I have heard about ibn-Arabi after reading a delightful book by Abd el-Kader, namely the excerpts from Kitab al-Mawaqif, translated by Michel Chodkiewicz (Escrits spirituels, Paris, 1984) and, of course, in the classic history of islamic philosophy by Henri Corbin. el-Kader moved me to learn about this great master of Islamic mysticism.

[see also Fathers and doctors of the Church]

Augustine of Hippo is the foudner of latin catholicism as we conceive it: his chiefwork, The city of God, is indeed an encyclopedia of catholicism which had, when it was published, normative value. As all Christian authors of his age, Augustine has been constantly involved in polemics (also very hard) against pagans (The city of God is written mainly with to aim), in the debate inside the Church (for instance on the canon) and in the contemplation of the end of the ancient world (he asked to Horosius the compilation of Historiae adversos paganos).

His work as father of the church is out of question, and his work as thinker makes of him the most penetrating philosopher of lating tongue of the late empire.

Berkeley is understimated in my country: I remember philosophy texts of high school talking briefly about him and his thought, just before Hume, and defining the latter as en empiricist and Berkeley as an idealist, and, with dialectic brutality, coming to Kant viewing his efforts as a synthesis or an overcoming of the doctrine of these two british philosophers. It suffices, instead, to study Berkeley position about the infinitesimals quarrel to understand not only the deepness of his thought, but also its originality: why the doom of the though of a philosopher must always be bound to the subsequent developments in the history of philosophy?

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Descartes revolutionized both scientific and philosophical thought: as far as science is concerned, he just changed the course of mathematics, by introducing analytic geometry, which not only proved the coherence of the axioms of Euclidean geometry, but which also traced the modern road to geometry. From a philosophical point of view, he started the awakening of reason in the west, after centuries of scholastic daze (it is ironical that scholastic was born just to awake reason...). Only Copernicus, a bit earlier, and Kant, somewhat later, contributed with similar revolutions in the history of western science and thought.

Nessuno sa chi ha scritto sul finire del VI secolo l'opera che la tradizione attribuisce (erroneamente) a quel Dionigi dell'Areopago citato negli Atti degli apostoli (17,34): chiunque fosse (magari si tratta di più di una persona) ha lasciato le più alte pagine della mistica cristiana altomedievale.

Erasmus is commonly considered a philologist, an erudite, etc. Actually, on reading his works according to their content, and not only for their very elegant umanistic latin, one can appreciate their profundity of thought, or at least this is the effect they have over me.

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I have read just one book (to my own blame) by this great muslim thinker, the translation of his al-Madina al-fadila (The Virtuous City), and I was delighted by this deep and thorough essay: Islamic philosophy is absurdly neglected in our western education, so I have had to discover by myself the flourishing flowers of this majestic garden.

Gnosticism has been one of the most philosophical oriented religious movement (inside Christianity), a phantasmagoric mixture of mystic and metaphysics.

Beware of sites devoted to Gnosticism, so to avoid ravings and superstitious nonsenses so widely scattered on the Net: the philosophical and theological interest in gnosis is very different from the vain misunderstanding of its form and content.

The classical portal to religious Hebrew thought is Scholem's book The Great Currents of Hebrew Mysticism: Scholem's scholarly books aside, I have been delighted by The Tales of Chassidim collected by Martin Buber. In any case, it is not possible to ignore Hebrew thought, whose origins and foundations are in the Bible itself, at least for people whose cultural horizon is the west, being them Hebrews, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, etc.

Here I collect some material and a warning: mind to nazi and racist sites in which one often is catched on the Net when looking for informationa about Hebrew culture: for example, a simple saerch for the word Talmud leads unbelievably to hateful groups of anti-semitics...

To my regret, I did not find much material on the thinker who awakened Kant from his dogmatic sleep... Unjustly he is often considered as a mere skeptic or "empiricist", while actually he was a great and gracious collector of philosophical perplexities, very courageous and not trivial for that period.

I become interested in Philosophy just after meeting Kant's thought, which made me want to read his original works: I have had the lucky to start with the classic synoptic Italian translation of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft by Giorgio Colli, a precious editorial project: I wonder why it is still floating around the older and worse version of Gentile-Lombardo Radice...

It is more and more difficult to find Marx works on the Net, and often one falls into sites from fanatic extremists. Credits to Jen Warner for pointing me to a couple of interesting links!

Under the term "presocratic philosophers" founders of philosophy as we intend it are understood: indeed the word "philosophy" just turns out from that world. But in some sense one should call them "scientists", since their main feature was to start thinking in a rational way to questions that were before answered by religion or myth: their attitude toward the world was, for that epoch, scientist, or maybe rationalist. This is, of course, a rough description: a different and simpler way to define presocratics would be to term them as the greek scholars spanning from Thales to Empedocles...