- The sixth U.S. President, and the first son of a former president to be elected president (only George W. Bush has done so since then). Allegedly enjoyed skinny-dipping in the Potomac in the early morning during his presidency and pimped for the Russian Czar (at least that’s what the Jacksonians believe). He was also ugly as sin and is considered the scariest-looking president ever, a fact we know for sure as he was the first President with a surviving photograph (and likely the first photographed period).
- Thomas Jefferson (plato.standford.edu)
Scholars in general have not taken seriously Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) as a philosopher, perhaps because he never wrote a formal philosophical treatise. Yet Jefferson was a prodigious writer, and his writings were suffuse with philosophical content. Well-acquainted with the philosophical literature of his day and of antiquity, he left behind a rich philosophical legacy in his declarations, presidential messages and addresses, public papers, numerous bills, letters to philosophically minded correspondents, and his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia.