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Adolf Fredriks kyrka
Adolf Fredriks kyrka ("The Church of Adolf Frederick") is a church in central Stockholm, Sweden. It was built in 1768-1774, replacing a wooden chapel from 1674, which was dedicated to Saint Olof.
Its cemetery is where René Descartes was first buried in 1650, before his remains were moved to France. Inside the church a memorial to the memory of Descartes was installed by Gustav III. Other famous people buried in the church cemetery include Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who was assassinated only a block from the church, as well as Prime Minister Hjalmar Branting.
The church is currently headed by pastor Ted Harris.
Coordinates: 59°20′16″N 18°03′37″E / 59.33778°N 18.06028°E / 59.33778; 18.06028
wn.com/Adolf_Fredriks_kyrka -
Amersfoort
Amersfoort [ˈaː.mərs.ˌfɔːrt] (
listen) is a municipality and the second largest city of the province of Utrecht in central Netherlands. The city is growing quickly but has a well-preserved and protected medieval centre. Amersfoort is one of the largest railway junctions in the country, because of its location on two of the Netherlands' main east-west and north-south rail lines. The town celebrated its 750th birthday in 2009.
The municipality of Amersfoort consists of the following cities, towns, villages and/or districts: Bergkwartier, Bosgebied, Binnenstad, Hoogland, Hoogland-West, Kattenbroek, Kruiskamp, de Koppel, Liendert, Rustenburg, Nieuwland, Randenbroek, Schuilenburg, Schothorst, Soesterkwartier, Vathorst, Hooglanderveen, Vermeerkwartier, Leusderkwartier, Zielhorst and Stoutenburg-Noord.
Hunter gatherers set up camps in the Amersfoort region in the Mesolithic period. Archaeologists have found traces of these camps, such as the remains of hearths, and sometimes microlithic flint objects, to the north of the city.
wn.com/Amersfoort -
Amsterdam
Amsterdam (English /ˈæmstərdæm/; Dutch: [ˌɑmstərˈdɑm] ( listen)) is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The city's status as the capital of the nation is governed by the constitution. Amsterdam has a population of 790,654 within city limits, an urban population of 1,209,419 and a metropolitan population of 2,289,762. The city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country. It comprises the northern part of the Randstad, one of the larger conurbations in Europe, with a population of approximately 7 million.
Amsterdam's name is derived from Amstelredamme, indicative of the city's origin: a dam in the river Amstel. Settled as a small fishing village in the late 12th century, Amsterdam became one of the most important ports in the world during the Dutch Golden Age, a result of its innovative developments in trade. During that time, the city was the leading center for finance and diamonds. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the city expanded, and many new neighborhoods and suburbs were formed. The 17th-century canals of Amsterdam (in Dutch: 'Grachtengordel'), located in the heart of Amsterdam, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2010.
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Deventer
Deventer [ˈdeɪ̯.vən.tər] ( listen) is a municipality and city in the Salland region of the Dutch province of Overijssel. Deventer is largely situated on the east bank of the river IJssel, but also has a small part of its territory on the west bank. In 2005 the municipality of Bathmen (pop. 5,000) was merged with Deventer as part of a national effort to reduce bureaucracy in the country.
Associated hamlets at second level
Deventer was probably founded around 768 by the English missionary Lebuinus, who built a wooden church on the east bank of the river IJssel. This was not the first human settlement at the location; from the Bronze Age to about 400 AD, there was a settlement at Colmschate, 4 km east of the city centre. Remains of this settlement were excavated between 1981 and 2006.
The village of Deventer, already important because of a trading road crossing the river IJssel, was looted and burnt down by the Vikings in 882. It was immediately rebuilt and fortified with an earthen wall (in the street Stenen Wal remains of this wall have been excavated and restored).
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Dordrecht
Dordrecht (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈdɔr.trɛχt] ( listen)), colloquially Dordt [dɔrt], historically in English named Dort, is a city and municipality in the western Netherlands, located in the province of South Holland. It is the fourth largest city of the province, having a population of 118,601 in 2009. The municipality covers the entire Dordrecht Island, also often called Het Eiland van Dordt (the Island of Dordt), bordered by the rivers Oude Maas, Beneden Merwede, Nieuwe Merwede, Hollands Diep, and Dordtsche Kil. Dordrecht is the largest and most important city in the Drechtsteden and is also part of the Randstad, the main conurbation in the Netherlands. Dordrecht is the oldest city in Holland and has a rich history and culture.
The name Dordrecht comes from Thyre, the name of a river, and Middle Dutch drecht "ford", thus meaning "Thure river crossing". Some documentation speaks of the river actually being called Thuredrith. Inhabitants of Dordrecht are Dordtenaren (singular: Dordtenaar). Dordrecht is informally called Dordt by its inhabitants. In earlier centuries, Dordrecht was a major trade port, well-known to British merchants, and was called Dort in English.
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Dutch Republic
The Dutch Republic — officially known as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands (Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden), the Republic of the United Netherlands, or the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Provinciën) — was a republic in Europe existing from 1581 to 1795, preceding the Batavian Republic, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and ultimately the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands. Alternative names include the United Provinces, Foederatae Belgii Provinciae (Federated Belgic Provinces), and Belgica Foederata (Belgic Federation).
Until the 16th century, the Low Countries – roughly now corresponding to Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – consisted of a number of duchies, counties and bishoprics, most of which were under the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire.
Most of the Low Countries had come under the rule of the House of Burgundy and subsequently the House of Habsburg. In 1549 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V issued the Pragmatic Sanction, which further unified the Seventeen Provinces under his rule. Charles was succeeded by his son, King Philip II of Spain. In 1568 the Netherlands, led by William I of Orange, revolted against Philip II because of high taxes, persecution of Protestants by the government, and Philip's efforts to modernize and centralize the devolved-medieval government structures of the provinces. This was the start of the Eighty Years' War.
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Egmond aan den Hoef
Egmond aan den Hoef (52°37′N 4°39′E / 52.617°N 4.65°E / 52.617; 4.65) is a village in the Dutch province of North Holland. It is a part of the municipality of Bergen, and lies about 7 km west of Alkmaar. Until 2001, Egmond aan den Hoef was part of the municipality of Egmond.
In 2001 Egmond aan den Hoef had 2491 inhabitants. The built-up area of the town was 0.42 km², and contained 922 residences. The wider statistical area of Egmond aan den Hoef had a population of around 3540, which had risen to 3920 by end 2008.
In Egmond aan den Hoef are the remains of the Op den Hoef castle. The castle was first built in the 11th century, and was destroyed around 1205. It was rebuilt and fortified, and was destroyed again in the 14th century. Again it was rebuilt. In 1573 at the order of William the Silent it was demolished by the Geuzen, led by Diederik Sonoy. The remnants were taken down at the end of the 18th century. During the 1830s the remains were dug up.
René Descartes, a French philosopher and the author of Meditations on First Philosophy, lived in the village from 1643 to 1649 before leaving Holland for Sweden. His letters to Elisabeth of the Palatinate were dated there.
wn.com/Egmond_aan_den_Hoef -
Franeker
Franeker (West Frisian: Frjentsjer) is one of the eleven historical cities of Friesland and capital of the municipality of Franekeradeel. It is located about 20 km west of Leeuwarden on the Van Harinxma Canal. As of 1 January 2006, it had 12,996 inhabitants. The city is famous for the Eisinga Planetarium from around the year 1800.
Franeker was founded around 800 as a Carolingian stronghold. The name probably derives from Froon-acker, meaning "country of the king"; the oldest street in the city is still called Froonacker. Beginning around the 11th century, Franeker developed into the administrative center Westergoa.
Franeker received city rights in 1374. In the 15th century, Albert, Duke of Saxony established himself in Franeker. The city appeared for a time to be growing into the primary city of Friesland, but was eventually overshadowed in this role by Leeuwarden.
During the period of the Dutch Revolt, the town sided early on with William I.
From 1585 to 1811, the city housed the University of Franeker, which was the second university in the Netherlands. It was closed shortly after the incorporation of the Kingdom of Holland into the French Empire. A successor institution, the Rijksatheneum, was founded in 1815, but in 1847 it, too, closed.
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Haverford College
Coordinates: 40°00′35.00″N 75°18′25.98″W / 40.00972°N 75.3072167°W / 40.00972; -75.3072167
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia. All students of the College are undergraduates, and nearly all reside on campus.
The College was founded in 1833 by area members of the Orthodox Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) to ensure an education grounded in Quaker values for young Quaker men. Although the College no longer has a formal religious affiliation, the Quaker philosophy still influences campus life. Originally an all-male institution, Haverford began admitting female transfer students in the 1970s and became fully co-ed in 1980. Currently, more than half of Haverford's students are women. For most of the 20th century, Haverford's total enrollment was kept below 300, but the school went through two periods of expansion after the 1970s, and its current enrollment is 1,190 students.
wn.com/Haverford_College -
La Flèche
Coordinates: 47°41′45″N 0°04′29″W / 47.6959°N 0.0747°W / 47.6959; -0.0747
La Flèche is a municipality located in the French department of Sarthe and the region of Pays de la Loire in the Loire Valley. This is the sub-prefecture of the South-Sarthe, the chief district and the chief city of a canton. This is the second most populous city of the department. The city is part of the Community of communes of the Pays La Flèche. The inhabitants of the town are called the La Flèchois. It is classified as a country of art and history.
The Prytanée National Militaire is located in La Flèche.
La Flèche is located on the Loire. La Flèche is also placed on the Greenwich meridian. It is located halfway between Le Mans (45 km) and Angers.
The origin of the name La Flèche is uncertain. Historian Jacques Termeau, in La Flèche Book No. 9, p. 5-11, has documented several hypotheses which most likely are related to the ancient Latin name Fixa meaning "stuck", that is to say "rock stuck in the ground". In fact La Flèche was a city situated on the border of Maine and Anjou. An ancient megalith boundary would have given this the name Fixa that can be found in early manuscripts in full as Fixa andegavorum, often translated later as La Flèche in Anjou, but strictly meant the boundary of Anjou.
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Leiden
Leiden (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈlɛi̯.də(n)] ( listen); in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the Dutch province of South Holland. The municipality of Leiden has a population of about 120,000, but the city forms one densely connected urban area with its suburbs Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp, Voorschoten, Valkenburg, Rijnsburg and Katwijk, which have about 254,000 inhabitants combined. The larger Leiden agglomeration counts 332,000 inhabitants which makes it the sixth major agglomeration in the Netherlands. Leiden is located on the Old Rhine, at a distance of some 20 kilometers from The Hague to its south and some 40 kilometers from Amsterdam to its north. The recreational area of the Kaag Lakes (Kagerplassen) lies just to the northeast of Leiden.
A university city since 1575, Leiden houses Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Centre. It is twinned with Oxford, the location of England's oldest university.
It is true that Leiden is an old city, its connection with Roman Lugdunum Batavorum is true though it is actually near the close-by town of Katwijk, whereas the Roman settlement near modern Leiden was called Matilo. However, there was a Roman fortress in Leiden in the 4th century.[citation needed]
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Leiden University
Leiden University (Dutch: Universiteit Leiden), located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The royal Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and Leiden University still have a close relationship. The Queens Juliana and Beatrix and crown-prince Willem-Alexander studied at Leiden University. In 2005 Queen Beatrix received a rare honorary degree from Leiden University.
Leiden University has six faculties, over 50 departments and more than 150 undergraduate programmes and enjoys an outstanding international reputation. Shanghai Jiao Tong University's 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities ranks Leiden University as the 65th best university worldwide. Times Higher Education World University Rankings consistently rank Leiden University as the best university in Continental Europe for Arts and Humanities. The University is associated with at least sixteen recipients of the Nobel Prize. The university is a member of the distinguished Coimbra Group, the Europaeum and the League of European Research Universities.
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Oegstgeest
Oegstgeest (Dutch pronunciation: [ˌuxstˈxeːst], locally [ˌuχstˈχeɪ̯st] ( listen)) is a town and municipality in the province of South Holland in the western Netherlands. Its population was 22,576 in 2008.
The municipality of Oegstgeest covers an area of 7.75 km² (of which 0.54 km² is water). Oegstgeest lies just to the north of Leiden, with which it is conjoined in a conurbation. Oegstgeest is a separate municipality, but it is effectively a suburb of Leiden. The municipality of Katwijk is to the west, the municipality of Teylingen to the north, the Kaag Lakes (Kagerplassen) to the northeast and Leiderdorp to the east.
Oegstgeest is one of the earliest inhabited places along the coast. Evidence of a Batavian settlement from the second century was found in 1946 in an extension of a coastal dune in the Elgeesterpolder, although it is not certain whether this location remained permanently inhabited in the centuries after that.
By the 9th century there was already a little church in the same location as the current Little Green Church (Groen Kerkje) which, according to legend, was dedicated by Willibrord. The existence of this church is an indication that there may have been a community there.
wn.com/Oegstgeest -
Prague
Prague (
/ˈprɑːɡ/; Czech: Praha pronounced [ˈpraɦa] ( listen)) is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic and fourteenth largest city in European Union. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of nearly 2.0 million. The city has a temperate oceanic climate with warm summers and chilly winters.
Prague has been a political, cultural, and economic centre of central Europe with waxing and waning fortunes during its 1,100 year existence. Founded during the Romanesque and flourishing by the Gothic and Renaissance eras, Prague was the seat of two Holy Roman Emperors and thus then also the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. It was an important city to the Habsburg Monarchy and its Austro-Hungarian Empire and after World War I became the capital of Czechoslovakia. The city played major roles in the Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, and in modern history generally as the principal conurbation in Bohemia and Moravia whose second city is Brno.
wn.com/Prague -
Stockholm
Stockholm (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈstɔkːˈhɔlm, ˈstɔkːˈɔlm, ˈstɔkːɔlm]( listen to the second one)) is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 864,324 in the municipality (2010), 1.4 million in the urban area (2010), and around 2.1 million in the 6,519 km2 (2,517.00 sq mi) metropolitan area (2010). As of 2010, the Stockholm metropolitan area is home to approximately 22% of Sweden's population.
Founded no later than c. 1250, possibly as early as 1187, Stockholm has long been one of Sweden's cultural, media, political, and economic centres. Its strategic location on 14 islands on the south-central east coast of Sweden at the mouth of Lake Mälaren, by the Stockholm archipelago, has been historically important. Stockholm has been nominated by GaWC as a global city, with a ranking of Alpha-. In The 2008 Global Cities Index, Stockholm ranked 24th in the world, 10th in Europe, and first in Scandinavia. Stockholm is known for its beauty, its buildings and architecture, its abundant clean and open water, and its many parks. It is sometimes referred to as Venice of the North.
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Sweden
Sweden (
i/ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən; Swedish: Sverige [ˈsværjɛ] ( listen)), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland, and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Øresund.
At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the third largest country in the European Union by area, with a total population of about 9.4 million. Sweden has a low population density of 21 inhabitants per square kilometre (54 /sq mi) with the population mostly concentrated to the southern half of the country. About 85% of the population live in urban areas. Sweden's capital city is Stockholm, which is also the largest city.
Sweden emerged as an independent and unified country during the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, the country expanded its territories to form the Swedish Empire. The empire grew to be one of the great powers of Europe in the 17th and early 18th century. Most of the conquered territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost during the 18th and 19th centuries. The eastern half of Sweden, present-day Finland, was lost to Russia in 1809. The last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Sweden by military means forced Norway into a personal union. Since then, Sweden has been at peace, practicing "non-participation in military alliances during peacetime and neutrality during wartime". However, Sweden has been a member of the European Union since 1 January 1995 and is a member of the OECD.
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3587 Descartes
3587 Descartes is a small main belt asteroid. It is 9.35 km in diameter. It was discovered by L. V. Zhuravleva in 1981. It is named after René Descartes, the seventeenth century philosopher.
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Adolph Stöhr
Adolph Stöhr (Sankt Pölten, 1855–1921) was professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. His lectures and publications covered subjects such as logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, experimental psychology, psychology of perception, and psychology of association.
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Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( /ˈtjʊərɪŋ/ TEWR-ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.
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Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
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Albrecht Ritschl
Albrecht Ritschl (March 25, 1822 – March 20, 1889) was a German theologian.
Starting in 1852, Ritschl lectured on "Systematic Theology". According to this system, faith was understood to be irreducible to other experiences, beyond the scope of reason. Faith, he said, came not from facts but from value judgments. Jesus' divinity, he argued, was best understood as expressing "revelational-value" of Christ for the community that trusts him as God. He held the Christ's message to be committed to a community.
Ritschl was born in Berlin. His father, Georg Karl Benjamin Ritschl (1783–1858), became in 1810 a pastor at the church of St Mary in Berlin, and from 1827 to 1854 was general superintendent and evangelical bishop of Pomerania. Albrecht Ritschl studied at Bonn, Halle, Heidelberg and Tübingen. At Halle he came under Hegelian influences through the teaching of Julius Schaller and Johann Erdmann. In 1845 he became a follower of the Tübingen school, and in his work Das Evangelium Marcions und das kanonische Evangelium des Lukas, published in 1846 and in which he argued that the Gospel of Luke was based on the apocryphal Gospel of Marcion, he appears as a disciple of the Hegelian new testament scholarFerdinand Baur. This did not last long with him, however, for the second edition (1857) of his most important work, on the origin of the Old Catholic Church (Die Entstehung der alt-kathol. Kirche), shows considerable divergence from the first edition (1850), and reveals an entire emancipation from Baur's method.
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Alexander Bain
Alexander Bain (11 June 1818 – 18 September 1903) was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist in the British school of empiricism who was a prominent and innovative figure in the fields of psychology, linguistics, logic, moral philosophy and education reform. He founded Mind, the first ever journal of psychology and analytical philosophy, and was the leading figure in establishing and applying applying the scientific method to psychology. Bain was the inaugural Regius Chair in Logic and Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, where he also held Professorships in Moral Philosophy and English Literature and was twice elected Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen.
