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
- Jesus Christ
- Moses
- Confucius
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Euclid
- St. Augustine
- Aquinas
- Columbus
- Machiavelli
- Copernicus
- Martin Luther
- Bacon
- René Descartes
- Isaac Newton
- Rousseau
- Kant
- Malthus
- Clausewitz
- Charles Darwin
- Karl Marx
- Clerk Maxwell
- William James
- Nietzsche
- Pavlov
- Sigmund Freud
- Albert Einstein
- Keynes
- Wiener
- 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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