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Mary Wollstonecraft was a well known English writer and philosopher, she is also known as the founder of the movements for women's rights, unfortunately, her achievements did not come easy. Mary was born on April 24, 1759 in London, she decided to flee home and start a life of her own as a writer after the abuse of his father and her mother’s death.

About 4 year latter Mary, with the help of her sister Eliza and a friend named Fanny created a school in Newington Green. With the knowledge acquired within the school she wrote a small book titled “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters” in 1787.

After the death of Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft took a position as a governess for a family in Ireland where she realizes that domestic work wasn’t her thing. When she came to this realization she went back to London and started working with Joseph Johnson, a well known radical text written, as a translator.

After being a regular contributor of Johnson’s work for four years  she published her most famous work  in 1792 known as “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” In her book she stated that a confined existence makes women frustrated and transforms them into tyrants over their children and servants. The key, she purports, is educational reform, giving women access to the same educational opportunities as men.

With her work Mary Wollstonecraft is known to bring into society different essential believes like Marriage as friendship, the need for a “revolution in female manners,” and problems of sensibility as well as reason and rationality.

Bibliography:

Mary Wollstonecraft. (2018, February 27). Retrieved from https://www.biography.com/people/mary-wollstonecraft-9535967

Wollstonecraft, M., W, K., & E. (n.d.). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Themes. Retrieved from https://www.gradesaver.com/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman/study-guide/themes

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John Locke lived in England from 1632 to 1704. He had a big influence in the area of philosophy and his ideas are believed to be the foundation of modern liberalism. He had a similar way of thinking to that of other members of the Royal Society such as Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton.
He was born in a small town called Wrington in England. At age 14 he was sent to Westminster School,  a relatively prestigious institution. He was a really good student, although he disagreed with many ideas his school had. In 1652, at age 20, he entered Christ Church, the largest college of the University of Oxford. He complained about the fact that his college was largely focused in old ideas from people such as Aristotle and heavily ignored new important ideas.
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1656 and a master degree two years later. He was elected a student of Christ Church and met a lot of important philosophers in Oxford such as Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle. He collaborated with the latter in important medical and scientific research.
He became a member of the Royal Society and wrote his first political work "Two Tracts on Government" in 1660. He was appointed senior sensor of his college in 1663. As such he gave a lot of lectures and talked about a lot of important topics. He showed his commitment to a "Law of Nature", a moral law that dictates the rightness or wrongness of human conduct. He also talked about how all knowledge was derived from experience, as opposed to people being born with it.
In 1666 he was introduced to Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, with whom he would spend several years with. He assisted him as his personal physician and helped him in several matters. He came to share most if not all of Ashley's political and philosophical views, some of which included toleration in religion, a constitutional monarchy,  etc. In 1668 Locke conducted medical research with Thomas Sydenham. In 1669 he helped draft a document which guaranteed freedom of religion in Carolina.
In 1675 Locke traveled to France and stayed there for about 4 years because of political issues. He was interested in France and studied it's society. He returned to England in 1679.
He fled to the Netherlands in 1683 and wrote a few works including "Two Treatises of Government" and "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding". He died in 1704 never marrying nor having any children.

His most important ideas included:

Religious Tolerance

The Theory of Value and Property

Political Theory

His Self Theory

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Locke

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, known as one of the most influential thinkers during the 18th-century European Enlightenment period, was born on June 28, 1712, in Geneva, Switzerland. His first philosophical work, A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, discussed how science and arts had caused the corruption of virtue and morality. His Political Philosophy, strongly influenced the French Revolution and the development of Liberal, Conservative and Socialist theory.
Towards the end of the 1740s, he became friends with the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784) and contributed several articles to the latter's "Encyclopédie". However, the friendship soon became strained and Diderot later described Rousseau as being "deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice".

Rousseau’s praise of nature is a theme that continues throughout his later works as well, the most significant of which include his comprehensive work on the philosophy of education, the Emile, and his major work on political philosophy, The Social Contract: both published in 1762.
These works caused great controversy in France and were immediately banned by Paris authorities. The end of Rousseau’s life was marked in large part by his growing paranoia and his continued attempts to justify his life and his work.
Unlike many Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau believed that emotions, as well as reason, were important to human development. He sought a balance between heart and mind, between emotions and reason.