Alexander Bain was born in Aberdeen, Scotland to George Bain, a weaver and veteran soldier, and Margaret Paul. At age eleven he left school to work as a weaver hence the description of him as Weevir, rex philosophorum. He also took to lectures at the Mechanics' Institutes of Aberdeen and the Aberdeen Public Library.
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Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and at the University of Arizona. He earned his PhD from Princeton University and is married to Holly Smith, a well known ethicist, former administrator, and current professor at Rutgers University. He has done influential work on a wide range of philosophical topics, but his principal areas of research are epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.
Goldman's early book, A Theory of Human Action (a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis), presents a systematic way of classifying and relating the many actions we perform at any time. Its influence was broad and can be found in, among other writings, John Rawls' book A Theory of Justice. Goldman's early work in action theory soon gave way to work in other branches of philosophy, most influentially epistemology.
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Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher, the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College.
He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics. Plantinga is the author of a number of books including God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), and the "warrant" series culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (2000). He has delivered the Gifford Lectures three times, and was described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God".
Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007). Plantinga's father was a first generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands. His family is from the Dutch province of Friesland. Plantinga’s father earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University and a Master's Degree in psychology, and taught several academic subjects at different colleges over the years. One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga, Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary. Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University. His brother Terrell worked for CBS News.
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Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury (Aosta c. 1033 – Canterbury 21 April 1109), also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the Church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Called the founder of scholasticism, he is famous as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God.
Born into the House of Candia, he entered the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Bec at the age of 27, where he became abbot in 1079. He became Archbishop of Canterbury under William II of England, and was exiled from England from 1097 to 1100, and again from 1105 to 1107 under Henry I of England as a result of the investiture controversy, the most significant conflict between Church and state in Medieval Europe.
Anselm was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1720 by a Papal Bull of Pope Clement XI.
Anselm was born under the name "Anselmus Candiae Genavae" (Italian: Anselmo di Candia Ginevra, French: Anselme de Candie Genève) at or nearAosta in the Kingdom of Arles (currently the capital of the Aosta Valley region in Northern Italy) around 1033. His family was noble (they were related by blood to the ascendant House of Savoy) and owned considerable property. His parents were from a noble lineage and holders of fiefdoms within the Burgundian territories. His father, Gundulf de Candia, was by birth a Lombard of the House of Candia; he seems to have been harsh. His mother, Ermenberga of Geneva, was regarded as prudent and virtuous; she was related to Otto, Count of Savoy.
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Anthony Kenny
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny FBA (born 16 March 1931 in Liverpool) is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to Analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St Thomas Aquinas in the style of modern philosophy by clearing away the trappings and obscurities of traditional Thomism. He is one of the executors of Wittgenstein's literary estate. He is a former President of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Kenny initially trained as a Roman Catholic priest at the Venerable English College, Rome, where he received the degree of S.T.L. He was ordained in 1955 and served as Curate in Liverpool 1959-63. Having received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford (St Benet's Hall) in 1961, he also worked as an Assistant Lecturer in the University of Liverpool (1961–63). However, he questioned the validity of Catholic doctrine and is now an agnostic. He was returned to the lay state in 1963, but according to Canon law his priestly ordination remains valid. He was never dispensed from the obligation of clerical celibacy and was therefore excommunicated on his marriage to Nancy Gayley in 1965.
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Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld (February 6, 1612, Paris – August 8, 1694, Brussels) — le Grand as contemporaries called him, to distinguish him from his father — was a French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics.
Antoine Arnauld was born in Paris to the Arnauld family. The twentieth and youngest child of the original Antoine Arnauld, he was originally intended for the bar, but decided instead to study theology at the Sorbonne. Here he was brilliantly successful, and his career was flourishing when he came under the influence of Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, the spiritual director and leader of the convent of Port-Royal, and was drawn in the direction of Jansenism.
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Antony Flew
Antony Garrard Newton Flew (11 February 1923 – 8 April 2010) was a British philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, he was notable for his works on the philosophy of religion.
Flew was a strong advocate of atheism, arguing that one should presuppose atheism until empirical evidence of a God surfaces. He also criticised the idea of life after death, the free will defence to the problem of evil, and the meaningfulness of the concept of God. However, in 2004 he stated an allegiance to deism, more specifically a belief in the Aristotelian God, stating that in keeping his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believes in the existence of God.
He later wrote the book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, with contributions from Roy Abraham Varghese. This book (and Flew's conversion itself) has been the subject of controversy, following an article in the New York Times magazine alleging that Flew had mentally declined, and that Varghese was the primary author. The matter remains contentious, with some commentators including PZ Myers and Richard Carrier supporting the allegations, and others, including Flew himself, opposing them.
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Aristotle
Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied. The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity, was the only way to attain liberation.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein,Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.
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Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte [oɡyst kɔ̃t], was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th century thought, impacting the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism, though now outdated, set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into Modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.
Comte's social theories culminated in the "religion of humanity", which was influential to the development of religious humanist and Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word "altruism".
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Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo ( /ɒˈɡʌstɨn/ or /ˈɔːɡəstɪn/;Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; November 13, 354 – August 28, 430), also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin,St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria). He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war.
When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the Church, the community that worshipped God.
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Averroes
ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd (Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد), better known just as Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد), and in European literature as Averroes ( /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.
Ibn Rushd was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against claims from the influential Islamic theologian Ghazali who attacked philosophy so it would not become an affront to the teachings of Islam.
Averroes' name is also seen as Averroës, Averroès or Averrhoës, indicating that the "o" and the "e" form separate syllables. Averroes is a Latinisation of a Hebrew transcription of the Arab name Ibn Rushd.
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Avicenna
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Persian پورسينا Pur Sina [ˈpuːr ˈsiːnɑː] "son of Sina"; c. 980, Afshana near Bukhara– 1037, Hamadan, Iran), commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persianpolymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.
His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650. Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).
His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.
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Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment[citation needed] and modern biblical criticism, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely." Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Spinoza's name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means "the Blessed". Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.
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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these in any profound sense. He was born in Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain.
Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 20th century. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
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Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
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Boethius
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, commonly called Boethius (ca. 480–524 or 525 AD) was a philosopher of the early 6th century. He was born in Rome to an ancient and prominent family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius, of the noble Anicia family, entered public life at a young age and was already a senator by the age of 25. Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls. Boethius was imprisoned and eventually executed by King Theodoric the Great, who suspected him of conspiring with the Eastern Roman Empire. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues. The Consolation became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. A link between Boethius and a mathematical boardgame Rithmomachia has been made.
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Carl Gustav Hempel
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 in Oranienburg, Germany - November 9, 1997 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a philosopher of science and a major figure in 20th-century logical empiricism. He is especially well known for his articulation of the Deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the Raven paradox, which highlights the problem of induction.
Hempel studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin. In Göttingen he encountered David Hilbert and was impressed by his attempt to base all of mathematics on solid logical foundations derived from a limited number of axioms (Hilbert's Program). Having moved to Berlin he participated in a congress on scientific philosophy in 1929, where he met Rudolf Carnap and became involved in the Berlin Circle of philosophers that was associated with the Vienna Circle. In 1934 he received his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin with a dissertation on probability theory.
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Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne (June 5, 1897 – October 9, 2000) was a prominent American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument. Hartshorne is also noted for developing Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into process theology.
Hartshorne (pronounced harts-horn) was born in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and was the son of Reverend F.C. Hartshorne. Among his brothers was the prominent geographer Richard Hartshorne. Charles attended Haverford College between 1915–17, but then spent two years as a hospital orderly serving in the US Army. He then studied at Harvard University, where he earned the B.A. (1921), M.A. (1922) and PhD (1923) degrees. His doctoral dissertation was on "The Unity of Being". He obtained all three degrees in only four years, an accomplishment believed unique in Harvard's long history.
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Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
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David Hume
David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
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Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (October 28, 1466? – July 12, 1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian.
Erasmus was a classical scholar who wrote in a pure Latin style. He was an early proponent of religious toleration, and enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists"; he has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists." Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament. These raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. He also wrote The Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, Julius Exclusus, and many other works.
Erasmus lived through the Reformation period, but while he was critical of the Church, he did not join the cause of the Reformers. In relation to clerical abuses in the Church, Erasmus remained committed to reforming the Church from within. He also held to Catholic doctrines such as that of free will, which some Reformers rejected in favor of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road approach disappointed and even angered scholars in both camps.
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Desmond Clarke
Desmond M. Clarke is an author and former professor of philosophy at University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland. His research interests lie predominantly in the 17th century, on such topics as the history of philosophy and theories of science - with a specific interest in the writings of René Descartes, as well as contemporary church/state relations, human rights, and nationalism. He is currently co-editor of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, and he has translated and written an introduction for the Penguin edition of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. He retired from his position as Professor of Philosophy in 2006.
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Dharmakirti
Dharmakīrti (ca. 7th century) also known as Serlingpa Dharmakīrti or Suvarnadvipi Dharmakīrti, was a Buddhist scholar of Srivijayan origin, Suvarnadvipa (Sumatra). He was one of the Buddhist founders of Indian philosophical logic. He was one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism, according to which the only items considered to exist are momentary states of consciousness.
Born around the turn of the 7th century in Sumatra, Dharmakirti was a Srivijayan prince of Sailendra dynasty. He became a revered scholar monk in Srivijaya and moved to India to became a teacher at the famed Nalanda University, as well as a poet. He built on and reinterpreted the work of Dignaga, the pioneer of Buddhist Logic, and was very influential among Brahman logicians as well as Buddhists. His theories became normative in Tibet and are studied to this day as a part of the basic monastic curriculum.
Collins (2000: p. 240) colourfully contextualized Dharmakirti and his experience of disaffection and collegiate misunderstanding at Nalanda:-
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Dorothy Emmet
Dorothy Mary Emmet (29 September 1904 – 20 September 2000) was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years. With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers.
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Duns Scotus
John (Johannes, Ioannes) Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (c. 1256 – November 18, 1308) was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was given the medieval accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.
Scotus has had considerable influence on Roman Catholic thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being," that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate conception of Mary.
Little is known of Scotus' life. He was probably born in 1265, probably at Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland. In 1291 he was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England. A note in Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, records that Scotus "flourished at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris in the Autumn of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with then Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with Philip the Fair of France, over the taxation of church property.
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Edmund Gettier
Edmund L. Gettier III (born 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known best for his 1963 paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?".
Gettier was educated at Cornell University, where his mentors included Max Black and Norman Malcolm. Gettier, himself, was originally attracted to the views of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. His first teaching job was at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where his colleagues included Keith Lehrer, R. C. Sleigh, and Alvin Plantinga. Because he was short on publications, his colleagues urged him to write up any ideas he had just to satisfy the administration. The result was a three-page paper that remains one of the most famous in recent philosophical history. According to anecdotal comments that Plantinga has given in lectures, Gettier was originally so unenthused about the paper that he wrote it, had someone translate it into Spanish, and published in in an obscure South American journal. The paper was later published in the United States. Gettier has since published nothing, but he has invented and taught to his graduate students new methods for finding and illustrating countermodels in modal logic, as well as simplified semantics for various modal logics.
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Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (German pronunciation: [ˈhʊsɛʁl]; April 8, 1859, Proßnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire – April 26, 1938, Freiburg, Germany) was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic. Not limited to empiricism, but believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, he worked on a method of phenomenological reduction by which a subject may come to know directly an essence.
Although born into a Jewish family, Husserl was baptized as a Lutheran in 1886. He studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl himself taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928. Thereafter he gave two notable lectures: at Paris in 1929, and at Prague in 1935. The notorious 1933 race laws of the Nazi regime took away his academic standing and privileges. Following an illness, he died at Freiburg in 1938.
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Emil Brunner
Heinrich Emil Brunner (December 23, 1889, Winterthur – April 6, 1966, Zurich) was a Swiss Protestant (Reformed) theologian. Along with Karl Barth (see Relationship with Karl Barth), he is commonly associated with neo-orthodoxy or the dialectical theology movement.
Emil Brunner was born in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland.
He studied at the universities of Zurich and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in theology from Zurich in 1913, with a dissertation on The Symbolic Element in Religious Knowledge. Brunner served as pastor from 1916 to 1924 in the mountain village of Obstalden in the Swiss Canton of Glarus. In 1919–1920 he spent a year in the United States studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
In 1921 Brunner published his Habilitationsschrift (a post-doctoral dissertation traditionally required in many countries in order to attain the position of a fully tenured professor) on Experience, Knowledge and Faith and in 1922 was appointed a Privatdozent at the University of Zurich. Soon after, another book followed: Mysticism and the Word (1924), which was a devastating critique of the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Brunner was rewarded for his literary efforts with his appointment in 1924 as Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology at the University of Zurich, a post which he held until his retirement in 1953. Following this appointment Brunner's reputation as a theologian continued to increase, particularly after the publication of two further important works in 1927, the first being The Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology and second The Mediator.
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Epicurus
Epicurus (Ancient Greek: Ἐπίκουρος, Epikouros, "ally, comrade"; 341 BCE – 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher as well as the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works. Much of what is known about Epicurean philosophy derives from later followers and commentators.
For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.
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Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Cassirer (German pronunciation: [kaˈsiːʁəʁ]; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading C20th advocates of philosophical idealism.
Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After working for many years as a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he was elected in 1919 to the Philosophy chair at the newly-founded University of Hamburg, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Because he was Jewish, he left Germany when the Nazis came to power.
After leaving Germany he taught for a couple of years in Oxford, before becoming a professor at Gothenburg University. When Cassirer considered Sweden too unsafe, he applied for a post at Harvard, but was rejected because thirty years earlier he had rejected a job offer from them. In 1941 he became a visiting professor at Yale University, before moving to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945.
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Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919), also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, "Art Forms of Nature"). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträtsel (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution. In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a 13,418 ft (4,090 m) summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honor, as is another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941 m (9,649 ft) summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel house ("Villa Medusa") in Jena, Germany contains a historic library.
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Ernst Troeltsch
Ernst Troeltsch (17 February 1865 – 1 February 1923) was a German Protestant theologian and writer on philosophy of religion and philosophy of history, and an influential figure in German thought before 1914. His work was a synthesis of a number of strands, drawing on Albrecht Ritschl, Max Weber's conception of sociology, and the Neo-Kantians of the Baden school.
His The Social Teachings of the Christian Church (two volume edition in translation by Harper Row, 1960) is a seminal work in this area.
While religious thinking in the days of the Weimar Republic moved away from his direction, Troeltsch's work in the sociology of religion remains important.
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Francine Descartes
Francine Descartes (19 July 1635, Deventer - 7 September 1640, Amersfoort) was René Descartes' daughter.
Francine was the daughter of Helena Jans van der Strom, a domestic servant of Thomas Sergeant – a bookshop owner and associate of Descartes at whose house in Amsterdam Descartes lodged on 15 October 1634. When Descartes moved back from Amsterdam to Deventer the following winter, Helena went with him. Although Francine was referred to as an illegitimate child, her baptism in Deventer on August 7, 1635, was recorded among the legitimate births. Helena officially remained Descartes' servant, and René referred to Francine as his niece, but both were included in his life. In 1640 Descartes wrote that he would bring his daughter to France to learn the language and be educated, but before that could happen, Francine died of scarlet fever at the age of 5. Russell Shorto postulated that the experience of fatherhood and losing a child formed a turning point in Descartes' work, changing its focus from medicine to a quest for universal answers..
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Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban(s),KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.
Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today.
Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created both the Baron Verulam in 1618, and the Viscount St Alban in 1621; as he died without heirs both peerages became extinct upon his death. He famously died by contracting pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.
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Francisco Suárez
Francisco Suárez (5 January 1548 – 25 September 1617) was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement, and generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas.
Francisco Suárez was born in Granada, Andalusia (southern Spain).
At age sixteen Suárez entered the Society of Jesus in Salamanca, and he studied Philosophy and Theology there for five years from 1565 to 1570. It seems he was not a promising student at first; in fact, he nearly gave up his matters of study after failing the entrance exam twice. After passing the exam at third attempt, though, things changed, and he completed his course of Philosophy with distinction, going on to study Theology, to then teach Philosophy in Ávila and Segovia. He was ordained in 1572, and taught Theology in Ávila, Segovia (1575), Valladolid (1576), Rome (1580–85), Alcalá (1585–92), Salamanca (1592–97), and Coimbra (1597–1616).
He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, producing a vast amount of work (his complete works in Latin amount to twenty-six volumes). Suárez writings include treatises on law, the relationship between Church and State, metaphysics, and theology. He is considered the godfather of International Law and his Disputationes metaphysicae were widely read in Europe during the seventeenth century and is considered by some scholars to be his most profound work.
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Frans Hals
Frans Hals the Elder (c. 1580 – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He is notable for his loose painterly brushwork, and helped introduce this lively style of painting into Dutch art. Hals was also instrumental in the evolution of 17th century group portraiture.
Hals was born in 1580 or 1581, in Antwerp. Like many, Hals' family fled during the Fall of Antwerp (1584-1585) from the Spanish Netherlands to Haarlem, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Hals studied under another Flemish-émigré, Karel van Mander (1548–1606), whose Mannerist influence, however, is not noticeably visible in his work. At the age of 27, he became a member of the city's painter's corporation, the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the city council. He worked on their large art collection that Karel van Mander had described in his book The Painting-Book (Middle Dutch: Het Schilder-Boeck), published in 1604. The most notable of these were the works of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Jan van Scorel and Jan Mostaert, that hung in de St. Jans kerk in Haarlem. The restoration work was paid for by the city of Haarlem, since all religious art was confiscated after the iconoclasm, but the entire collection of paintings was not formally possessed by the city council until 1625, after the city fathers had decided which paintings were suitable for the city hall. The remaining art that was considered too "Roman Catholic" was sold to Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, a fellow guild member, on the grounds that he remove it from the city. It was under these circumstances that Hals began his career in portraiture, since the market for religious themes had disappeared.
