Who Are Your Favorite Philosophers?

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  1. Immanuel Kant
  2. Søren Kierkegaard
  3. David Hume
  4. St. Thomas Aquinas
  5. Jean-Paul Sartre
 
**ISTM Augustine & Aquinas are Christian believers & “men of the Church” before they are philosophers; & that (what is even more important) their philosophies are not separable from their theologies; or, much less so than with more recent thinkers; including thinkers who were Christians. So those two are being left out 🙂 **

I would have to disagree with your comments about St. Augustine. He was first a philosopher and rhetorician for many wealthy people in the Roman Empire. He was paid quite well for his speeches. His studies included the writings of rhetoricians and philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, as well as many others. After his stint as a Manichean (which drove his mother Monica to talk to St. Ambrose), he was deeply influenced by the writings of Plotinus, especially the Enniades, which influenced much of St. Augustine’s thoughts regarding interiority. It wasn’t until his philosophical mind could not embrace the concepts of who two gods (one good, the other bad) were in Manichean teachings, that he turned to St. Ambrose and Christianity. If you read the Enniades and the Confessions of St. Augustine you will “hear” many similarities.
 
I perhaps ought to have included in my list, also, Yagyu Munenori, 1571-1646, the great swordsman and philosopher (whose father-in-law and possibly son were, by the way, Iga ninja). His thought on war and Buddhism is also extremely applicable to Christian ethics, and he is the only reason I have even a smidgen of understanding of Zen. If you want to know what the Mind of No Mind is, read Munenori, not Bruce Lee (here’s a hint: it’s not “Don’t think, feel.”)

His book also has wonderful Zen one-liners, as, for instance, “We ought to cast away the Law. How much more, then, ought we to cast away the false law?”
 
I did not read much , but from what I had been reading , the Fyodor Dostoevskiy - ‘’ The Brothers Karamazovs ‘’ and ‘’ Crime and Punishment ‘’ are the works which are worthy of reading.
Also the works of C.S.Lewis had a great spiritual influence on me in my childhood.
I mean not the tales but his ‘’ Mere Christianity ‘’ , ‘’ The problem of pain ‘’ , ‘’ The Miracle ‘’ , ‘’ The Abolishion of man .’’
 
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