Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Greatest thinkers of our time?!


There is nothing more powerful than an idea in the
mind of man. At some point in time the thinking of
a single man puts things together a new way and an
idea is born. That idea can change the world and
the lives of everyone living in the world. Something
as insubstantial as thinking, someone as ”unimportant”
as a single person can have this effect. That is the
fascination of thinking and ideas.

The greatest thinkers are the minds that have shaped
our civilization. Edward de Bono (This guy has written
quite a number of books on thinking) wrote a book
published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson London in 1976
called The Greatest Thinkers - the thirty minds that
shaped our civilization (I’m not sure it’s still in print).
From Moses, through such diverse figures as Jesus Christ,
Columbus, Descartes, Marx and Freud, to Sartre, the book
ranges across the wide field of human achievement and
perhaps surprisingly includes few philosophers. A particularly
original feature of the book is the visualization of each
thinker's achievement and the way it changed the
existing line of thought. The book is fully illustrated with
portraits and other documentary material.

The thirty people in the book
  1. Jesus Christ
  2. Moses
  3. Confucius
  4. Plato
  5. Aristotle
  6. Euclid
  7. St. Augustine
  8. Aquinas
  9. Columbus
  10. Machiavelli
  11. Copernicus
  12. Martin Luther
  13. Bacon
  14. René Descartes
  15. Isaac Newton
  16. Rousseau
  17. Kant
  18. Malthus
  19. Clausewitz
  20. Charles Darwin
  21. Karl Marx
  22. Clerk Maxwell
  23. William James
  24. Nietzsche
  25. Pavlov
  26. Sigmund Freud
  27. Albert Einstein
  28. Keynes
  29. Wiener
  30. Sartre

These are the people Ed de Bono thinks have
shaped our lives forever - His opinion in a world of
6.5 billion humans. I don’t totally agree with
his list though.

Quote of the day
"Minds are like parachutes, they only function
when they are open." - Thomas Dewar


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