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François Viète
François Viète (Latin: Franciscus Vieta; 1540 – 23 February 1603), Seigneur de la Bigotière, was a French mathematician whose work on new algebra was an important step towards modern algebra, due to its innovative use of letters as parameters in equations. He was a lawyer by trade, and served as a privy councillor to both Henry III and Henry IV.
Viete was born at Fontenay-le-Comte, Vendée. His grandfather was a merchant from La Rochelle. His father, Etienne Viète, was an attorney in Fontenay-le-Comte and a notary in Le Busseau. His mother was the aunt of Barnabé Brisson, a magistrate and the first president of parliament during the ascendancy of the Catholic League of France.
Vieta went to a Franciscan school and in 1558 studied law at Poitiers, graduating as a Bachelor of Law in 1559. A year later, he began his career as an attorney in his native town. From the outset, he was entrusted with some major cases, including the settlement of rent in Poitou for the widow of King Francis I of France and looking after the interests of Mary, Queen of Scots.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( /ˈniːtʃə/;German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtsʃə]; October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, cultural critic and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.
Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be.
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Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science".
His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honour), and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, inventing an improved military compass and other instruments.
Galileo's championing of heliocentrism was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the absence of an observed stellar parallax. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could only be supported as a possibility, not as an established fact. Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he wrote one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. Here he summarized the work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials.
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George Berkeley
George Berkeley ( /ˈbɑrkliː/; 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Thus, as Berkeley famously put it, for physical objects "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
In 1709, Berkeley published his first major work, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he discussed the limitations of human vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects, but light and color. This foreshadowed his chief philosophical work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 which, after its poor reception, he rewrote in dialogue form and published under the title Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in 1713.
In this book, Berkeley's views were represented by Philonous (Greek: 'lover of mind'), while Hylas (Greek: 'matter') embodies the Irish thinker’s opponents, in particular John Locke. Berkeley argued against Sir Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (on Motion), published 1721. His arguments were a precursor to the views of Mach and Einstein. In 1732, he published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers, and in 1734, he published The Analyst, an empiricist critique of the foundations of infinitesimal calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.
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George Santayana
George Santayana (born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás in Madrid, December 16, 1863; died September 26, 1952, in Rome) was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a validated Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. His last will was to be buried in the Spanish Pantheon of the Cimitero Monumentale del Verano in Rome.
Santayana is known for the sayings, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and "[O]nly the dead have seen the end of war." The latter sentence is often (for example, at the start of the film Blackhawk Down) falsely attributed to Plato; the former appears in Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of Santayana's five-volume Life of Reason. (In the 1905 Charles Scribner's Sons edition, it is found on page 284.) Santayana is broadly included among the pragmatists with Harvard University colleagues William James and Josiah Royce. He said that he stood in philosophy "exactly where [he stood] in daily life."
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Gerolamo Cardano
Gerolamo (or Girolamo, or Geronimo) Cardano (French Jérôme Cardan; Latin Hieronymus Cardanus) (24 September 1501 – 21 September 1576) was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer and gambler. His gambling led him to formulate elementary rules in probability, making him one of the founders of the field.
He was born in Pavia, Lombardy, the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano, a mathematically gifted lawyer, who was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. In his autobiography, Cardano claimed that his mother had attempted to abort him. Shortly before his birth, his mother had to move from Milan to Pavia to escape the Plague; her three other children died from the disease.
In 1520, he entered the University of Pavia and later in Padua studied medicine. His eccentric and confrontational style did not earn him many friends and he had a difficult time finding work after his studies ended. In 1525, Cardano repeatedly applied to the College of Physicians in Milan, but was not admitted owing to his combative reputation and illegitimate birth.
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Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900, Brighton – 6 October 1976, Oxford), was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist." Ryle's best known book is The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'." Ryle, having engaged in detailed study of the key works of Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, himself suggested instead that the book "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label."
Ryle was born in Brighton, England in 1900 and grew up in an environment of learning. His father was a Brighton doctor, a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, and passed on to his children an impressive library. Ryle was educated at Brighton College, and in 1919, he went up to Queen's College at Oxford, initially to study Classics but was quickly drawn to Philosophy. He would graduate with first class honours in 1924 and was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. A year later, he was to become a tutor. Ryle remained at Christ Church until World War II.
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Harald Høffding
Harald Høffding (11 March 1843 – 2 July 1931) was a Danish philosopher.
Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen.[citation needed] He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school.[citation needed] The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding.[citation needed]
Høffding died in Copenhagen.[citation needed]
His best-known work is perhaps his Den nyere Filosofis Historie (1894), translated into English from the German edition (1895) by B.E. Meyer as History of Modern Philosophy (2 vols., 1900), a work intended by him to supplement and correct that of Hans Brøchner, to whom it is dedicated. His Psychology, the Problems of Philosophy (1905) and Philosophy of Religion (1906) also have appeared in English.
Among Høffding's other writings, practically all of which have been translated into German, are: Den engelske Filosofi i vor Tid (1874); Etik (1876); Psychologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaring (ed. 1892); Psykologiske Undersøgelser (1889); Charles Darwin (1889); Kontinuiteten i Kants filosofiske Udviklingsgang (1893); Det psykologiske Grundlag for logiske Domme (1899); Rousseau und seine Philosophie (1901); Mindre Arbejder (1899).
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Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (French pronunciation: [bɛʁksɔn] 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.
He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented".
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859 (the year in which France emerged as a victor in the Second Italian War of Independence, and in the month before the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species). His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish family background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous[citation needed] Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
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Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) (French pronunciation: [ˈʒyl ɑ̃ˈʁi pwɛ̃nkaˈʁe]) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
Poincaré made clear importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.
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Henry More
Henry More FRS (October 12, 1614 – September 1, 1687) was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school.
Henry was born at Grantham and was schooled at The King's School, Grantham and at Eton College. Both his parents were Calvinists but he himself "could never swallow that hard doctrine." In 1631 he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, at about the time John Milton was leaving it. He took his BA in 1635, his MA in 1639, and immediately afterwards became a fellow of his college, turning down all other positions that were offered. He would not accept the mastership of his college, to which, it is understood, he would have been preferred in 1654, when Ralph Cudworth was appointed. In 1675, he finally accepted a prebend in Gloucester Cathedral, but only to resign it in favour of his friend Dr. Edward Fowler, afterwards bishop of Gloucester.
More taught many notable pupils, including Anne Finch, sister of Heneage Finch, subsequently Earl of Nottingham. She later became Lady Conway, and at her country seat at Ragley in Warwickshire, More would spend "a considerable part of his time." She and her husband both appreciated him, and amidst the woods of this retreat he wrote several of his books. The spiritual enthusiasm of Lady Conway was a considerable factor in some of More's speculations, even though she at length joined the Quakers. She became the friend not only of More and William Penn, but of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699) and Valentine Greatrakes, mystical thaumaturgists of the 17th century. Ragley became a centre of devotion and spiritualism.
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Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος—Hērákleitos ho Ephésios; c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the riddling nature of his philosophy and his contempt for humankind in general, he was called "The Obscure" and the "Weeping Philosopher".
Heraclitus is famous for his insistence on ever-present change in the universe, as stated in the famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same river twice" (see panta rhei, below). He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down are one and the same", all existing entities being characterized by pairs of contrary properties. His cryptic utterance that "all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos" (literally, "word", "reason", or "account") has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
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Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did." As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900; "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
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Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position. Putnam is currently Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.
In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind-body problem. In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, inventing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.
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Hugh of Saint Victor
Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096 – 11 February 1141) was born perhaps in France, or more probably in Saxony. His origins and early life are rather obscure. He studied and taught at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris after which he is named. His writings include works of theology, mysticism, philosophy and the arts. Appointed a canon of the Victorines around the turn of the twelfth century.
The early Didascalion was an elementary, encyclopedic approach to God and Christ, in which Hugh avoided controversial subjects and focused on what he took to be commonplaces of Catholic Christianity. In it he outlined three types of philosophy or "science" [scientia] that can help mortals improve themselves and advance toward God: theoretical philosophy (theology, mathematics, physics) provides them with truth, practical philosophy (ethics, economics, politics) aids them in becoming virtuous and prudent, and "mechanical" or "illiberal" philosophy (e.g., carpentry, agriculture, medicine) yields physical benefits. A fourth philosophy, logic, is preparatory to the others and exists to ensure clear and proper conclusions in them. Hugh's deeply mystical bent did not prevent him from seeing philosophy as a useful tool for understanding the divine, or from using it to argue on behalf of faith.
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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He stated:
Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.
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Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes.
Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. He avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his name to Imre Molnár. His mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. He became an active communist during the Second World War. He changed his last name once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos.
After the war, from 1947 he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948, and also attended György Lukács's weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars. He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949. When he returned, however, he found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the Hungarian communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known.
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Isaac Beeckman
Isaac Beeckman (10 December 1588, Middelburg – 19 May 1637, Dordrecht) was a Dutch philosopher and scientist, who, through his studies and contact with leading natural philosophers, may have "virtually given birth to modern atomism".
Beeckman was born in Middelburg, Zeeland, to a strong Calvinistic family, which had fled from the Spanish-controlled Southern Netherlands a few years before. He had a strong early education in his home town and went on to study theology, literature and mathematics in Leiden. Upon his return to Middelburg he could not find a position as a minister, due to clashing ideas of his father and the local church, and decided to follow his father in the candle making business, setting up his own company in Zierikzee. While trying to improve on the candle making process, he also involved himself in other projects, like creating water conduits and doing meteorological observations. In 1616 he sold the business to his apprentice and went to study medicine in Caen, where he graduated in 1618. On his return, he became an assistant rector in Utrecht. On April 1620 he married Cateline de Cerf, who he knew from Middelburg, and with whom he would have seven children. From 1620 to 1627 he taught at the Latin school in Rotterdam, where he founded a "Collegium Mechanicum", or Technical College. From 1627 until his death at the age of 48 he was rector of the Latin school in Dordrecht.
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Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
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Jan Gullberg
Jan Gullberg, (born 1936, died May 21, 1998) was a Swedish writer on popular Science and Medical topics. He is the author of Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers, published by W. W. Norton in 1997 (ISBN 039304002X ). The book was positively reviewed in Scientific American, but more reservedly in New Scientist.
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Jason Stanley
Jason Stanley (born October 12, 1969) is an American philosopher currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His primary interests include linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Stanley is an occasional contributor to Brian Leiter's Leiter Reports blog.
Jason Stanley graduated from Corcoran High School in his hometown of Syracuse, New York. He studied in Lünen, Germany from 1985–1986 as part of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, after which he enrolled in the State University of New York in Binghamton, NY, where he studied philosophy of language under Jack Kaminsky. In 1987 he transferred to Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, but returned to the State University of New York in 1988, this time at the Stony Brook campus. There, he studied philosophy and linguistics under Peter Ludlow and Richard Larson. He received his BA in May 1990, and went on to receive his PhD from MIT in January 1995 with Robert Stalnaker as his thesis advisor.
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Jean Mabillon
Jean Mabillon (23 November 1632 – 27 December 1707) was a French Benedictine monk and scholar, considered the founder of palaeography and diplomatics.
He was born in Saint-Pierremont, Ardennes as the son of Estienne Mabillon (who died in 1692 at age 104) and Jeanne Guérin. At age 12 he entered the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims and in 1650 entered the seminary. He left the seminary in 1653 and instead became a monk in the Maurist Abbey of Saint-Remi. His devotion to his studies there left him ill, and he was sent to Corbie in 1658 to regain his strength. In 1663 he transferred again, to Saint-Denis Abbey near Paris, and the next year to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, where he met and worked with many other scholars, including Luc d'Achery, Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, Etienne Baluze, and Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont.
In Saint-Germain, Mabillon edited the works of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (published in 1667), and also worked on the Lives of the Benedictine Saints ("Acta Ordinis S. Benedicti") (published in nine volumes between 1668 and 1701). The later work was undertaken in collaboration with Luc d'Achery, an older scholar and long-lasting librarian of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who had collected the historical materials which Mabillon used. A foreword which Mabillon later added used the lives of the saints in order to illustrate the history of the early Middle Ages.
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John Dewey
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.
Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics.
In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.[citation needed]
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John Locke
John Locke FRS ( /ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.
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John Searle
John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. Among his notable concepts are the "Chinese Room" argument against artificial intelligence.
Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics.
In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).
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John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.
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Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas ( /ˈjɜrɡən/ or /ˈjʊərɡən ˈhɑːbərmɑːs/;German: [ˈjʏʁɡən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist, geographer and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of "rationalization" originally set forth by Max Weber. While influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and even poststructuralism, many of the central tenets of Habermas' thought remain broadly Marxist in nature. Global polls identified him as one of the leading intellectuals of the present day.
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Kapila
Kapila (Hindi: कपिल ऋषि) was a Vedic sage credited as one of the founders of the Samkhya school of philosophy. He is prominent in the Bhagavata Purana, which features a theistic version of his Samkhya philosophy. Traditional Hindu sources describe him as a descendant of Manu, a grandson of Brahma. The Bhagavad Gita depicts Kapila as a yogi hermit with highly developed siddhis, or spiritual powers.
Many of the details about sage Kapila's life are described in Book 3 of the Bhagavata Purana, where it is mentioned that his parents were Kardama Muni and Devahuti. Kapila is considered an incarnation of the supreme-being (Narayana) and listed as such in the list of incarnations in Bhagavata Purana .After his father left home, Kapila instructed his mother, Devahuti in the philosophy of yoga and devotional worship of Lord Vishnu, enabling her to achieve liberation (moksha). Kapila's Sankhya is also given by Krishna to Uddhava in Book 11 of the Bhagavata Purana, a passage also known as the "Uddhava Gita".
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Karl Barth
Karl Barth ((1886-05-10)May 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968(1968-12-10)) (pronounced "Bart") was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom many scholars hold to be among the most important thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century European Protestantism.
Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Other critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy — a term emphatically rejected by Barth himself. The most accurate description of his work might be "a theology of the Word." Barth's theological thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his interpretation of the Calvinistic doctrine of election.
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Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.
Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne, where he founded his own newspaper. In 1849 he was exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved, and also campaigned for socialism—he became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.
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Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS (27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.
In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a proponent of eugenics, and a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton.
A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Carl Pearson, later known as Karl Pearson (1857–1936), was born to William Pearson and Fanny Smith, who had three children, Aurthur, Carl (Karl) and Amy. William Pearson also sired an illegitimate son, Frederick Mockett.
Pearson's mother, Fanny Pearson née Smith, came from a family of master mariners who sailed their own ships from Hull; his father read law at Edinburgh and was a successful barrister and Queen's Counsel (QC). William Pearson's father's family came from the North Riding of Yorkshire.
"Carl Pearson" inadvertently became "Karl Pearson" when he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1879, which changed the spelling. He used both variants of his name until 1884 when he finally adopted Karl — supposedly also after Karl Marx[citation needed], though some argue otherwise. Eventually he became universally known as "KP".
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Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRSFBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-Britishphilosopher and professor at the London School of Economics. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
Popper is known for his attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy". In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible.
Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born. Karl's father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society: Simon Siegmund Carl became a legal partner[clarification needed] of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimond Grübl and, after his death in 1898, took over the firm (Karl received his middle name from the mayor).
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Larry Laudan
Larry Laudan (b. Austin, Texas, 1941) is a contemporary philosopher of science and epistemologist. He has strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he has defended a view of science as a privileged and progressive institution against popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as an important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs."
His most important contributions to the philosophy of science can be found in his book Progress and its Problems (1977) while acting as chair of the history and philosophy of science department at the University of Pittsburgh. Laudan charges philosophers of science with paying lip service to the view that “science is fundamentally a problem-solving activity” without taking seriously the view's implications for the history of science and its philosophy, and without questioning certain issues in the historiography and methodology of science. Against empiricism, which is represented by Karl Popper, and "revolutionism," represented by Thomas Kuhn, Laudan maintained in Progress and its Problems that science is an evolving process that accumulates more empirically validated evidence while solving conceptual anomalies at the same time. Mere evidence collecting or empirical confirmation does not constitute the true mechanism of scientific advancement; conceptual resolution and comparison of the solutions of anomalies provided by various theories form an indispensable part of the evolution of science.
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Laurence BonJour
Laurence BonJour (born 31 August 1943) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington.
He received his bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Macalester College and his doctorate in 1969 from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Richard Rorty. Before moving to UW he taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
His areas of specialty include epistemology, Kant, and British empiricism.
BonJour's work, along with that of Roderick Chisholm, Keith Lehrer, and Michael Williams, is at the center of current debates in epistemology. Initially defending coherentism in his anti-foundationalist critique The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, BonJour has since moved to defend Cartesian[disambiguation needed
]foundationalism in such works as Epistemology and In Defense of Pure Reason. The latter book is a sustained defense of a priori justification, strongly criticizing empiricists and pragmatists who dismiss it (such as W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty).
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Lev Shestov
Lev Isaakovich Shestov (Russian: Лев Исаа́кович Шесто́в), born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann (Russian: Иегуда Лейб Шварцман), was a Ukrainian/Russian existentialist philosopher. Born in Kiev (Russian Empire) on February 13 [O.S. January 31] 1866, he emigrated to France in 1921, fleeing from the aftermath of the October Revolution. He lived in Paris until his death on November 19, 1938.
Shestov was born Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann in Kiev into a Jewish family. He obtained an education at various places, due to fractious clashes with authority. He went on to study law and mathematics at the Moscow State University but after a clash with the Inspector of Students he was told to return to Kiev, where he completed his studies.
Shestov's dissertation prevented him from becoming a doctor of law, as it was dismissed on account of its revolutionary tendencies. In 1898 he entered a circle of prominent Russian intellectuals and artists which included Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Diaghilev, Dmitri Merezhkovsky and Vasily Rozanov. Shestov contributed articles to a journal the circle had established. During this time he completed his first major philosophical work, Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching; both authors mentioned in the title had a profound impact on Shestov's thinking.
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Lodovico Ferrari
Lodovico Ferrari (February 2, 1522 – October 5, 1565) was an Italian mathematician.