T. (2014, April 02). Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Retrieved August 25, 2018, from https://www.biography.com/people/jean-jacques-rousseau-9465453
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (n.d.). Retrieved August 25, 2018, from https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_rousseau.html
Delaney, J. (2018). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [online] Iep.utm.edu. Available at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/rousseau/ [Accessed 25 Aug. 2018].

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Thomas Hobbes, was an English philosopher, historian and scientist, whom was born in April 5, 1588, Wiltshire, England. During his era, England was still having some political disputes. Queen Elizabeth had died and his cousin King James VI of Scotland, became King of England. King James VI came into conflict with the parliament, and was forced to find new ways to raise money.

Hobbes is an important character in the area of Political Philosophy. He could be considered as one of the founding fathers of modern political philosophy. He's thesis and theories are disliked by many, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us he is infamous  for "having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power."

One of the most important works of our philosopher, by which he is recognised is the Leviathan, in which he states that the human body works like a machine and that political organisation is an artificial human being. He also viewed the government mainly as a way of assuring collective security. He is also well known for his "social contract theory", which is defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "a method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons." Another of his ideals is that he defended materialism, he believed and viewed that only material things are real. He also wrote the De Cive’s, in which he defies aristotele, and states that humans aren't made for a political life, they are unsuited for it. He said that "humans, they naturally denigrate and compete with each other, are very easily swayed by the rhetoric of ambitious men, and think much more highly of themselves than of other people."

S.A. (2018). Thomas Hobbes ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER. Agosto 25, 2018, de Encyclopedia Britannica. Sitio web: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hobbes
Lloyd, A.(2002). Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy. Agosto 24, 2018, de Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition). Sitio web: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/#MajPolWri
Williams, G. (2002). Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy. Agosto 24, 2018, de Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sitio web: https://www.iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/#SH4a
Lambert, I. (S.F). A HISTORY OF 17TH CENTURY ENGLAND. Agosto 24, 2018, de Local Histories Sitio web: http://localhistories.org/17thcent.html

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Dennis Diderot was a materialist philosopher that lived in france (1713-1784). He was atheist. He was the greatest ideologist of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of the XVII century
Diderot undertook translation work and in 1745 published a free translation of the inquiry concerning virtue.  In 1755 he met Sophie Volland, with whom he formed an attachment that was to last more than 20 years. The liasion was founded on common interests, natural sympathy, and a deepening friendship.
The completion of the enclopedie in 1772 left Diderot without a source of income.

Following the completion of the enclopedie in 1772, Diderot went into semiretirement; he wrote steadily but did not publish all of his works. His earnings as editor of the enclopedie guaranteed him a decent income, which he added to by writing literary criticism. In addition, he sold his library to Empress Catherine of Russia (1729–1796), who allowed him to keep it while he lived and paid him an annual salary as its librarian. On July 30, 1784, Diderot died in the home of his daughter.

Diderot’s major work is l’Encyclopédie, which still is a monument of the French Enlightenment, representing the standard of scholarly knowledge of its time and the spirit of rationalism which pervaded 18th century thought. He wrote other treatises in philosophy and art in which he showed a strong anti-clerical attitude and criticized the despotism of the French king. He advocated deism, a form of democracy and the abolishment of slavery. Later he became a pronounced atheist.

https://www.kent.ac.uk/ewto/projects/anthology/denis-diderot.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Denis-Diderot
http://www.notablebiographies.com/De-Du/Diderot-Denis.html

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Charles Louis de Secondant (1689-1755) baron of Montesquieu was a French noble. His father Jaques de Secondant was a soldier, and his mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles Louis was seven, was an heiress who eventually brought the barony of La Brède to the Secondat family.
In 1700 Montesquieu was sent to the Oratorian Collège de Juilly, at Meaux, where he received a modern education. Returning to Bordeaux in 1705 to study law, he was admitted to practice before the Bordeaux Parlement (parliament) in 1708. The next five years were spent in Paris, France, continuing his studies.
In 1715 Montesquieu married Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant.  In 1716 on the death of his uncle Jean Baptiste, he inherited the barony of Montesquieu and the presidency of the Bordeaux Parlement.

