I love how philosophy taught me…

• Communication & Rhetoric and how to see through weak arguments and articulate what I mean
• See with new eyes as I look through new concepts or Dialectics
• To never feel alone–people have thought of what I care about long before I was here
• Understanding myself: On Being — how I think

A Timeline of My Most Influential Thinkers

• 544-496 BC - Sun Tzu - “The Art of War,” strategy that reveals psychology
• 470–399 BC - Socrates - Socratic method, “the unexamined life is not worth living”
• 428–347 BC - Plato - allegory of the cave, forms as archetypical constructs
• 384–322 BC - Aristotle - Formal Logic, Virtue Ethics, taught Alexander the Great
• 341–270 BC - Epicurus - pursuit of happiness, atomism
• 55–135 AD - Epictetus - Stoicism, “Enchiridion,” control of one’s own mind
• 1596–1650 - Descartes - Cartesian doubt, cogito ergo sum, mind-body dualism (which I now know better than)
• 1694–1778 - Voltaire - Enlightenment, criticism of religion, mocking prose of “Candide”
• 1711–1776 - Hume - Empiricism, skepticism, “A Treatise of Human Nature”
• 1769-1821 - Napoleone - Leadership through narrative, symbolism, mastery of preparation
• 1809–1882 - Kierkegaard - Key Existentialist, “Leap of faith,” difficulty of true faith, “teleological suspension of the ethical”
• 1844–1900 - Nietzsche - Power is self-understanding, shedding slave morality, creative destruction, overcoming, falling in-love with eternal recurrence, moral relativism requires choice
• 1865–1939 - Whitehead - Symbolism as “sense data,” process philosophy
• 1905–1980 - Sartre - Popular Existentialism, ‘freedom is what you do with what is done to you’, bad faith, nausea
• 1908–1986 - Simone de Beauvoir - Feminist(?) Existentialism, how we conflate social constructs with nature
• 1889–1951 - Wittgenstein - Language games, words falling short of big concepts
• 1926–1984 - Foucault - Post-structuralism, the invisibility of power relations in Discipline and Punish
• 1925–1995 - Deleuze and Guattari - rhizomatic thinking, concept creation precedes empirical knowledge, de/territorialization
• 1949–present - Zizek - ideology and dialectics, marxism, cultural critique

Psychology (that’s Core to My Philosophy)

• 1856–1939 - Freud - unconscious mind, Psychoanalysis
• 1875–1961 - Carl Jung - collective unconscious, archetypes, presence and shadow self
• 1880–1943 - Max Wertheimer - Gestalt psychology - whole is more than just the sum of parts
• 1896–1980 - Jean Piaget - Developmental psychology, stages of cognitive development, genetic epistemology
• 1902–1987 - Carl Rogers - Humanistic psychology, client-centered therapy, unconditional positive regard
• 1904–1990 - B.F. Skinner - Behaviorism, operant conditioning, reinforcement theory, being disproven by Gestaltism
• 1941–present - George Lakoff - Cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory, embodied mind, storage of memories near related metaphors, use of simple metaphors for complex thinking

Art & Literature (that Expresses My Philosophy)

• 1809–1849 - Kafka - Surrealism, existentialism, “The Metamorphosis”
• 1821–1881 - Dostoevsky - Existentialism, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Brothers Karamazov”
• 1828–1910 - Tolstoy - Realism, “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina”
• 1917–1963 - Camus - Absurdism, “The Stranger,” “The Myth of Sisyphus”
• 1894–1963 - Aldous Huxley - “Brave New World,” Door to Perception
• 1898–1977 - MC Escher - Tessellations, impossible objects, mathematical art
• 1904–1989 - Salvador Dalí - Surrealism, “The Persistence of Memory,” dreamscapes
• 1901–1966 - Giacometti - Existentialism in art, sculpture, “Walking Man”
• 1929–2018 - Ursula K. Le Guin - Utopia and anarchism, gender, sci-fi
• 1934-2024 - Daniel Kahneman - system 1 and 2 (fast and slow), awareness of bias does not reduce bias, designing systems to challenge bias
• 1962–2008 - David Foster Wallace - Postmodern literature, “Infinite Jest,” critique of modern life
• 1945–present - Douglas Hofstadter - Cognitive science, self-referential systems, “I am a strange loop”
• 1967–present - Ted Chiang - Science fiction, “Story of Your Life,” exploration of causality and consequence

Modern Influences

• Simon Wardley - Wardley Mapping
• Team Topologies
• John Cutler - Beautiful Mess, organizational ontologies, product management practices

Who I want to Learn More about

• 483–375 BC - Gorgias - Nihilism, rhetoric, skepticism about objective reality (before it was cool)
• 1947–present - Martha Nussbaum - Capability approach, emotions in ethics, “The Fragility of Goodness”
• Spinoza
• The Taos
• Upanishads