Born in Milan, Italy, grandfather, Bartholomew Ferrari was forced out of Milan to Bologna. He settled in Bologna, Italy and he began his career as the servant of Gerolamo Cardano. He was extremely bright, so Cardano started teaching him mathematics. Ferrari aided Cardano on his solutions for quadratic equations and cubic equations, and was mainly responsible for the solution of quartic equations that Cardano published. While still in his teens, Ferrari was able to obtain a prestigious teaching post after Cardano resigned from it and recommended him. Ferrari eventually retired young (only 42) and quite rich. He then moved back to his home town of Bologna where he lived with his widowed sister Maddalena to take up a professorship of mathematics at the University of Bologna in 1565. Shortly thereafter, he died of white arsenic poisoning, allegedly murdered by his greedy sister.
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Loyal Rue
Loyal Rue is an American philosopher and writer whose research focuses on naturalistic theories of religion. He is Professor Emeritus in the philosophy and religion departments at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
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Luca Pacioli
Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (sometimes Paccioli or Paciolo; 1445 – 1517) was an Italian mathematician, Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and seminal contributor to the field now known as accounting. He was also called Luca di Borgo after his birthplace, Borgo Sansepolcro, Tuscany.
Luca Pacioli was born in 1447 in Sansepolcro (Tuscany) where he received an abbaco education. This was education in the vernacular (i.e. the local tongue) rather than Latin and focused on the knowledge required of merchants. He moved to Venice around 1464, where he continued his own education while working as a tutor to the three sons of a merchant. It was during this period that he wrote his first book, a treatise on arithmetic for the boys he was tutoring. Between 1472 and 1475, he became a Franciscan friar.
In 1475, he started teaching in Perugia, first as a private teacher, from 1477 holding the first chair in mathematics. He wrote a comprehensive textbook in the vernacular for his students. He continued to work as a private tutor of mathematics and was, in fact, instructed to stop teaching at this level in Sansepolcro in 1491. In 1494, his first book to be printed, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità, was published in Venice. In 1497, he accepted an invitation from duke Ludovico Sforza to work in Milan. There he met, collaborated with, lived with, and taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci. In 1499, Pacioli and Leonardo were forced to flee Milan when Louis XII of France seized the city and drove out their patron. Their paths appear to have finally separated around 1506. Pacioli died at age 70(+/-) in 1517, most likely in Sansepolcro where it is thought that he had spent much of his final years.
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Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (July 28, 1804, Landshut, Lower Bavaria – September 13, 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist. He was the fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, brother of mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach. An associate of Left Hegelian circles, Feuerbach was politically liberal, an atheist and a materialist. Many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of Christianity. His thought was influential in the development of dialectical materialism, where he is often recognized as a bridge between Hegel and Marx.
Feuerbach matriculated in the University of Heidelberg with the intention of pursuing a career in the church.[citation needed] Through the influence of Prof. Karl Daub he was led to an interest in the then predominant philosophy of Hegel and, in spite of his father's opposition, enrolled in the University of Berlin in order to study under the master himself. After 22 years, the Hegelian influence began to slacken. Feuerbach became associated with a group known as the Young Hegelians, alternately known as the Left Hegelians, who synthesized a radical offshoot of Hegelian philosophy, interpreting Hegel's dialectic march of spirit through history to mean that existing Western culture and institutional forms—and, in particular, Christianity—would be superseded. "Theology," he wrote to a friend, "I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality." These words are a key to Feuerbach's development. He completed his education at Erlangen, at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg with the study of natural science.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947. In his lifetime, he published just one book review, one article, a children's dictionary, and the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). In 1999, his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "...the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".Bertrand Russell described him as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".
Born in Vienna into one of Europe's wealthiest families, he gave away his entire inheritance. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Ludwig contemplating it too. He left academia several times: serving as an officer on the frontline during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for hitting children when they made mistakes in mathematics; and working during World War II as a hospital porter in London, where he told patients not to take the drugs they were prescribed, and where no-one knew he was one of the world's most famous philosophers. He described philosophy, however, as "the only work that gives me real satisfaction."
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Léon Brunschvicg
Léon Brunschvicg ([leɔ̃ bʁœ̃svik]; November 10, 1869–January 18, 1944) was a French Idealist philosopher. He co-founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale with Xavier Leon and Élie Halévy in 1893.
From 1895-1900 he taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. In 1909 he became professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was married to Cécile Kahn, a major campaigner for women's suffrage in France, with whom he had four children.
Forced to leave his position at the Sorbonne by the Nazis, Brunschvicg fled to the south of France, where he died at the age of 74. While in hiding, he wrote studies of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal that were printed in Switzerland. He composed a manual of philosophy dedicated to his teenage granddaughter entitled Héritage de Mots, Héritage d'Idées (Legacy of Words, Legacy of Ideas) which was published posthumously after the liberation of France. His reinterpretation of Descartes has become the foundation for a new idealism.
Brunschvicg defined philosophy as "the mind's methodical self-reflection" and gave a central role to judgement.
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Maimonides
Mosheh ben Maimon משה בן מימון, called Moses Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn (Arabic: موسى بن ميمون), or RaMBaM (רמב"ם – Hebrew acronym for "Rabbi Mosheh Ben Maimon"), was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the most prolific and followed Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages. He was born in Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain) on Passover Eve, 1135, and died in Egypt (or Tiberias) on 20th Tevet, December 12, 1204. He was a rabbi, physician and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt.
Although his writings on Jewish law and ethics were met with acclaim and gratitude from most Jews even as far off as Spain, Iraq and Yemen, and he rose to be the revered head of the Jewish community in Egypt, there were also vociferous critics of some of his rulings and other writings particularly in Spain. Nevertheless, he was posthumously acknowledged to be one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history, his copious work a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. His fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah still carries canonical authority as a codification of Talmudic law. In the Yeshiva world he is known as "haNesher haGadol" (the great eagle) in recognition of his outstanding status as a bona fide exponent of the Oral Torah.
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Marin Mersenne
Marin Mersenne, Marin Mersennus or le Père Mersenne (8 September 1588 – 1 September 1648) was a French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, often referred to as the "father of acoustics" (Bohn 1988:225). Mersenne was "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of the 1600s."
Marin Mersenne (pronounced Mehr-SENN) was born of peasant parents near Oizé, Maine (present day Sarthe, France). He was educated at Le Mans and at the Jesuit College of La Flèche. On 17 July 1611, he joined the Minim Friars, and, after studying theology and Hebrew in Paris received his full holy orders in 1613.
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Martin Buber
Martin Buber (Hebrew: מרטין בובר; February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923 Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.
In 1930 Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology.
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Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976); German pronunciation: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."
Heidegger argues that philosophy is preoccupied with what exists and has forgotten the question of the "ground" of being. We find ourselves "always already" fallen into a world that already existed; but he insists that we have forgotten the basic question of what being itself is. This question defines our central nature. He argues that we are practical agents, caring and concerned about our projects in the world, and allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself to us. He also says that our manipulation of reality is often harmful and hides our true being as essentially limited participants, not masters, of the world which we discover.
Heidegger wrote about these issues in his best-known book, Being and Time (1927), which is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's influence is far reaching, from philosophy to deconstructionism and literary theory, theology, architecture, and artificial intelligence.
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Martin Lings
Martin Lings (also known as Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din) (January 24, 1909 – May 12, 2005) was an English Muslim writer and scholar, a student and follower of Frithjof Schuon, and Shakespearean scholar. He is best known as the author of a very popular and positively reviewed biography, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, first published in 1983 and still in print.
Lings was born in Burnage, Manchester in 1909 to a Protestant family. The young Lings gained an introduction to travelling at a young age, spending significant time in the United States due to his father's employment. Lings attended Clifton College and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a BA in English Language and Literature. At Magdalen, he was a student and then a close friend of C. S. Lewis. After graduating from Oxford Lings went to Vytautas Magnus University, in Lithuania, where he taught Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.
For Lings himself, however, the most important event whilst at Oxford was his discovery of the writings of the René Guénon, a French metaphysician and Muslim convert, and those of Frithjof Schuon, a German spiritual authority, metaphysician and Perennialist. In 1938, Lings went to Basle to make Schuon's acquaintance and he remained Frithjof Schuon's disciple and expositor for the rest of his life.[citation needed]
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Martin van den Hove
Martin (Maarten) van den Hove (Latinized as Martinus Hortensius (Ortensius)) (1605 – 7 August 1639) was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician. His adopted Latin name is a translation of the Dutch hof ("garden"), in Latin horta.
Born in Delft, he studied at Leiden University under Snellius and Isaac Beeckman from 1625 to 1627. He received further instruction from Snellius from 1628 to 1630 at Leiden and at Ghent.
In 1628, he began studying under Philippe van Lansberge, who was introduced to him by Beeckman. Van den Hove became an enthusiastic supporter of Landsberge, who was by now quite aged, and helped Landsberge complete his project to "restore astronomy" (i.e. create new systematic observations to replace old, insufficient data). Landsberge thanked Van den Hove publicly, considered himself lucky that "by divine providence, in my old age, pressed by sickness, such a strong helper came to my aid, as formerly the learned Rheticus to the great Copernicus."
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Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927) is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.
Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City to a Jewish family, where he attended The Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton (1954). He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. In 1959 he and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Carl Sagan.Patrick Winston has also described Minsky as the smartest person he has ever met. Ray Kurzweil has referred to Minsky as his mentor.
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Michel Aflaq
Michel Aflaq (Arabic: ميشيل عفلق, Damascus, 1910 – Paris, 23 June 1989) was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny (1958) and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution (1975).
Born into a middle class family in Damascus, Syria, Aflaq studied at the Sorbonne, where he met his future political companion Salah al-Din al-Bitar. He returned to Syria in 1932, and began his political career in communist politics. Aflaq became a communist activist, but broke his ties with the communist movement when the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party supported France's colonial policies. Later in 1940 Aflaq and al-Bitar established the Arab Ihya Movement (later renaming itself the Arab Ba'ath Movement, taking the name from Zaki al-Arsuzi's group by the same name). The movement proved successful, and in 1947 the Arab Ba'ath Movement merged with al-Arsuzi's Arab Ba'ath organisation to establish the Arab Ba'ath Party. Aflaq was elected to the party's executive committee and was elected "'Amid" (meaning the party's leader).
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Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]), February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, including René Descartes,Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer,Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare.
In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, 'I am myself the matter of my book', was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, 'Que sçay-je?' ('What do I know?' in Middle French; modern French Que sais-je?). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling.
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Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a eliˈade]; March 13 [O.S. February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.
His literary works belong to the fantasy and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels Maitreyi ("La Nuit Bengali" or "Bengal Nights"), Noaptea de Sânziene ("The Forbidden Forest"), Isabel şi apele diavolului ("Isabel and the Devil's Waters") and the Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent, the novellas Domnişoara Christina ("Miss Christina") and Tinereţe fără tinereţe ("Youth Without Youth"), and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger ("The Secret of Dr. Honigberger") and La Ţigănci ("With the Gypsy Girls").
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Ned Block
Ned Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. In 1971, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Hilary Putnam. He went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor of philosophy (1971-1977), worked as associate professor of philosophy (1977-1983), professor of philosophy (1983-1996) and served as chair of the philosophy section (1989-1995). He has, since 1996, been a professor in the departments of philosophy and psychology and at the Center for Neural Science at New York University (NYU).
Block is noted for presenting the Blockhead argument against the Turing Test as a test of intelligence in a paper entitled Psychologism and Behaviourism (1981). He is also known for his criticism of functionalism, arguing that a system with the same functional states as a human is not necessarily conscious. In his more recent work on consciousness, he has made a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, where phenomenal consciousness consists of subjective experience and feelings and access consciousness consists of that information globally available in the cognitive system for the purposes of reasoning, speech and high-level action control. He has argued that access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness might not always coincide in human beings.
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Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906, Somerville, Massachusetts – 25 November 1998, Needham, Massachusetts) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.
Goodman graduated from Harvard University, A.B., magna cum laude (1928). During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts while studying for a Harvard Ph.D. in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy. During World War II, he served in the US Army.
He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, 1946–1964, where his students included Noam Chomsky, Sydney Morgenbesser, and Hilary Putnam. He left Penn because he was not granted the control he desired over the philosophy department. He was a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies from 1962 to 1963 and was a Professor at several universities from 1964 to 1967, before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1968.
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Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche French pronunciation: [nikɔˈlɑ malˈbrɑ̃ʃ]; (6 August 1638 – 13 October 1715) was a French Oratorian and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is best known for his doctrines of Vision in God and Occasionalism. Known by many as "The Occasional Philosopher" a term coined by David Hume, Malebranche's sworn adversary.
Nicolas Malebranche was born in Paris in 1638, the youngest child of Nicolas Malebranche, secretary to King Louis XIII of France, and Catherine de Lauzon, sister of a Jean de Lauson, Governor of New France. Because of a malformed spine, Malebranche received his elementary education from a private tutor. He left home at the age of sixteen to pursue a course of philosophy at the Collège de la Marche, and subsequently to study theology at the Collège de Sorbonne, both colleges from the University of Paris. He eventually left the Sorbonne, having rejected scholasticism, and entered the Oratory in 1660. There, he devoted himself to ecclesiastical history, linguistics, the Bible, and the works of Saint Augustine. Malebranche was ordained a priest in 1664.
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Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
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Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath (Vienna, December 10, 1882 - Oxford, December 22, 1945) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was to flee his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
Neurath was born in Vienna, the son of Wilhelm Neurath (1840–1901), a well-known political economist at the time. He studied mathematics in Vienna and gained his Ph.D. in the department of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin.
He married Anna Schapire in 1907. She died as a result of childbirth (Paul Neurath) in 1911, and he married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopher Olga Hahn. Perhaps because of Olga's blindness and then because of the outbreak of war, his son, Paul Neurath was sent to a children's home outside Vienna, where Neurath's mother lived, and returned to live with his father and Olga when he was nine years old.
Neurath taught political economy at the Neue Wiener Handelsakademie (New College of Commerce, Vienna) until war broke out. Subsequently he became director of the Deutsches Kriegwirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later the Deutsches Wirtschaftmuseum) at Leipzig. Wolfgang Schumann, known from the Dürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles, urged him to work out a plan for socialization. Neurath joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918-19 and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned but returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison he wrote "Anti-Spengler", a critical attack on Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West".
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Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea ( /pɑrˈmɛnɨdiːz əv ˈɛliə/; Ancient Greek: Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; fl. early 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In "the way of truth" (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as "what-is") is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In "the way of opinion," he explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful. These ideas strongly influenced the whole of Western philosophy, perhaps most notably through its effect on Plato.
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Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend (January 13, 1924 – February 11, 1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958–1989). He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, and finally Switzerland. His major works include Against Method (published in 1975), Science in a Free Society (published in 1978) and Farewell to Reason (a collection of papers published in 1987). Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules. He is an influential figure in the philosophy of science, and also in the sociology of scientific knowledge.
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Paul Grice
Herbert Paul Grice (March 13, 1913, Birmingham, England – August 28, 1988, Berkeley, California), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British-educated philosopher of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United States.
Born and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham), in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After a brief period teaching at Rossall School, he went back to Oxford where he taught until 1967. In that year, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his death in 1988. He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason. He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in the Way of Words (1989).
He was married and had two children. He and his wife lived in an old Spanish style house in the Berkeley Hills.[citation needed]
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Paul Häberlin
Paul Haeberlin (February 17, 1878, Kesswil – September 29, 1960, Basel) was a Swiss philosopher who at different times in his career took the standpoint that either religion or theoretical knowledge was the answer to human problems. He always gave philosophy an important role, but religion was to him the only way man could understand his real position in existence. Haeberlin made contributions to characterology and psychotherapeutics, and was especially successful in treating psychopathic youth and teens. Made a full professor of philosophy, psychology and pedagogics at the University of Basel.
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Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general public, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation": an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.
Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel Silesia which was then part of Germany. He was the oldest of three children, with two sisters: Johanna (b. 1888, d. 1920) and Elisabeth (b. 1893). Tillich’s Prussian father Johannes Tillich was a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces; his mother Mathilde Dürselen was from the Rhineland and was more liberal. When Tillich was four, his father became superintendent of a diocese in Schönfliess, a town of three thousand, where Tillich began elementary school. In 1898, Tillich was sent to Königsberg Chojna to begin gymnasium. At Königsberg, he lived in a boarding house and experienced loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bible. Simultaneously, however, he was exposed to humanistic ideas at school.
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Pavel Florensky
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (also P.A. Florenskiĭ, Florenskii, Florenskij, Russian: Па́вел Алекса́ндрович Флоре́нский) (January 21 [O.S. January 9] 1882 - December 1937) was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor and Neomartyr.
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was born on January 21, 1882, into the family of a railroad engineer, (Aleksandr Florensky) in the town of Yevlakh in western Azerbaijan. His father came from a family of Russian Orthodox priests while his mother Olga (Salomia) Saparova (Saparyan, Sapharashvili) was of the Tbilisi Armenian nobility. His maternal grandmother Sofia Paatova (Paatashvili) was from Sighnaghi, Georgia. Florensky "always searched for the roots of his Armenian family" and noted that they're coming from Karabakh.
After graduating from Tbilisi gymnasium in 1899, Florensky entered the department of mathematics of Moscow State University and simultaneously studied philosophy. During this period the young Florensky, who had no religious upbringing, began taking an interest in studies beyond "the limitations of physical knowledge..." In 1904 he graduated from Moscow State University and declined a teaching position at the University: instead, he proceeded to study theology at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Sergiyev Posad. During his theological study, he first came into contact with who would become his spiritual father and mentor, Elder Isidore on a visit to Gethsemane Hermitage. Together with fellow students Ern, Svenitsky and Brikhnichev he founded a society, the Christian Struggle Union (Союз Христиaнской Борьбы), with the revolutionary aim of rebuilding Russian society according to the principles of Vladimir Solovyov. Subsequently he was arrested for membership in this society in 1906: however, he later lost his interest in the Radical Christianity movement.