Montesquieu had no great enthusiasm for law as a profession. He was much more interested in the spirit that lay behind law, it is from this interest that his greatest work  The Spirit of the Laws (1748) developed, it was a study of governments. Montesquieu tried to find the natural laws that govern the social and political relationships of human beings. Montesquieu stated that England's government had three branches: the executive (the monarch), the legislative (Parliament), and the judicial (the courts of law). The government functioned through a separation of powers, this was to prevent one person or group from gaining too much power, this system provides the greatest freedom and security for the state.

The system of checks and balances through separation of powers was Montesquieu's most lasting contribution to political thought.Translation of his work into English made it available to American philosophes, who worked these democratic-republican principles into the United States Constitution.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Montesquieu

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François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire was born in Paris, France. He lived from 1694-1778. From an early age, he decided to change his name to Voltaire, a wise chose because the 18th century is often referred to as the Age of Voltaire. He was a great poet. When he was only 24 he had his first verse tragedy performed.

His religious beliefs were express clearly. He was not an atheist, because he thought that minimal religious beliefs were needed for social cohesion. The god that Voltaire believed in created the world but then took a step back, this was known as rational religion.
He was a man of reason and hated the clergy who exploited the believers to maintain their own power. Voltaire believed in religion but not in church.
In one of his published writings, he expressed that plurality of religions leads to a more peaceful society, this was a criticism of France were Catholicism is dominant. In one of his other writings, he was able to make the worldwide population question good and evil through his story.
He was one of the greatest writers and philosophers of his time.

- Voltaire wrote more than 50 plays, more than 20,000 letters and verse, several history books, and dozens of treatises.
- Voltaire spent a year in the Bastille (French prison) after a brief exile from Paris, because he could not contain his love for writing scandalous verse. He wrote a poem that implied scandalous behavior from the regent, that he had an inappropriate relationship with his daughter.
- Voltaire became fluent in five languages in his lifetime.

Bibliography:

S.A. (2016) LITERATURE - Voltaire. Recuperado el 24 de Agosto del 2018, de https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAzKGkTIKpg

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Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher. He has become famous by his influential book The Wealth of Nations(1776). Smith was the son of the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact date of his birth is unknown. However, he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723, his father having died some six months previously.

At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to Glasgow university, studying moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson. In 1740 he entered Balliol college, Oxford, and he relinquished his exhibition in 1746. In 1748 he began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames. In 1751 Smith was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow university, transferring in 1752 to the chair of moral philosophy. His lectures covered the field of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence and political economy, or "police and revenue." In 1759 he published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, embodying some of his Glasgow lectures. This work, which established Smith's reputation in his own day, is concerned with the explanation of moral approval and disapproval. Theory of Moral Sentiments

It provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works

Smith now began to give more attention to jurisprudence and political economy in his lecture and less to his theories of morals.

In 1778 he was appointed to a comfortable post as commissioner of customs in Scotland and went to live with his mother in Edinburgh. He died there on July 17, 1790, after a painfull illness. He had apparently devoted a considerable part of his income to numerous secret acts of charity.

Shortly before his death Smith had nearly all his manuscripts destroyed. In his last years he seems to have been planning two major treatises, one on the theory and history of law and one on the sciences and arts. The posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795) probably contain parts of what would have been the latter treatise.

The Wealth of Nations has become so influential since it did so much to create the subject of political economy and develop it into an autonomous systematic discipline. In the western world, it is the most influential book on the subject ever published. When the book, which has become a classic manifesto against mercantalism, appeared in 1776, there was a strong sentiment for free trade in both Britain and America. This new feeling had been born out of the economic hardships and poverty caused by the war.  The Wealth of Nations was the first and remains the most important book on the subject of political ecomomy until this present day.

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/biographies/adam-smith/