History of philosophy game: ideas, thinkers, concepts and schools
A history of philosophy game for matching, ordering and sorting, from Thales to Hannah Arendt. In some rounds you match ideas —“no one steps in the same river twice”, “I think, therefore I am”, “existence precedes essence”— with the philosopher who held them; in others you tap three or four philosophers in order, earliest first, and they then appear on a segmented timeline; and in others you take each one to their school, from the Presocratics to existentialism. Ideas shared by several thinkers never appear in the same round.
Philosophy · Secondary, Sixth form
Each idea is explained in today’s words, as an essay requires: it is not enough to remember “panta rhei”, you have to know what it means. Wrong options are philosophers from the same period, which is where the real confusion lies.
The dialectic belongs to Hegel and also to Marx; the social contract to Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. When more than one thinker held an idea, the others are never offered as wrong options, so there is always one right answer.
The timeline, with Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern era, places each thinker when you answer. On hard you put them in order, which helps you see who is answering whom: Kant to Hume, Marx to Hegel.
"Hobbes, Ockham and Protagoras come up to be ordered. The student starts with Ockham because he sounds medieval, but Protagoras is a Greek sophist of the 5th century BC: on checking, the timeline shows the two thousand years between them."
Prefer to learn without screens? Try this analogue version:
Choose two philosophers from different periods, such as Plato and Nietzsche.
Write each one’s best-known idea in your own words.
Imagine a ten-line dialogue in which they argue about truth or happiness.
Check in the game that the ideas you gave them really are theirs.
If you like Who Thought It?, these activities work similar skills:
The Spanish Constitution and the State: separation of powers, as Locke and Montesquieu imagined it.
Put historical events in chronological order.
The countries and institutions of the European Union on the map.
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