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Peter Geach
Peter Thomas Geach, MA, FBA ( /ˈɡiːtʃ/; born 29 March 1916) is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.
Geach was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He taught at Birmingham University (1951–1966) and from 1966 at the University of Leeds where he was Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy. Geach was given the title of Emeritus Professor of Logic on his retirement in 1981.
Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965.
He has been awarded the papal cross "Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice" by the Holy See for his philosophical work.
His early work includes the classic texts Mental Acts and Reference and Generality, the latter defending an essentially modern conception of reference against medieval theories of supposition.
His Catholic perspective is integral to his philosophy. He is perhaps the founder of Analytical Thomism (though the current of thought running through his and Elizabeth Anscombe's work to the present day was only ostensibly so named forty years later by John Haldane), the aim of which is to synthesise Thomistic and Analytic approaches. He defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentially rational animals, each one miraculously created. He dismisses Darwinistic attempts to regard reason as inessential to humanity, as "mere sophistry, laughable, or pitiable." He repudiates any capacity for language in animals as mere "association of manual signs with things or performances."
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Pierre Chanut
Pierre Hector Chanut (Riom, February 22, 1601 – Livry-sur-Seine, July 3, 1662) was a civil servant in the Auvergne, a French ambassador and state counsellor.
In 1626 he married Marguerite Clerselier and had eight children. He was charged by Jules Mazarin and resided from 1646 to 1649 at the Swedish court and in Osnabrück, negotiating the Peace of Westfalia. He held a correspondence with Queen Christina of Sweden to whom he presented the French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes died of pneumonia in his house at Mälaren, 300 meters from Tre Kronor (castle).
In 1651 Chanut departed to Lübeck to a Congress which had to mediate peace between Sweden and Poland. This failed, however, and in 1653 Chanut came back to Stockholm. He probably invited Pierre Bourdelot and Gabriel Naudé, but departed soon after the Netherlands, where he was ambassador till 1655. Back in Paris he became state counsellor. While Ludovico Santinelli was participant at the murder of Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi at Fontainebleau. Christina promised Chanut Ludivico and his two helpers would have to leave her court. After his death his friend and brother-in-law Claude Clerselier, an editor, inherited all the manuscripts by Descartes and published them.
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Pierre Duhem
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem ([pjˈɛʁ moʁˈis maʁˈi dyˈɛm] ( listen); 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages. Duhem also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics.
Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. In this work, he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. But the novelty of Duhem's work was his proposal that Newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted Kepler's Laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from Keplerian orbits. Since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to Duhem, Newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from Kepler's Laws.
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Pierre Gassendi
Pierre Gassendi (January 22, 1592 – October 24, 1655) was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. With a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
He wrote numerous philosophical works, and some of the positions he worked out are considered significant, finding a way between scepticism and dogmatism. Richard Popkin indicates that Gassendi was one of the first thinkers to formulate the modern "scientific outlook", of moderated scepticism and empiricism. He clashed with his contemporary Descartes on the possibility of certain knowledge. His best known intellectual project attempted to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity.
Gassendi was born at Champtercier, near Digne, in France. A youthful prodigy, at a very early age he showed academic potential and attended the college at Digne, where he displayed a particular aptitude for languages and mathematics. Soon afterwards he entered the University of Aix-en-Provence, to study philosophy under Philibert Fesaye. In 1612 the college of Digne called him to lecture on theology. Four years later he received the degree of Doctor of Theology at Avignon, and in 1617 he took holy orders. In the same year he answered a call to the chair of philosophy at Aix-en-Provence University, and seems gradually to have withdrawn from theology.
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Plato
Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
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Plotinus
Plotinus (Greek: Πλωτῖνος) (ca. 204/5–270 CE) was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas and he is of the Platonic tradition. Historians of the 19th century invented the term Neoplatonism[citation needed] and applied it to him and his philosophy which was influential in Late Antiquity. Much of the biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads. His metaphysical writings have inspired centuries of Pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Gnostic metaphysicians and mystics.
Porphyry reported that Plotinus was 66 years old when he died in 270, the second year of the reign of the emperor Claudius II, thus giving us the year of his teacher's birth as around 205. Eunapius reported that Plotinus was born in the Deltaic Lycopolis; "Lyco-" from the Greek meaning "wolf" (Greek: λύκος, lykos). It is the same root that gave rise to Aristotle's Lyceum (place of the wolf) in Egypt, which has led to speculations that he may have been a native Egyptian of Roman,Greek, or Hellenized Egyptian descent.
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Pope Alexander VII
Pope Alexander VII (13 February 1599 – 22 May 1667), born Fabio Chigi, was Pope from 7 April 1655, until his death.
Born in Siena, a member of the illustrious banking family of Chigi and a great-nephew of Pope Paul V (1605–1621), he was privately tutored and eventually received doctorates of philosophy, law, and theology from the University of Siena.
In 1627 he began his apprenticeship as vice-papal legate at Ferrara, and on recommendations from two cardinals he was appointed successively Inquisitor of Malta and nuncio in Cologne (1639–1651). There, he supported Urban VIII's condemnation of Jansenius' Augustinus by the papal bull In eminenti of 1642.
Though expected to take part in the negotiations which led in 1648 to the Peace of Westphalia, he declined to deliberate with persons whom the Catholic Church considered heretics, and protested, when it was finally completed, against the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and established the balance of European power that lasted until the wars of the French Revolution (1789).
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Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (/ˈraɪnhoʊld ˈniːbʊər/; June 21st, 1892 – June 1st, 1971) was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world. He attacked utopianism as ineffectual for dealing with reality, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944):
His realism deepened after 1945 and led him to support United States' efforts to confront Soviet communism around the world. A powerful speaker, he was one of the most influential religious leaders of the 1940s and 1950s in American public affairs.[citation needed] Niebuhr battled with the religious liberals over what he called their naïve views of sin and the optimism of the Social Gospel, and battled with the religious conservatives over what he viewed as their naïve view of Scripture and their narrow definition of "true religion".
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René Descartes
René Descartes (French pronunciation: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; Latinized form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian"; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system — allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes in a two-dimensional coordinate system — was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution and has been described as an example of genius.
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René Guénon
René Guénon (November 15, 1886 – January 7, 1951), also known as Shaykh `Abd al-Wahid Yahya, was a French author and intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having written on topics ranging from metaphysics, "sacred science" and traditional studies to symbolism and initiation.
In his writings, he proposes either "to expose directly some aspects of Eastern metaphysical doctrines", these doctrines being defined by him as of "universal character", or "to adapt these same doctrines for Western readers while keeping strictly faithful to their spirit"; he only endorsed the act of "handing down" these Eastern doctrines, while reiterating their "non-personal character".
He wrote and published in French and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
René Guénon was born in Blois, a city in central France approximately 100 miles (~ 160 km) from Paris. Guénon, like most Frenchmen of the time, was born into a Roman Catholic family. Little is known of his family, although it appears that his father was an architect. By 1904, Guénon was living as a student in Paris, where his studies focused on mathematics and philosophy. He was known as a brilliant student, notably in mathematics, in spite of his poor health.
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Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the traditional analytic philosophy, which he would later famously reject in favor of his own brand of pragmatism.
The philosophical program he developed included a rejection of a representationalist account of knowledge, that is, "mirror of nature", which he reviewed as a holdover from Plato and pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. In response to these visual theorists, which he drew as embodied by modern analytic philosophy, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods are merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which were abandoned or adopted over time according to social conventions and usefulness.
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Richard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne (born 26 December 1934) is a British philosopher of religion. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Swinburne received an Open Scholarship to study Classics at Exeter College, Oxford, but in fact graduated with a first class BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Swinburne has held various professorships through his career in academia. From 1972 to 1985 he taught at Keele University. During part of this time, he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen from 1982 to 1984, resulting in the book The Evolution of the Soul. From 1985 until his retirement in 2002 he was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford (his successor in this chair is Brian Leftow).
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Robert Audi
Robert Audi (born November 1941) is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics – especially on ethical intuitionism – and the theory of action. He is O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and previously held a Chair in the Business School there. His 2005 book, The Good in the Right, updates and strengthens Rossian intuitionism and develops the epistemology of ethics. He has also written important works of political philosophy, particularly on the relationship between church and state.
Audi earned his BA from Colgate University and his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin, and for many years as the Charles J. Mach University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln before moving to University of Notre Dame as Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Management, and the David E. Gallo Chair in Ethics. He has served as General Editor of the First Edition (1995) and Second Edition (1999) of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. He has also served as the general editor for "Modern Readings in Epistemology", as well as for "Modern readings in Metaphysics".
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Robert Kilwardby
Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215–11 September 1279) was an Archbishop of Canterbury in England and as well as a cardinal.
Kilwardby studied at the University of Paris, then was a teacher of grammar and logic there. He then joined the Dominican Order and studied theology, and became regent at Oxford University before 1261, probably by 1245. He was named provincial prior of the Dominicans for England in 1261, and in October 1272 Pope Gregory X appointed him as Archbishop of Canterbury to end a disupte over the election. Kilwardby was provided to the archbishopric on 11 October 1272, given the temporalities on 12 December 1272, and consecrated on 26 February 1273.
Kilwardby crowned Edward I and his wife Eleanor as king and queen of England in August 1274, but otherwise took little part in politics. He instead concentrated on his ecclesiastical duties, including charity to the poor and donating to the Dominicans.
In 1278 Pope Nicholas III named Kilwardby Cardinal Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina. He then resigned Canterbury and left England, taking with him papers, registers and documents belonging to the see. He also left the see deep in debt again, after his predecessor had cleared the debt. He died in Italy in 1279 and was buried in the Dominican convent in Viterbo, Italy. While in theory this was a promotion, probably it was not, as the pope was unhappy with Kilwardy's support of efforts to resist the payment of papal revenues and with the lack of effort towards the reforms demanded at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.
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Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology.
Nozick was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from the Russian shtetl who had been born with the name of Cohen. Nozick was married to the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. He died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with stomach cancer. He is interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Nozick was educated at Columbia (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, and later at Princeton (Ph.D. 1963), and Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar (1963-1964).
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Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. (c. 1214–1294), (scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, meaning "wonderful teacher"), was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He is sometimes credited, mainly starting in the 19th century, as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by the works of Aristotle and later pseudo-Aristotelian works, like the works of Muslim scientist Alhazen. However, more recent reevaluations emphasize that he was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books, in the scholastic tradition. A survey of the reception of Bacon's work over centuries found that it often reflects the concerns and controversies central to the receivers.
Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, possibly in 1213 or 1214 at the Ilchester Friary. The only source for his date of birth is his statement in the Opus Tertium, written in 1267, that "forty years have passed since I first learned the alphabet". The 1214 birth date assumes he was not being literal, and may have meant 40 years had passed since he matriculated at Oxford at the age of 13. If he had been literal, his birth date was more likely to have been around 1220/1222. In the same passage he reports that for all but two of those forty years he had always been engaged in study. His family appears to have been well-off, but, during the stormy reign of Henry III of England, their property was despoiled and several members of the family were driven into exile.
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Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891 – September 14, 1970) was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble until his parents' generation. He began his formal education at the Barmen Gymnasium. From 1910 to 1914, he attended the University of Jena, intending to write a thesis in physics. But he also studied carefully Kant's Critique of Pure Reason during a course taught by Bruno Bauch, and was one of very few students to attend Gottlob Frege's courses in mathematical logic. After serving in the German army during World War I for three years, he was given permission to study physics at the University of Berlin, 1917–18, where Albert Einstein was a newly appointed professor. Carnap then attended the University of Jena, where he wrote a thesis defining an axiomatic theory of space and time. The physics department said it was too philosophical, and Bruno Bauch of the philosophy department said it was pure physics. Carnap then wrote another thesis, with Bauch's supervision, on the theory of space in a more orthodox Kantian style, and published as Der Raum (Space) in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien (1922). In it he makes the clear distinction between formal, physical and perceptual (e.g., visual) spaces.
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Rudolf Otto
Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869–6 March 1937) was an eminent German Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion.
Born in Peine near Hanover, Otto attended the Gymnasium Andreanum in Hildesheim and studied at the universities of Erlangen and Göttingen, where he wrote his dissertation on Martin Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, and his habilitation on Kant. By 1906, he held a position as extraordinary professor, and in 1910 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen. In 1915, he became ordinary professor at the University of Breslau, and in 1917, at the University of Marburg's Divinity School, then one of the most famous Protestant seminaries in the world. Although he received several other calls, he remained in Marburg for the rest of his life. He retired in 1929 and died of pneumonia eight years later, after he had suffered serious injuries falling some 20 m from a tower. His death is held to be the result of a suicide attempt., but many have long believed that he was thrown from the tower by Nazi agents, as the Nazi Party was hostile to his views, especially the radical equality implied in those views (and there is some suspicion that Eliade's Encylopedia entry reflects Eliade's well-known Nazi sympathies more than the truth). He is buried in Marburg cemetery.
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Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke (born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.
Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, since he was a teenager. Unusual for a professional philosopher, his only degree is an undergraduate degree from Harvard, in mathematics. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, with his principal contribution being a semantics for modal logic, involving possible worlds as described in a system now called Kripke semantics. Another of his most important contributions is his argument that necessity is a 'metaphysical' notion, which should be separated from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary a posteriori truths, such as "Water is H2O." He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referred to as "Kripkenstein." His most famous work is Naming and Necessity (1980).
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Sergei Bulgakov
Fr. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (Russian: Серге́й Никола́евич Булга́ков) (28 June [O.S. 16 June] 1871 - July 12, 1944) was a Russian Orthodox Christian theologian, philosopher and economist. Until 1922 he worked in Russia; afterwards in Paris.
Sergei Nicolaevich Bulgakov was born on 16 June 1871 Old Style to the family of an Orthodox priest (Nikolai Bulgakov) in the town of Livny, Oryol guberniya, in Russia.
He studied at Orel seminary, then at Yelets gimnasium. In 1894 he graduated from the Law School of Moscow University, where he had also undertaken a serious study of political economy.
During his study at the seminary Bulgakov became interested in Marxism and took part in the Legal Marxism movement. Studying Marxism, Bulgakov eventually became convinced of the impotence of this theory. Under the influence of works of Russian religious thinkers (Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Solovyov, etc.), in the course of his meetings and arguments with Leo Tolstoy he found his religious beliefs again. He wrote a book about his evolution (Sergey Bulgakov, From Marxism to Idealism, 1903). Such an evolution was common for the Russian intelligentsia of the time, and he soon became one of their recognised ideologists. A primary contributor to the books Problems of Idealism (1902), Vekhi, Problems of Religion, About Vladimir Solovyev, About the Religion of Leo Tolstoy, The Religion of Solovyov's Philosophical Society, he participated in the journals New Way (Новый Путь) and Questions of Life (Вопросы Жизни). He was a leader of the publisher Way (Путь, 1911–1917), where he printed many important works of contemporary Orthodox theology.
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Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 AD), was a physician and philosopher, and has been variously reported to have lived in Alexandria, Rome, or Athens. His philosophical work is the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman skepticism.
In his medical work, tradition maintains that he belonged to the "empiric school", as reflected by his name. However, at least twice in his writings, Sextus seems to place himself closer to the "methodic school", as his philosophical views imply.
Sextus Empiricus's three known works are the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Πυῤῥώνειοι ὑποτύπωσεις or Pyrrhōneioi hypotypōseis, thus commonly abbreviated PH), and two distinct works preserved under the same title, Against the Mathematicians (Adversus Mathematicos), one of which is probably incomplete.
The first six books of Against the Mathematicians are commonly known as Against the Professors, but each book also has a traditional title (Against the Grammarians (book I), Against the Rhetoricians (book II), Against the Geometricians (book III), Against the Arithmeticians (book IV), Against the Astrologers (book V), Against the Musicians (book VI). It is widely believed, with perhaps the exception of Sextus scholar Richard Bett, that this is Sextus's latest and most mature work.
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Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.
Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense" and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".
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Stephen Gaukroger
Stephen Gaukroger (born 1950) is a British philosopher and intellectual historian. He is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. Recently he also took up a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.
He graduated B.A. from the University of London and a Ph..D from the University of Cambridge. He joined the University of Sydney in 1981.
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Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Edelston Toulmin (25 March 1922 - 4 December 2009) was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin Model of Argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, was considered his most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric and communication, and in computer science.
Stephen Toulmin was born in London, England, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge in 1942. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. At the end of World War II, he returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1947 and a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University, subsequently publishing his dissertation as An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). While at Cambridge, Toulmin came into contact with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose examination on the relationship between the uses and the meanings of language shaped much of Toulmin’s own work.
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (/ˈsɔrən ˈkɪərkəɡɑrd/ or /ˈkɪərkəɡɔr/; Danish: [ˈsɶːɐn ˈkiɐ̯ɡəɡɒːˀ] ( listen)) (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. He was also critical of the state and practice of Christianity, primarily that of the Church of Denmark. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.
Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking, and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
His theological work focuses on Christian ethics, on the institution of the Church, and on the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity. He wrote of the individual's subjective relationship to Jesus Christ, the God-Man, which came through faith. Much of his work deals with the art of Christian love.
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Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."
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Thomas Chubb
Thomas Chubb (September 29, 1679 – February 8, 1747) was an English lay Deist writer, born near Salisbury.
Chubb regarded Christ as a divine teacher, but held reason to be sovereign in matters of religion, questioned religions' morality, yet was on rational grounds a defender of Christianity. He had no learning, but was well up in the religious controversies of the time.
Chubb wrote The True Gospel of Jesus Christ, Asserted wherein he stated that one must distinguish between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Apostles who wrote that the Gospels.
Chubb's views concerning free will and determinism, as expressed in his book A Collection of Tracts on Various Subjects (1730) was the subject of extensive criticism by Jonathan Edwards in his book Freedom of the Will (1754).
