—for example, that a man named Julius Caesar lived a long time ago. Problems arise when testimonies conflict, as they often do, but there is no simple rule or set of rules that determines how one ought to resolve such controversies. Dreaming, Philosophy of – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". utm.edu. Archived from the original on 31 January 2022 . Retrieved 23 December 2016.For Berkeley, ostensibly physical objects like tables and chairs are really nothing more than collections of sensible ideas. Since no idea can exist outside a mind, it follows that tables and chairs, as well all the other furniture of the physical world, exist only insofar as they are in the mind of someone—i.e., only insofar as they are perceived. For any nonthinking being, esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”).