Raphael: The Academy at Athens; Wikimedia Commons

The Universal Masters
of Thinking

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Ever since our history has been put down in writing, we have been blessed with accounts of the ideas of great minds. These great minds who have reflected on the human condition and the relation of humans with the universe have produced ideas and outlooks that are with us still, and will be with us as we develop our ideas further. If we use the time line as our way of presenting who these thinkers were and what their main ideas were, we need to start with Antiquity, when our written history of thinking came into being. After that we look at the Middle Ages, and then – still using the time line as our classification -  the 1500s, the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1800s, and the 1900s. In doing this, we base our overview on the excellent book of professor Trond Berg Eriksen of the University of Oslo: "Undringens labyrinter" (in English, the title would presumably be: "The Labyrinths of Wondering"; 1998). The 2000s is still in its beginning, and it seems better to wait before trying to give an overview of our present century.