He published tracts, one of which, The Previous Question with regard to Religion, went through four editions, three in 1725. They were collected in a quarto volume in 1730, and attracted wider notice. (A second edition, in 2 volumes which appeared in 1754 included 35 tracts.) Chubb was encouraged to write further tracts. A disciple of Samuel Clarke, he gradually diverged from Arianism into a modified deism.
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Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
He was one of the founders of modern political philosophy. His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.
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Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. He is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings.
Nagel was born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) to a Jewish family. He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil from the University of Oxford in 1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls. Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from 1966 to 1980), where he trained many well-known philosophers including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, who is now his colleague at NYU. In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Vasubandhu
Vasubandhu (Sanskrit: वसुबन्दु; traditional Chinese: 世親; pinyin: Shìqīn; Tibetan: དབྱིག་གཉེན་, Wylie: dbyig gnyen) (fl. 4th c.) was an Indian Buddhist monk, and along with his half-brother Asanga, one of the main founders of the Indian Yogācāra school. However, some scholars consider Vasubandhu to be two distinct people. Vasubandhu is one of the most influential figures in the entire history of Buddhism. In the Jodo Shinshu branch of Buddhism, he is considered the Second Patriarch. In Zen, he is the 21st Patriarch.
Born a brahmin Vasubandhu was said to have been the half brother of Asanga, another key personage in the founding of the Yogacara School. He was also, as well as his elder half brother Asanga, one of the ‘Six Ornaments’(i.e. six great commentators on the Buddha’s teachings). He resided at Kausambhi (near modern Allahabad) where he was trained in the orthodox Sarvastivada Order of Buddhism, which had its seat at Kausambhi. He was contemporaneous with King Chandragupta I, the father of Samudragupta. This information temporally places this Vasubandhu in the fourth century CE.
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Wikipedia Persondata
wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata -
Wilhelm Windelband
Wilhelm Windelband (May 11, 1848, Potsdam – October 22, 1915, Heidelberg) was a German philosopher of the Baden School.
Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who protested other neo-Kantians of his time and maintained that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries, Windelband argued that philosophy should engage in humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences rather than uncritically appropriating its methodologies. His interests in psychology and cultural sciences represented an opposition to psychologism and historicism schools by a critical philosophic system.
Windelband relied in his effort to reach beyond Kant on such philosophers as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Hermann Lotze. Closely associated with Windelband was Heinrich Rickert. Windelband's disciples were not only noted philosophers, but sociologists like Max Weber and theologians like Ernst Troeltsch and Albert Schweitzer.
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Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 - 31 August 1920 in Germany) was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig.
By creating this laboratory he was able to explore the nature of religious beliefs, identify mental disorders and abnormal behavior, and find damaged parts of the brain. In doing so, he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other topics. He also formed the first journal for psychological research in 1881.
Asteroids 635 Vundtia and 11040 Wundt are named in his honour.
Wundt was born at Neckarau, Baden on August 16th, 1832 (now part of Mannheim), the fourth child to parents Maximilian Wundt (a Lutheran minister), and his wife Marie Frederike. When about four years of age, Wundt's family moved to Heidelsheim which was known to be a small town. He studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, University of Heidelberg, and the University of Berlin. After graduating in medicine from Heidelberg (1856), Wundt studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller, before joining the University's staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858. There he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception (1858–62). In 1865, he wrote a textbook about human physiology. In 1867 he became a professor in acquainting medical students with the exact physical needs for medical investigation. In 1874, he became a professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich. In 1875, he moved back to Leipzig.
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William Alston
William Payne Alston (November 29, 1921, Shreveport, Louisiana September 13, 2009, Jamesville, New York) was an American philosopher. He made influential contributions to the philosophy of language, epistemology and Christian philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and taught at Syracuse University, Rutgers University and the University of Michigan.
His views on foundationalism, internalism versus externalism, speech acts, and the epistemic value of mystical experience, among many other topics, have been very influential. Like most American philosophers, Alston is counted among the analytic philosophers.
Together with Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Robert Adams, Alston helped to found the journal Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers. With Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and others, Alston was also responsible for the development of "Reformed epistemology" (a term that Alston, an Episcopalian, never fully endorsed), one of the most important contributions to Christian thought in the twentieth century. Alston was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1979 and was widely recognized as one of the core figures in the late twentieth-century revival of the philosophy of religion. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.
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William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, James married Alice Gibbens.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
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William Lane Craig
William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, and the defense of Christian theism. One of his most notable contributions to the philosophy of religion is his defense of the Kalām cosmological argument, which is the most widely discussed argument for the existence of God in contemporary Western philosophy. In theology, he has also defended Molinism and the belief that God is, since Creation, subject to time.
Craig has authored or edited over 30 books, including The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (1980), Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (with Quentin Smith, 1993), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (with J.P. Moreland, 2003) and Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (3d edition, 2008).
Craig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1971 and two summa cum laude master's degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1975, in philosophy of religion and ecclesiastical history. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, England in 1977 and a Th.D. under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich in 1984.
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William of Ockham
William of Ockham ( /ˈɒkəm/; also Occam, Hockham, or several other spellings; c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although he is commonly known for Ockham's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.
William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at an early age. It is believed that he studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's degree (the usual undergraduate degree in those times). Because of this, he acquired the byname Venerabilis Inceptor, or "Worthy Beginner" (an inceptor was a student formally admitted to the ranks of teachers by the university authorities). He was also known as the Doctor Invincibilis or "Unconquerable Teacher."
wn.com/William_of_Ockham -
William Whewell
William Whewell ( /ˈhjuːəl/ HEW-əl; 24 May 1794 – 6 March 1866) was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Whewell was born in Lancaster. His father, a carpenter, wished him to follow his trade, but his success in mathematics at Lancaster and Heversham grammar schools won him an exhibition (a type of scholarship) at Trinity College, Cambridge (1812). In 1814 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry. He was Second Wrangler in 1816, President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1817, became fellow and tutor of his college, and, in 1841, succeeded Dr Christopher Wordsworth as master. He was professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832 and Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy (then called "moral theology and casuistical divinity") from 1838 to 1855.
Whewell died in Cambridge 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
Full bibliographical details are given by Isaac Todhunter, W. Whewell: an Account of his Writings (2 vols., 1876). See also Life of W. Whewell, by Mrs Stair Douglas (1881).
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William Wollaston
William Wollaston (26 March 1659 – 29 October 1724) was an English philosophical writer. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed only two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated (1st ed. 1722; 2nd ed. 1724).
He was born at Coton Clanford in Staffordshire, on 26 March 1659. He was born to a family long-established in Staffordshire, and was distantly related to Sir John Wollaston, the Alderman and Lord Mayor of London. At the age of ten, he began school at a Latin school newly opened in Shenstone, Staffordshire, and continued in country free schools until he was admitted to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at the age of 15, in June 1674.
After leaving Cambridge in September 1681, he became an assistant master at King Edward's School, Birmingham and took holy orders. At this time, he became Perpetual curate of St Mary's Church, Moseley from 1684 - 1686. In 1688 an uncle left him a fortune and an estate at Shenton Hall, Leicestershire, and in November of the same year he settled in London. On 26 November 1689, he married Catharine Charlton. They had eleven children together, four of whom died within his lifetime. They lived happily together for 30 years, until Catharine's death on 21 July 1720. Wollaston also published anonymously a small book, On the Design of the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Unreasonableness of Men's Restless Contention for the Present Enjoyments, represented in an English Poem (London, 1691).
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Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium (Greek: Ζήνων ὁ Κιτιεύς, Zēnōn ho Kitiéŭs;, c. 334 BC – c. 262 BC) was a Greek language philosopher of Phoenician origin from Citium (Greek: Κίτιον). Zeno was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in accordance with nature. It proved very successful, and flourished as the dominant philosophy from the Hellenistic period through to the Roman era.
Zeno was born c. 334 BC, in Citium in Cyprus. Most of the details known about his life come from the anecdotes preserved by Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes relates a legend that Zeno was a merchant and that after surviving a shipwreck, Zeno wandered into a bookshop in Athens and was attracted to some writings about Socrates. He asked the librarian how to find such a man. In response, the librarian pointed to Crates of Thebes, the most famous Cynic living at that time in Greece.
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Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi (simplified Chinese: 庄子; traditional Chinese: 莊子; pinyin: Zhuāng Zǐ; Wade–Giles: Chuang Tzŭ) was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, a period corresponding to the philosophical summit of Chinese thought — the Hundred Schools of Thought, and is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name, the Zhuangzi. His name Zhuangzi (English "Master Zhuang", with Zi being an honorific) is sometimes spelled Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chuang Tzu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze.
The only account of the life of Zhuangzi is a brief sketch in chapter 63 of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, where he is described as a minor official from the town of Meng (in modern Anhui) in the state of Song, living in the time of King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi (late 4th century BCE). Sima Qian writes:
The validity of his existence has been questioned by some, including himself (See below) and Russell Kirkland, who writes:
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Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emil dyʁˈkɛm], [dyʁˈkajm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
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Descartes, Marat Filmography
- O Tempo e o Vento (2013)
- 2 Coelhos (2012)
- Nove Crônicas para um Coração aos Berros (2012)
- Nove Crônicas para um Coração aos Berros (2012)
- Nove Crônicas para um Coração aos Berros (2012)
- Nove Crônicas para um Coração aos Berros (2012)
- A Vida da Gente (2011)
- Começar uma História (2011)
- Super Nada (2011)
- Trabalhar Cansa (2011)
- Estamos juntos (2011)
- Os Inquilinos (2009)
- É Proibido Fumar (2009)
- Alice (2008)
- Um Ramo (2007)
Descartes, René Filmography
Descartes, Robert Filmography
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Three Minute Philosophy: Rene Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:57
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
It's back at last! Pull up a stool as I take you through another fascinating, often painful, rapid-fire journey through the history of philosophy.
http://wn.com/Three_Minute_Philosophy_Rene_Descartes
It's back at last! Pull up a stool as I take you through another fascinating, often painful, rapid-fire journey through the history of philosophy.
Bernard Williams on Descartes: Section 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:41
- Updated: 23 Jan 2013
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
http://wn.com/Bernard_Williams_on_Descartes_Section_1
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
- published: 25 Dec 2008
- views: 74650
- author: flame0430
JOHN COTTINGHAM ON DESCARTES 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 24:57
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines. www.stjt.org.uk
http://wn.com/JOHN_COTTINGHAM_ON_DESCARTES_1
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines. www.stjt.org.uk
- published: 22 Jan 2012
- views: 2700
- author: StJohnsNottingham
Descartes 1: The Method of Doubt
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 57:05
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
The 7th video in Dr. Richard Brown's online introduction to philosophy course. For all videos go to onlinephilosophyclass.wordpress.com
http://wn.com/Descartes_1_The_Method_of_Doubt
The 7th video in Dr. Richard Brown's online introduction to philosophy course. For all videos go to onlinephilosophyclass.wordpress.com
- published: 17 Oct 2011
- views: 13719
- author: Richard Brown
The Mark Steel Lectures-Descartes 1/3
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:24
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents persuasive, yet witty, arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
http://wn.com/The_Mark_Steel_Lectures-Descartes_1_3
Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents persuasive, yet witty, arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
- published: 25 Sep 2008
- views: 41881
- author: coughsirup
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditations, 1-2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 64:30
- Updated: 26 Jan 2013
In this session from my Fall 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we begin our foray into Descartes' philosophy by examining Meditations 1 and 2. We discuss the reliability of the senses, hyperbolic doubt, the "evil demon" hypothesis, the Cogito and Descartes' views on thinking and extended substances
http://wn.com/Intro_to_Philosophy_Rene_Descartes,_Meditations,_1-2
In this session from my Fall 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we begin our foray into Descartes' philosophy by examining Meditations 1 and 2. We discuss the reliability of the senses, hyperbolic doubt, the "evil demon" hypothesis, the Cogito and Descartes' views on thinking and extended substances
- published: 27 Nov 2011
- views: 10728
- author: Gregory B. Sadler
Philosophy and the Matrix - Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:42
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
Cogito ergo sum, descartes compared to philosophy in the Matrix trilogy, rationalism, perception of the world, systematic This clip is taken from the documentary 'Return to the Source - Philosophy and the Matrix' See it in full length here www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Philosophy_and_the_Matrix_Descartes
Cogito ergo sum, descartes compared to philosophy in the Matrix trilogy, rationalism, perception of the world, systematic This clip is taken from the documentary 'Return to the Source - Philosophy and the Matrix' See it in full length here www.youtube.com
- published: 27 Mar 2008
- views: 202915
- author: Bart Hamming
A brief introduction to René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:17
- Updated: 25 Jan 2013
The rest of this interview can be found here: www.youtube.com More from Christian philosopher John Cottingham: www.youtube.com Cottingham is something of a specialist on Descartes and this introduction is the best I have ever come by on YT - therefore my sharing it. He has an extremely good biography on Descartes which I highly recommend. For those interested as to why a professional philosopher would be a Christian a good place to start would be his 2009 book 'Why Believe?'. www.amazon.co.uk Rene Descartes in IEP: www.iep.utm.edu
http://wn.com/A_brief_introduction_to_René_Descartes
The rest of this interview can be found here: www.youtube.com More from Christian philosopher John Cottingham: www.youtube.com Cottingham is something of a specialist on Descartes and this introduction is the best I have ever come by on YT - therefore my sharing it. He has an extremely good biography on Descartes which I highly recommend. For those interested as to why a professional philosopher would be a Christian a good place to start would be his 2009 book 'Why Believe?'. www.amazon.co.uk Rene Descartes in IEP: www.iep.utm.edu
- published: 02 Aug 2012
- views: 2623
- author: TheCartesianTheist
René Descartes Biography
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:44
- Updated: 20 Jan 2013
René Descartes 1596 - 1650 cloudbiography.com Descartes has been referred to as the "Father of Modern Philosophy." Much of work laid the foundation for modern western philosophy. All content is either in the public domain or licensed pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License http Attribution: cloudbiography.com
http://wn.com/René_Descartes_Biography
René Descartes 1596 - 1650 cloudbiography.com Descartes has been referred to as the "Father of Modern Philosophy." Much of work laid the foundation for modern western philosophy. All content is either in the public domain or licensed pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License http Attribution: cloudbiography.com
- published: 15 May 2012
- views: 4198
- author: TheCloudBiography
Bernard Williams on Descartes: Section 2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:04
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
http://wn.com/Bernard_Williams_on_Descartes_Section_2
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
- published: 25 Dec 2008
- views: 25865
- author: flame0430
The Philosophy and Epistemology of René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 18:06
- Updated: 27 Jan 2013
This is a short video about the philosophy and epistemology of René Descartes, discussing his "method of doubt" and his famous statement "Cogito ergo sum."
http://wn.com/The_Philosophy_and_Epistemology_of_René_Descartes
This is a short video about the philosophy and epistemology of René Descartes, discussing his "method of doubt" and his famous statement "Cogito ergo sum."
- published: 06 Mar 2011
- views: 16364
- author: wmiller24
Descartes and Cartesian Coordinates
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:22
- Updated: 27 Jan 2013
Learn more: www.khanacademy.org Bridging algebra and geometry. What makes linear equations so linear.
http://wn.com/Descartes_and_Cartesian_Coordinates
Learn more: www.khanacademy.org Bridging algebra and geometry. What makes linear equations so linear.
