"It may seem hyperbolic to claim that Plato is Western humanity's single most influential thinker, but from mathematics and metaphysics to religion and ethics, Plato's philosophy has molded the minds of millions."
"Sometimes ideas become isms; names become adjectives. But what is it to go back to the original source of an idea, really grounded in a human being, grounded in their lived experience?"
"All these ideas have a way of trickling down to all parts of the culture."
"The religion of Islam has had some of the best thinkers of all time."
"Philosophy and human thought as perceived by Renaissance Europeans before the close of the 15th century show how much Aristotle and Averroes stand out as protagonists."
"Western Europe's intellectual cultural achievements across the last half millennia are impressive. I just deny the racist propaganda they were used to justify."
"A dilemma was presented to Kant by French philosopher, Benjamin Constant."
"So I really think it's no accident, and like I say, but I. Bernard Cohen had the idea first, that the Declaration is this quintessential enlightenment document."
"They were highly intellect way more intellect sure than us right now."
"The interaction between Islam and Confucianism in China is a fascinating aspect of intellectual history."
"But Franklin approached these subjects with one key difference: whereas Puritans thought of egalitarianism and freedom in the context of godly Christianity, Franklin rejected religion almost entirely."
"The American founders drew on an astonishingly wide range of historical sources... Ignorance of the intellectual trajectory... puts those achievements at risk."
"When it comes to forming an unhealthily strong attachment to numbers, few of us have taken it quite as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras."
"Russia has such an amazing rich intellectual tradition."
"Black women were always public intellectuals because they didn't have the institutional perches to be anything but that."
"The marketplace of ideas did not emerge in the enlightenment, the second enlightenment is upon us."
"Since our history of religious thinking and literacy are tied together, some of our greatest thinking in terms of Science and Mathematics comes from religion."
"Democracy and the Arts and Sciences and Mathematics and all the things we take for granted today including the origins of free speech, there's something astounding happening at this site."
"We lost something when we moved to monologue treatises from Platonic dialogues."
"His legacy cements him as the first and most prominent black intellectual of Europe."
"Freud for his part would come to admit both in private letters and in public lectures the affinities of his newfound positions on the death drive with the philosophy the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer."
"The whole history of Western thought is a series of footnotes on Plato."
"As to his influence, the entire philosophic thought of the 19th century revolved about his speculation."
"If Marx was the greatest critique of capitalism in the 19th century I would say Keynes was the greatest critic of capitalism in the 20th."
"Since its inception in 1663, many prominent geniuses have been members of this society including Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Elon Musk."
"French intellectuals and politicians from both sides of the political spectrum adopted inclusive theories and social justice ideas in the 60s."
"The Scottish Enlightenment: a really fascinating period."
"The tension between faith and reason has produced some significantly positive sparks in Western civilization."
"We're going up against something like the history of Western civilization is pretty closely tied to a pretty narrow conception of literacy and intelligence."
"Mises is important for the intellectual history of the 20th century and beyond."
"Socrates is demon is a God but it's also an intellectual God according to Ficino...Socrates is the first in the genus of philosophers, inspiring philosophical conversion and ascent."
"He is part of a general intellectual trend towards the systematizing of the human sciences and towards recognizing the profound effect that the industrial and scientific revolutions have had on our conception of human beings and human society."
"Darwin perpetuated the greatest intellectual swindle in the history of ideas."
"The history of the post-Renaissance world was an intellectual civil war between two trends that clashed and intermingled and contradicted each other most often in the works of the same individual philosopher."
"If you don't understand the sweep of intellectual history, you're going to miss some of this."
"The special intellectual forces that led us to our modern understanding of freedom and nihilism were generated within Christian theology."
"We have the luxury now of living in a post-Socratic world."
"He specializes in the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, particularly ancient philosophy, religion, and science, with emphasis on the origins of Christianity and the use and progress of science under the Roman Empire."
"They provide the roadmap to our contemporary ideas."
"Descartes' views... are a vast improvement over the views that prevailed before."
"A world that can produce a Gildas is a learned world in close connection with a wider intellectual, a wider religious community."
"It was the most important event perhaps in the intellectual history of man."
"The figure of Jesus through the centuries is a really interesting paper... it looks at 2,000 years of thought about this figure Jesus of Nazareth."
"Neo-Confucianism was one of the central threads of intellectual and cultural continuity between the Song, Yuan, and Ming periods."
"We're looking at a period which is an astonishing intellectual brilliance, a period when science is moving forward rapidly."
"It's undeniable that he had a very clear influence on both Nietzsche and Marx."
"The Quran engages with all of them simultaneously and distills centuries of intellectual history on this subject."
"He wasn't exactly the first philosopher, but his self-consciousness about what philosophy consists of, and what philosophers do, means that he's inevitably regarded as the inventor or founder of what we mean by philosophy."
"The strong connection between psychoanalysis and literary theory has continued well beyond Freud."
"Boethius was the first major Christian writer who was interested more in Aristotle than Plato."
"This provides the paradigm for over 200 years of how the scientific community and the intellectual community is going to understand the physical world."
"Our own ideas about what constitutes the literary were originally or basically formed during the Romantic period."
"Gazali is the single most important influential figure in the entire history of Muslim thought."
"The whole history of Western intellectual thought from Socrates onward is a dialectic, a critique, a counter-example."
"Every century France has produced five or ten world-class thinkers."
"The most intelligent author who ever lived, it's just a revival of Pythagorean Platonic monistic metaphysics."
"We really should look at languages as a unifying intellectual historical concept rather than some of the other structures."