Still More about Philosophers Trivia Quiz

Answer: Kaliningrad

It was the former East-Prussian city of Königsberg. The Russians having after the Second World War annexed the city, renaimed it after Kalinin, who as president ruled the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. Better said: who as president did NOT rule the Soviet Union. (That was done by another man, whose name I have forgotten.)
Wroclaw is the former German town of Breslau in Silesia, now Polish.
Praha is known to the Anglo- and Gallophones as Prague.

Answer: Martin Heidegger

Heidegger, by some regarded as the most important philosopher of the 20th century, by others as a ranting madman, is not famous for the clarity and lucidity of his writings. As a young man he was a pupil of Husserl, also an author who is not exactly easily understandable.
Heisenberg (who also did not resist the Nazis heroically) was an outstanding physicist, who worked during the Second World War on nuclear devices for Hitler's Germany. Fortunately, his work did not result in an atomic bomb.
Alban Berg was a composer, and certainly never had any Nazi sympathies whatsover.

Answer: Friedrich Nietzsche

Hegel certainly was a genius, but quite incapable of such language. So was Leibniz, this nice rational mathematician, who thought, that God had created the best world of all possible worlds.

But for those players, who guessed it was Schopenhauer, okay, this was, in a formal sense, not the right answer, but if ever another man could have said this, it was that old miser Schopenhauer (but he said other things, which are equally worth reading!).

Answer: René Descartes

The 17th century scientist who wrote the famous three words: "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), perhaps the most remarkable protagonist of rationalist philosophy.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume lived a century later, is regarded as a founding father of British empiricism, but might be considered in many respects as a forerunner of Immanuel Kant. His contemporary Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) was the man who made a scientific catalogue of all plants and animals, and not a philosopher at all. Or a mercenary, for that matter.
Grotius (Huig de Groot) was a Dutch jurist, contemporary of Descartes, who made a tremendous contribution to international law. Like Descartes he knew the Swedish Queen Christine very well (no innuendo meant by me), and served as her ambassador to France.

Answer: logical neo-positivism

To give the essence of the philosophy in a manner as crudely as the adherents did themselves: "all metaphysical statements are nonsense!" Because they thought to have invented a logic, applied to linguistics, which would make mince-meat of all things metaphysical. The forerunner of this movement was, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Pope of these Believers was Rudolf Carnap. (It is my layman´s impression, that no one of them - perhaps except Wittgenstein - ever has made the slightest effort to have a superficial look at modern sub-atomic physics.

Existentialism, on the other hand, is a strain of thought among some philosophers who clearly had an innate aversion against any logical thought, culminating, or rather reaching its deepest point, with Jean-Paul Sartre (but admittedly he was a brilliant playwright).

Polycentric neo-structuralism is the label on my own philosophy, which I still have to invent. Just be a bit patient, please.

Answer: Isaac Newton

Well, Newton, although living a century before Goethe, seems to have won the battle of colours (something to do with frequencies, no further questions, please).
Well, this is the place to tell, although it has nothing to do with colours, that Newton behaved in a miserable way, full of envy, to Leibniz, when the latter proved to have invented the same thing in a certain branch of mathematics as Newton, but, as some experts say, in a more elegant way.

Answer: Karl Popper

No, not Isaac Newton, who lived two and a half centuries before the logical positivists, and thus could hardly have voiced his disagreement with them. The same is valid for David Hume (18th century).

Answer: Anaxagoras

If I am not mistaken, Socrates and Plato never speculated about the nature of the sun. And Pericles was not a philosopher at all, but the leading statesman of Athens at that time, or more precisely: he was a leftist democrat, yet strove to make Athens a mighty empire (sort of mixture between Clinton and Bush, perhaps). But he protected Anaxagoras

Answer: Alfred Rosenberg

Rosenberg was the official "philosopher" of the Nazi movement. His "Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhundert" is a rather confusing and not very well-written pseudo-scientific treatise about racial theories and other Nazi tenets. In 1941 Hitler nominated him Minister of the Eastern Territories, i.e. the territories to be conquered in the Soviet Union.

After the war Rosenberg was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged.

Answer: Plato

Plato indeed wrote a book, called "The Republic". Popper indeed wrote a book, called "The Open Society and its Enemies". (This Open Society may more or less be identified with our Western democracies. Plato of course was not the only one Popper objected to.)
Alcibiades was not at all a philosopher, but an Athenian demagogue, who led his city in a war against another Greek city-state, to wit: Syracuse. I do not know whether he maintained that Syracuse possessed weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, the war ended in a disastrous way for the attackers.