- published: 15 Feb 2012
- views: 174704
- author: khanacademy
Pre-Calculus - Using Descartes rule of signs
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:13
- Updated: 23 Jan 2013
This video shows how to use Descartes rule of signs to determine the number of possible positive and negative zeros. Remember that this comes from looking at the sign changes, but that it can actually be less that that, by an even number. For more videos, please visit www.mysecretmathtutor.com
http://wn.com/Pre-Calculus_Using_Descartes_rule_of_signs
This video shows how to use Descartes rule of signs to determine the number of possible positive and negative zeros. Remember that this comes from looking at the sign changes, but that it can actually be less that that, by an even number. For more videos, please visit www.mysecretmathtutor.com
- published: 11 Oct 2011
- views: 8356
- author: MySecretMathTutor
descartes a kant - my sweetest headache waltz
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:37
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
video clip descartes a kant my sweetest headache waltz
http://wn.com/descartes_a_kant_my_sweetest_headache_waltz
video clip descartes a kant my sweetest headache waltz
- published: 01 Sep 2007
- views: 340957
- author: gerryrosado
Descartes sub español 1-15
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:30
- Updated: 13 Jan 2013
Descartes subtitulado español rossellini parte 1-15
http://wn.com/Descartes_sub_español_1-15
Descartes subtitulado español rossellini parte 1-15
- published: 24 Sep 2010
- views: 20865
- author: AlfonsoMoraleja
Propagandhi - Nailing Descartes To The Wall
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:02
- Updated: 27 Jan 2013
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http://wn.com/Propagandhi_Nailing_Descartes_To_The_Wall
René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:52
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
René Descartes es uno de los principales filósofos modernos, padre del "racionalismo". Conoceremos su pensamiento, el papel de la razón a la hora de conocer, su interés por la aplicación un método y su preocupación por llegar a la verdad. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Más sobre este video en: ▶ www.educatina.com Busca practicas relacionadas a este tema en: ▶ www.educatina.com ▶ http Síguenos en: ▶ www.facebook.com (¡me gusta! ♥) ▶ twitter.com ▶ www.youtube.com Suscríbete a nuestro canal: ▶ bit.ly Si quieres estar informado de las próximas subidas, suscribete al canal educatina. Y no olvides hacernos llegar cualquier sugerencia, consejo o duda. © Educatina. All rights reserved. www.educatina.com
http://wn.com/René_Descartes
René Descartes es uno de los principales filósofos modernos, padre del "racionalismo". Conoceremos su pensamiento, el papel de la razón a la hora de conocer, su interés por la aplicación un método y su preocupación por llegar a la verdad. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Más sobre este video en: ▶ www.educatina.com Busca practicas relacionadas a este tema en: ▶ www.educatina.com ▶ http Síguenos en: ▶ www.facebook.com (¡me gusta! ♥) ▶ twitter.com ▶ www.youtube.com Suscríbete a nuestro canal: ▶ bit.ly Si quieres estar informado de las próximas subidas, suscribete al canal educatina. Y no olvides hacernos llegar cualquier sugerencia, consejo o duda. © Educatina. All rights reserved. www.educatina.com
- published: 13 Dec 2011
- views: 48922
- author: educatina
Biografias Universales : René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:01
- Updated: 27 Jan 2013
La Biografía de René Descartes !!! También conocido como Cartesius, que era la forma latinizada en la cual escribia su nombre, nombre del que deriva la palabra cartesiano, formuló el célebre cogito ergo sum, elemento esencial del racionalismo occidental. Escribió una parte de sus obras en latín, que era la lengua internacional del conocimiento y la otra en francés. En física está considerado como el creador del mecanicismo, y en matemática, de la geometría analítica. No obstante parte de sus teorías han sido rebatidas -teoría del animal-máquina- o incluso abandonadas -teoría de los vórtices-. Su pensamiento pudo aproximarse a la pintura de Poussin3 por su estilo claro y ordenado. Su método filosófico y científico, que expone en Reglas para la dirección de la mente (1628) y más explicitamente en su Discurso del método (1637), establece una clara ruptura con la escolástica que se enseñaba en las universidades. Está caracterizado por su simplicidad —en su Discurso del método únicamente propone cuatro normas— y pretende romper con los interminables razonamientos escolásticos. Toma como modelo el método matemático, en un intento de acabar con el silogismo aristotélico empleado durante toda la Edad Media. es.wikipedia.org
http://wn.com/Biografias_Universales_René_Descartes
La Biografía de René Descartes !!! También conocido como Cartesius, que era la forma latinizada en la cual escribia su nombre, nombre del que deriva la palabra cartesiano, formuló el célebre cogito ergo sum, elemento esencial del racionalismo occidental. Escribió una parte de sus obras en latín, que era la lengua internacional del conocimiento y la otra en francés. En física está considerado como el creador del mecanicismo, y en matemática, de la geometría analítica. No obstante parte de sus teorías han sido rebatidas -teoría del animal-máquina- o incluso abandonadas -teoría de los vórtices-. Su pensamiento pudo aproximarse a la pintura de Poussin3 por su estilo claro y ordenado. Su método filosófico y científico, que expone en Reglas para la dirección de la mente (1628) y más explicitamente en su Discurso del método (1637), establece una clara ruptura con la escolástica que se enseñaba en las universidades. Está caracterizado por su simplicidad —en su Discurso del método únicamente propone cuatro normas— y pretende romper con los interminables razonamientos escolásticos. Toma como modelo el método matemático, en un intento de acabar con el silogismo aristotélico empleado durante toda la Edad Media. es.wikipedia.org
- published: 08 Sep 2011
- views: 28279
- author: hshsoft
Bernard Williams on Descartes: Section 3
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:49
- Updated: 20 Jan 2013
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
http://wn.com/Bernard_Williams_on_Descartes_Section_3
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
- published: 25 Dec 2008
- views: 19997
- author: flame0430
04 Descartes.wmv
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 23:03
- Updated: 17 Jan 2013
Renato Descartes, sus ideas, obras e influencia.
http://wn.com/04_Descarteswmv
Renato Descartes, sus ideas, obras e influencia.
- published: 27 Apr 2012
- views: 1102
- author: Rodolfo Justiniano Segura Chán
Filosofia02 Aula04 Renê Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:16
- Updated: 05 Jan 2013
Descartes, Renê, racionalismo, empirismo, cogito ergo sun
http://wn.com/Filosofia02_Aula04_Renê_Descartes
Descartes, Renê, racionalismo, empirismo, cogito ergo sun
- published: 27 Feb 2009
- views: 46674
- author: Gilson Xavier de Azevedo
Descartes' Ontological Argument
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:09
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
http://wn.com/Descartes'_Ontological_Argument
Descartes - Discours de la méthode
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:59
- Updated: 28 Jan 2013
« Discours de la méthode » abrégé, mis en scène par Rossellini en 1972 dans le film « Blaise Pascal ». www.philo5.com
http://wn.com/Descartes_Discours_de_la_méthode
« Discours de la méthode » abrégé, mis en scène par Rossellini en 1972 dans le film « Blaise Pascal ». www.philo5.com
- published: 20 Mar 2010
- views: 11300
- author: François Brooks
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Three Minute Philosophy: Rene Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:57
- Updated: 14 Jan 2013
It's back at last! Pull up a stool as I take you through another fascinating, often painful, rapid-fire journey through the history of philosophy.
http://wn.com/Three_Minute_Philosophy_Rene_Descartes
It's back at last! Pull up a stool as I take you through another fascinating, often painful, rapid-fire journey through the history of philosophy.
- published: 29 Mar 2009
- views: 514436
- author: CollegeBinary
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditations, 1-2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 64:30
- Updated: 14 Jan 2013
In this session from my Fall 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we begin our foray into Descartes' philosophy by examining Meditations 1 and 2. We discuss the reliability of the senses, hyperbolic doubt, the "evil demon" hypothesis, the Cogito and Descartes' views on thinking and extended substances
http://wn.com/Intro_to_Philosophy_Rene_Descartes,_Meditations,_1-2
In this session from my Fall 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we begin our foray into Descartes' philosophy by examining Meditations 1 and 2. We discuss the reliability of the senses, hyperbolic doubt, the "evil demon" hypothesis, the Cogito and Descartes' views on thinking and extended substances
- published: 27 Nov 2011
- views: 10311
- author: Gregory B. Sadler
The Philosophy and Epistemology of René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 18:06
- Updated: 09 Jan 2013
This is a short video about the philosophy and epistemology of René Descartes, discussing his "method of doubt" and his famous statement "Cogito ergo sum."
http://wn.com/The_Philosophy_and_Epistemology_of_René_Descartes
This is a short video about the philosophy and epistemology of René Descartes, discussing his "method of doubt" and his famous statement "Cogito ergo sum."
- published: 06 Mar 2011
- views: 16089
- author: wmiller24
René Descartes Biography
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:44
- Updated: 07 Jan 2013
René Descartes 1596 - 1650 cloudbiography.com Descartes has been referred to as the "Father of Modern Philosophy." Much of work laid the foundation for modern western philosophy. All content is either in the public domain or licensed pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License http Attribution: cloudbiography.com
http://wn.com/René_Descartes_Biography
René Descartes 1596 - 1650 cloudbiography.com Descartes has been referred to as the "Father of Modern Philosophy." Much of work laid the foundation for modern western philosophy. All content is either in the public domain or licensed pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License http Attribution: cloudbiography.com
- published: 15 May 2012
- views: 3841
- author: TheCloudBiography
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditation 3 (and 5)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 65:15
- Updated: 17 Dec 2012
In this session from my 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we continue our study of Descartes' Meditations, focusing specifically on Mediations 3 and 5, in which Descartes provides some rather interesting arguments for God's existence
http://wn.com/Intro_to_Philosophy_Rene_Descartes,_Meditation_3_and_5
In this session from my 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we continue our study of Descartes' Meditations, focusing specifically on Mediations 3 and 5, in which Descartes provides some rather interesting arguments for God's existence
- published: 27 Nov 2011
- views: 2593
- author: Gregory B. Sadler
Bernard Williams on Descartes: Section 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:41
- Updated: 10 Jan 2013
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
http://wn.com/Bernard_Williams_on_Descartes_Section_1
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
- published: 25 Dec 2008
- views: 73914
- author: flame0430
Filosofia02 Aula04 Renê Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:16
- Updated: 05 Jan 2013
Descartes, Renê, racionalismo, empirismo, cogito ergo sun
http://wn.com/Filosofia02_Aula04_Renê_Descartes
Descartes, Renê, racionalismo, empirismo, cogito ergo sun
- published: 27 Feb 2009
- views: 46535
- author: gilsonprof
A brief introduction to René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:17
- Updated: 14 Jan 2013
The rest of this interview can be found here: www.youtube.com More from Christian philosopher John Cottingham: www.youtube.com Cottingham is something of a specialist on Descartes and this introduction is the best I have ever come by on YT - therefore my sharing it. He has an extremely good biography on Descartes which I highly recommend. For those interested as to why a professional philosopher would be a Christian a good place to start would be his 2009 book 'Why Believe?'. www.amazon.co.uk Rene Descartes in IEP: www.iep.utm.edu
http://wn.com/A_brief_introduction_to_René_Descartes
The rest of this interview can be found here: www.youtube.com More from Christian philosopher John Cottingham: www.youtube.com Cottingham is something of a specialist on Descartes and this introduction is the best I have ever come by on YT - therefore my sharing it. He has an extremely good biography on Descartes which I highly recommend. For those interested as to why a professional philosopher would be a Christian a good place to start would be his 2009 book 'Why Believe?'. www.amazon.co.uk Rene Descartes in IEP: www.iep.utm.edu
- published: 02 Aug 2012
- views: 2317
- author: TheCartesianTheist
The Mark Steel Lectures-Descartes 1/3
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:24
- Updated: 10 Jan 2013
Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents persuasive, yet witty, arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
http://wn.com/The_Mark_Steel_Lectures-Descartes_1_3
Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents persuasive, yet witty, arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
- published: 25 Sep 2008
- views: 41565
- author: coughsirup
Seminário sobre René Descartes - parte 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:49
- Updated: 08 Jan 2013
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Universidade Nacional da Bolívia, a IV Parte do Discurso do Método, de René Descartes. A invenção do ateísmo idealista por Descartes; o Racionalismo Absoluto; são temas, entre outros, nos nove vídeos curtos em que dividimos este seminário, para tornar confortável a assistência e facilitar a compreensão. Realização NÚCLEO CASTOR www.nuca.org.br Florianópolis, SC, Brasil - Junho de 2011
http://wn.com/Seminário_sobre_René_Descartes_parte_1
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Universidade Nacional da Bolívia, a IV Parte do Discurso do Método, de René Descartes. A invenção do ateísmo idealista por Descartes; o Racionalismo Absoluto; são temas, entre outros, nos nove vídeos curtos em que dividimos este seminário, para tornar confortável a assistência e facilitar a compreensão. Realização NÚCLEO CASTOR www.nuca.org.br Florianópolis, SC, Brasil - Junho de 2011
- published: 09 Jun 2011
- views: 7928
- author: Núcleo Castor
Seminário sobre René Descartes - parte 2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:40
- Updated: 31 Dec 2012
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Universidade Nacional da Bolívia, a IV Parte do Discurso do Método, de René Descartes. A invenção do ateísmo idealista por Descartes; o Racionalismo Absoluto; são temas, entre outros, nos nove vídeos curtos em que dividimos este seminário, para tornar confortável a assistência e facilitar a compreensão. Realização NÚCLEO CASTOR www.nuca.org.br Florianópolis, SC, Brasil - Junho de 2011
http://wn.com/Seminário_sobre_René_Descartes_parte_2
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Universidade Nacional da Bolívia, a IV Parte do Discurso do Método, de René Descartes. A invenção do ateísmo idealista por Descartes; o Racionalismo Absoluto; são temas, entre outros, nos nove vídeos curtos em que dividimos este seminário, para tornar confortável a assistência e facilitar a compreensão. Realização NÚCLEO CASTOR www.nuca.org.br Florianópolis, SC, Brasil - Junho de 2011
- published: 09 Jun 2011
- views: 1945
- author: Núcleo Castor
Biografias Universales : René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:01
- Updated: 06 Jan 2013
La Biografía de René Descartes !!! También conocido como Cartesius, que era la forma latinizada en la cual escribia su nombre, nombre del que deriva la palabra cartesiano, formuló el célebre cogito ergo sum, elemento esencial del racionalismo occidental. Escribió una parte de sus obras en latín, que era la lengua internacional del conocimiento y la otra en francés. En física está considerado como el creador del mecanicismo, y en matemática, de la geometría analítica. No obstante parte de sus teorías han sido rebatidas -teoría del animal-máquina- o incluso abandonadas -teoría de los vórtices-. Su pensamiento pudo aproximarse a la pintura de Poussin3 por su estilo claro y ordenado. Su método filosófico y científico, que expone en Reglas para la dirección de la mente (1628) y más explicitamente en su Discurso del método (1637), establece una clara ruptura con la escolástica que se enseñaba en las universidades. Está caracterizado por su simplicidad —en su Discurso del método únicamente propone cuatro normas— y pretende romper con los interminables razonamientos escolásticos. Toma como modelo el método matemático, en un intento de acabar con el silogismo aristotélico empleado durante toda la Edad Media. es.wikipedia.org
http://wn.com/Biografias_Universales_René_Descartes
La Biografía de René Descartes !!! También conocido como Cartesius, que era la forma latinizada en la cual escribia su nombre, nombre del que deriva la palabra cartesiano, formuló el célebre cogito ergo sum, elemento esencial del racionalismo occidental. Escribió una parte de sus obras en latín, que era la lengua internacional del conocimiento y la otra en francés. En física está considerado como el creador del mecanicismo, y en matemática, de la geometría analítica. No obstante parte de sus teorías han sido rebatidas -teoría del animal-máquina- o incluso abandonadas -teoría de los vórtices-. Su pensamiento pudo aproximarse a la pintura de Poussin3 por su estilo claro y ordenado. Su método filosófico y científico, que expone en Reglas para la dirección de la mente (1628) y más explicitamente en su Discurso del método (1637), establece una clara ruptura con la escolástica que se enseñaba en las universidades. Está caracterizado por su simplicidad —en su Discurso del método únicamente propone cuatro normas— y pretende romper con los interminables razonamientos escolásticos. Toma como modelo el método matemático, en un intento de acabar con el silogismo aristotélico empleado durante toda la Edad Media. es.wikipedia.org
- published: 08 Sep 2011
- views: 27148
- author: hshsoft
René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:52
- Updated: 14 Jan 2013
René Descartes es uno de los principales filósofos modernos, padre del "racionalismo". Conoceremos su pensamiento, el papel de la razón a la hora de conocer, su interés por la aplicación un método y su preocupación por llegar a la verdad. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Más sobre este video en: ▶ www.educatina.com Busca practicas relacionadas a este tema en: ▶ www.educatina.com ▶ http Síguenos en: ▶ www.facebook.com (¡me gusta! ♥) ▶ twitter.com ▶ www.youtube.com Suscríbete a nuestro canal: ▶ bit.ly Si quieres estar informado de las próximas subidas, suscribete al canal educatina. Y no olvides hacernos llegar cualquier sugerencia, consejo o duda. © Educatina. All rights reserved. www.educatina.com
http://wn.com/René_Descartes
René Descartes es uno de los principales filósofos modernos, padre del "racionalismo". Conoceremos su pensamiento, el papel de la razón a la hora de conocer, su interés por la aplicación un método y su preocupación por llegar a la verdad. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Más sobre este video en: ▶ www.educatina.com Busca practicas relacionadas a este tema en: ▶ www.educatina.com ▶ http Síguenos en: ▶ www.facebook.com (¡me gusta! ♥) ▶ twitter.com ▶ www.youtube.com Suscríbete a nuestro canal: ▶ bit.ly Si quieres estar informado de las próximas subidas, suscribete al canal educatina. Y no olvides hacernos llegar cualquier sugerencia, consejo o duda. © Educatina. All rights reserved. www.educatina.com
- published: 13 Dec 2011
- views: 46957
- author: educatina
1/2 René Descartes (1637-1650) Royaume de France
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:36
- Updated: 06 Jan 2013
Descartes et la France (1/2). 2000 ans d'Histoire sur France Inter de Patrice Gélinet avec François Azouvi (philosophe). 13.06.2003 « Descartes c'est la France » (André Glucksmann, 1987) Qu'ils aient lu ou non le Discours de la Méthode, qu'ils admirent, qu'ils détestent ou qu'ils ignorent Descartes, qu'ils le veuillent ou non, les Français, c'est bien connu, sont cartésiens. Et chacun d'entre eux connait par cœur les cinq mots "je pense donc je suis" sur lesquels Descartes a fondé toute sa philosophie. Mais en les écrivant, notre philosophe national ignorait, peut-être, toutes les passions qu'il allait déchaîner. Mis à l'index puis récupéré par l'Église, encensé par la Révolution Française et stigmatisé par les royalistes qui ont vu en lui un des inspirateurs de la Révolution, depuis plus de trois siècles Descartes n'a jamais cessé de diviser mais aussi d'incarner un pays qui est le seul au monde à s'identifier à une philosophie. Sceptiques et raisonneurs par principe, sûrs de leur bon sens, se méfiant toujours des dogmes et des autorités établies, les Français se reconnaissent volontiers en ce philosophe dont les premiers livres écrits en Hollande arrivaient en France au milieu du XVIIe siècle, à l'époque de la Fronde et de Mazarin. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- invité: *François Azouvi Directeur d'études à l'EHESS, directeur de recherches au CNRS ...
http://wn.com/1_2_René_Descartes_1637-1650_Royaume_de_France
Descartes et la France (1/2). 2000 ans d'Histoire sur France Inter de Patrice Gélinet avec François Azouvi (philosophe). 13.06.2003 « Descartes c'est la France » (André Glucksmann, 1987) Qu'ils aient lu ou non le Discours de la Méthode, qu'ils admirent, qu'ils détestent ou qu'ils ignorent Descartes, qu'ils le veuillent ou non, les Français, c'est bien connu, sont cartésiens. Et chacun d'entre eux connait par cœur les cinq mots "je pense donc je suis" sur lesquels Descartes a fondé toute sa philosophie. Mais en les écrivant, notre philosophe national ignorait, peut-être, toutes les passions qu'il allait déchaîner. Mis à l'index puis récupéré par l'Église, encensé par la Révolution Française et stigmatisé par les royalistes qui ont vu en lui un des inspirateurs de la Révolution, depuis plus de trois siècles Descartes n'a jamais cessé de diviser mais aussi d'incarner un pays qui est le seul au monde à s'identifier à une philosophie. Sceptiques et raisonneurs par principe, sûrs de leur bon sens, se méfiant toujours des dogmes et des autorités établies, les Français se reconnaissent volontiers en ce philosophe dont les premiers livres écrits en Hollande arrivaient en France au milieu du XVIIe siècle, à l'époque de la Fronde et de Mazarin. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- invité: *François Azouvi Directeur d'études à l'EHESS, directeur de recherches au CNRS ...
- published: 29 Oct 2011
- views: 2918
- author: PierreBraquemard
René Descartes - (em português)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:24
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
Fundador da filosofia moderna; Pai da matemática moderna; Sinfonia 40 - Mozart
http://wn.com/René_Descartes_em_português
Fundador da filosofia moderna; Pai da matemática moderna; Sinfonia 40 - Mozart
- published: 12 Jan 2011
- views: 4575
- author: lipinha92
Der Gottesbeweis von Rene Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:31
- Updated: 13 Jan 2013
Der ontologische Gottesbeweis aus Rene Descartes' Meditationen über die erste Philosophie ( lat. "Meditationes de prima philosophia").
http://wn.com/Der_Gottesbeweis_von_Rene_Descartes
Der ontologische Gottesbeweis aus Rene Descartes' Meditationen über die erste Philosophie ( lat. "Meditationes de prima philosophia").
- published: 21 Feb 2011
- views: 20332
- author: PhilosophenUndDenker
René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:57
- Updated: 22 Oct 2012
Trailer do DVD - René Descartes - da coleção Filósofos ea Educação - ATTA Mídia
http://wn.com/René_Descartes
Trailer do DVD - René Descartes - da coleção Filósofos ea Educação - ATTA Mídia
- published: 30 Mar 2010
- views: 7157
- author: nittasvideo
Descartes sub español 1-15
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:30
- Updated: 13 Jan 2013
Descartes subtitulado español rossellini parte 1-15
http://wn.com/Descartes_sub_español_1-15
Descartes subtitulado español rossellini parte 1-15
- published: 24 Sep 2010
- views: 20335
- author: AlfonsoMoraleja
La duda metódica de René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:48
- Updated: 13 Jan 2013
Sobre el pensamiento cartesiano
http://wn.com/La_duda_metódica_de_René_Descartes
Phaedrus Presents the Rationalist Epistemology of Rene Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:45
- Updated: 01 Jun 2012
Phaedrus Presents the Rationalist Epistemology of Rene Descartes
http://wn.com/Phaedrus_Presents_the_Rationalist_Epistemology_of_Rene_Descartes
Phaedrus Presents the Rationalist Epistemology of Rene Descartes
- published: 12 Jul 2010
- views: 1544
- author: dal6
Can animals suffer? Debunking William Lane Craig and other philosophers who say no.
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 30:43
- Updated: 14 Jan 2013
Rene Descartes argued that animals could neither think nor feel due to their lack of a pineal gland, an idea not taken seriously now. But a modified version of this argument has recently been revived this time using the pre frontal cortex to argue that animals cant suffer. This film aims to debunk this claim and we talk to some of the leading scientists in the world to refute this claim. All of the scientists who were featured in the movie were sent a preview copy and asked to let us know if they feel we had misquoted them or made any scientific errors. No instances were identified by them. Many thanks to those that helped in the making of this movie. Dr Anita Alvarez, Imperial College/UCL Prof Stuart Firestein, Columbia University Prof Joaquinn Fuster, UCLA Prof Bruce Hood, Bristol University Dr Lori Marino, Emory Univeriy James Moskito, Great White Shark Adventures Dr Diana Reiss, City University NY All of the wildlife footage was filmed by us and the music is by Symphony of Science and is used with permission.
http://wn.com/Can_animals_suffer?_Debunking_William_Lane_Craig_and_other_philosophers_who_say_no
Rene Descartes argued that animals could neither think nor feel due to their lack of a pineal gland, an idea not taken seriously now. But a modified version of this argument has recently been revived this time using the pre frontal cortex to argue that animals cant suffer. This film aims to debunk this claim and we talk to some of the leading scientists in the world to refute this claim. All of the scientists who were featured in the movie were sent a preview copy and asked to let us know if they feel we had misquoted them or made any scientific errors. No instances were identified by them. Many thanks to those that helped in the making of this movie. Dr Anita Alvarez, Imperial College/UCL Prof Stuart Firestein, Columbia University Prof Joaquinn Fuster, UCLA Prof Bruce Hood, Bristol University Dr Lori Marino, Emory Univeriy James Moskito, Great White Shark Adventures Dr Diana Reiss, City University NY All of the wildlife footage was filmed by us and the music is by Symphony of Science and is used with permission.
- published: 03 Oct 2012
- views: 14941
- author: skydivephil
Philosophy & Religion: René Descartes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:13
- Updated: 12 Jan 2013
Do we really exist? Based on the philosophies of René Descartes. Created by Jimmy Weng.
http://wn.com/Philosophy_Religion_René_Descartes
Do we really exist? Based on the philosophies of René Descartes. Created by Jimmy Weng.
- published: 10 Mar 2009
- views: 15904
- author: jimbojimmothy
Creative Quotations from Rene Descartes for Mar 31
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:15
- Updated: 15 Jun 2012
A thought provoking collection of Creative Quotations from Rene Descartes (1596-1650); born on Mar 31. French philosopher, mathematician, scientist; He was called the father of modern philosophy; inventor of analytic geometry and several advances in optics.
http://wn.com/Creative_Quotations_from_Rene_Descartes_for_Mar_31
A thought provoking collection of Creative Quotations from Rene Descartes (1596-1650); born on Mar 31. French philosopher, mathematician, scientist; He was called the father of modern philosophy; inventor of analytic geometry and several advances in optics.
- published: 18 Mar 2008
- views: 5803
- author: CreativeQuotations
3:57
Three Minute Philosophy: Rene Descartes
It's back at last! Pull up a stool as I take you through another fascinating, often painfu...
published: 29 Mar 2009
author: CollegeBinary
Three Minute Philosophy: Rene Descartes
It's back at last! Pull up a stool as I take you through another fascinating, often painful, rapid-fire journey through the history of philosophy.
- published: 29 Mar 2009
- views: 514436
- author: CollegeBinary
64:30
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditations, 1-2
In this session from my Fall 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we b...
published: 27 Nov 2011
author: Gregory B. Sadler
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditations, 1-2
In this session from my Fall 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we begin our foray into Descartes' philosophy by examining Meditations 1 and 2. We discuss the reliability of the senses, hyperbolic doubt, the "evil demon" hypothesis, the Cogito and Descartes' views on thinking and extended substances
- published: 27 Nov 2011
- views: 10311
- author: Gregory B. Sadler
18:06
The Philosophy and Epistemology of René Descartes
This is a short video about the philosophy and epistemology of René Descartes, discussing ...
published: 06 Mar 2011
author: wmiller24
The Philosophy and Epistemology of René Descartes
This is a short video about the philosophy and epistemology of René Descartes, discussing his "method of doubt" and his famous statement "Cogito ergo sum."
- published: 06 Mar 2011
- views: 16089
- author: wmiller24
1:44
René Descartes Biography
René Descartes 1596 - 1650 cloudbiography.com Descartes has been referred to as the "Fathe...
published: 15 May 2012
author: TheCloudBiography
René Descartes Biography
René Descartes 1596 - 1650 cloudbiography.com Descartes has been referred to as the "Father of Modern Philosophy." Much of work laid the foundation for modern western philosophy. All content is either in the public domain or licensed pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License http Attribution: cloudbiography.com
- published: 15 May 2012
- views: 3841
- author: TheCloudBiography
65:15
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditation 3 (and 5)
In this session from my 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we contin...
published: 27 Nov 2011
author: Gregory B. Sadler
Intro to Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Meditation 3 (and 5)
In this session from my 2011 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist College, we continue our study of Descartes' Meditations, focusing specifically on Mediations 3 and 5, in which Descartes provides some rather interesting arguments for God's existence
- published: 27 Nov 2011
- views: 2593
- author: Gregory B. Sadler
10:41
Bernard Williams on Descartes: Section 1
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, consider...
published: 25 Dec 2008
author: flame0430
Bernard Williams on Descartes: Section 1
I think, therefore I am. Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Decartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, Bernard Williams of Kings College examines Decartes' theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God. Descartes' theory of physical and mental substances, and Cartesian dualism—which allows the concept of science to coexist with the notion of God—are examined.
- published: 25 Dec 2008
- views: 73914
- author: flame0430
10:16
Filosofia02 Aula04 Renê Descartes
Descartes, Renê, racionalismo, empirismo, cogito ergo sun...
published: 27 Feb 2009
author: gilsonprof
Filosofia02 Aula04 Renê Descartes
Descartes, Renê, racionalismo, empirismo, cogito ergo sun
- published: 27 Feb 2009
- views: 46535
- author: gilsonprof
12:17
A brief introduction to René Descartes
The rest of this interview can be found here: www.youtube.com More from Christian philosop...
published: 02 Aug 2012
author: TheCartesianTheist
A brief introduction to René Descartes
The rest of this interview can be found here: www.youtube.com More from Christian philosopher John Cottingham: www.youtube.com Cottingham is something of a specialist on Descartes and this introduction is the best I have ever come by on YT - therefore my sharing it. He has an extremely good biography on Descartes which I highly recommend. For those interested as to why a professional philosopher would be a Christian a good place to start would be his 2009 book 'Why Believe?'. www.amazon.co.uk Rene Descartes in IEP: www.iep.utm.edu
- published: 02 Aug 2012
- views: 2317
- author: TheCartesianTheist
9:24
The Mark Steel Lectures-Descartes 1/3
Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents persuasive, yet witty,...
published: 25 Sep 2008
author: coughsirup
The Mark Steel Lectures-Descartes 1/3
Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents persuasive, yet witty, arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
- published: 25 Sep 2008
- views: 41565
- author: coughsirup
12:49
Seminário sobre René Descartes - parte 1
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Univer...
published: 09 Jun 2011
author: Núcleo Castor
Seminário sobre René Descartes - parte 1
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Universidade Nacional da Bolívia, a IV Parte do Discurso do Método, de René Descartes. A invenção do ateísmo idealista por Descartes; o Racionalismo Absoluto; são temas, entre outros, nos nove vídeos curtos em que dividimos este seminário, para tornar confortável a assistência e facilitar a compreensão. Realização NÚCLEO CASTOR www.nuca.org.br Florianópolis, SC, Brasil - Junho de 2011
- published: 09 Jun 2011
- views: 7928
- author: Núcleo Castor
12:40
Seminário sobre René Descartes - parte 2
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Univer...
published: 09 Jun 2011
author: Núcleo Castor
Seminário sobre René Descartes - parte 2
O professor, escritor e filósofo Pedro Bertolino analisa com o professor Pelayo, da Universidade Nacional da Bolívia, a IV Parte do Discurso do Método, de René Descartes. A invenção do ateísmo idealista por Descartes; o Racionalismo Absoluto; são temas, entre outros, nos nove vídeos curtos em que dividimos este seminário, para tornar confortável a assistência e facilitar a compreensão. Realização NÚCLEO CASTOR www.nuca.org.br Florianópolis, SC, Brasil - Junho de 2011
- published: 09 Jun 2011
- views: 1945
- author: Núcleo Castor
7:01
Biografias Universales : René Descartes
La Biografía de René Descartes !!! También conocido como Cartesius, que era la forma latin...
published: 08 Sep 2011
author: hshsoft
Biografias Universales : René Descartes
La Biografía de René Descartes !!! También conocido como Cartesius, que era la forma latinizada en la cual escribia su nombre, nombre del que deriva la palabra cartesiano, formuló el célebre cogito ergo sum, elemento esencial del racionalismo occidental. Escribió una parte de sus obras en latín, que era la lengua internacional del conocimiento y la otra en francés. En física está considerado como el creador del mecanicismo, y en matemática, de la geometría analítica. No obstante parte de sus teorías han sido rebatidas -teoría del animal-máquina- o incluso abandonadas -teoría de los vórtices-. Su pensamiento pudo aproximarse a la pintura de Poussin3 por su estilo claro y ordenado. Su método filosófico y científico, que expone en Reglas para la dirección de la mente (1628) y más explicitamente en su Discurso del método (1637), establece una clara ruptura con la escolástica que se enseñaba en las universidades. Está caracterizado por su simplicidad —en su Discurso del método únicamente propone cuatro normas— y pretende romper con los interminables razonamientos escolásticos. Toma como modelo el método matemático, en un intento de acabar con el silogismo aristotélico empleado durante toda la Edad Media. es.wikipedia.org
- published: 08 Sep 2011
- views: 27148
- author: hshsoft
13:52
René Descartes
René Descartes es uno de los principales filósofos modernos, padre del "racionalismo". Con...
published: 13 Dec 2011
author: educatina
René Descartes
René Descartes es uno de los principales filósofos modernos, padre del "racionalismo". Conoceremos su pensamiento, el papel de la razón a la hora de conocer, su interés por la aplicación un método y su preocupación por llegar a la verdad. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Más sobre este video en: ▶ www.educatina.com Busca practicas relacionadas a este tema en: ▶ www.educatina.com ▶ http Síguenos en: ▶ www.facebook.com (¡me gusta! ♥) ▶ twitter.com ▶ www.youtube.com Suscríbete a nuestro canal: ▶ bit.ly Si quieres estar informado de las próximas subidas, suscribete al canal educatina. Y no olvides hacernos llegar cualquier sugerencia, consejo o duda. © Educatina. All rights reserved. www.educatina.com
- published: 13 Dec 2011
- views: 46957
- author: educatina
14:36
1/2 René Descartes (1637-1650) Royaume de France
Descartes et la France (1/2). 2000 ans d'Histoire sur France Inter de Patrice Gélinet avec...
published: 29 Oct 2011
author: PierreBraquemard
1/2 René Descartes (1637-1650) Royaume de France
Descartes et la France (1/2). 2000 ans d'Histoire sur France Inter de Patrice Gélinet avec François Azouvi (philosophe). 13.06.2003 « Descartes c'est la France » (André Glucksmann, 1987) Qu'ils aient lu ou non le Discours de la Méthode, qu'ils admirent, qu'ils détestent ou qu'ils ignorent Descartes, qu'ils le veuillent ou non, les Français, c'est bien connu, sont cartésiens. Et chacun d'entre eux connait par cœur les cinq mots "je pense donc je suis" sur lesquels Descartes a fondé toute sa philosophie. Mais en les écrivant, notre philosophe national ignorait, peut-être, toutes les passions qu'il allait déchaîner. Mis à l'index puis récupéré par l'Église, encensé par la Révolution Française et stigmatisé par les royalistes qui ont vu en lui un des inspirateurs de la Révolution, depuis plus de trois siècles Descartes n'a jamais cessé de diviser mais aussi d'incarner un pays qui est le seul au monde à s'identifier à une philosophie. Sceptiques et raisonneurs par principe, sûrs de leur bon sens, se méfiant toujours des dogmes et des autorités établies, les Français se reconnaissent volontiers en ce philosophe dont les premiers livres écrits en Hollande arrivaient en France au milieu du XVIIe siècle, à l'époque de la Fronde et de Mazarin. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- invité: *François Azouvi Directeur d'études à l'EHESS, directeur de recherches au CNRS ...
- published: 29 Oct 2011
- views: 2918
- author: PierreBraquemard
Vimeo results:
0:43
O Descarte - Trailer 3
Trailer do curta-metragem "O Descarte".
Dirigido por Carlon Hardt e Lucas Fernandes, o fi...
published: 29 Aug 2011
author: O Descarte
O Descarte - Trailer 3
Trailer do curta-metragem "O Descarte".
Dirigido por Carlon Hardt e Lucas Fernandes, o filme é produzido por Vania Mezzadri e conta com a trilha sonora de André Nigro e Eugênio Fim.
Uma história com toques de conto policial, cinema Noir, faroeste, cinema oriental e Rock’n’Roll passada na Curitiba dos anos 90, em gloriosa animação 2D.
O Descarte está participando do circuito de festivais, por isso ainda não possui uma versão integral online. O lançamento na internet deve acontecer no final do ano.
Se quiser saber mais sobre O DESCARTE (programação de exibições, críticas, entrevistas, etc…) acesse o canal do facebook ou o site do filme: http://www.facebook.com/pages/O-DESCARTE/112263102205197
www.odescarte.com.br
23:40
Descartes
Vídeo sobre Descartes, apresentado por Antonio Joaquim Severino, da série Os Filósofos e a...
published: 26 Aug 2011
author: Aldenei Barros
Descartes
Vídeo sobre Descartes, apresentado por Antonio Joaquim Severino, da série Os Filósofos e a Educação, TV Escola
2:06
Descartes
Montaje para el blog 'Descartes' en Jotdown (www.jotdown.es). Una vision subjetiva sobre m...
published: 18 Oct 2012
author: rojas77
Descartes
Montaje para el blog 'Descartes' en Jotdown (www.jotdown.es). Una vision subjetiva sobre mi experiencia como periodista en los últimos viajes a África (Congo, Sudán del Sur, Ruanda, Níger, República Centroafricana). Son retales, planos fallidos, como su nombre indica: Descartes.
6:48
Descarte
Forte - Bruno Moreno
Gianluca - Lucas Durão
Garoto 1 - Victor Dias
Garoto 2 - Murillo Bass...
published: 08 Apr 2011
author: Tito Ferradans
Descarte
Forte - Bruno Moreno
Gianluca - Lucas Durão
Garoto 1 - Victor Dias
Garoto 2 - Murillo Basso
Roteiro de
J.G. Rodrigues
Colaboração de
Lucas Durão
Mari Brecht
Direção
J.G. Rodrigues
Assistência de Direção
Luciana Zulpo
Montagem
Plínio Chaparin
Direção de Arte
Mari Brecht
Fotografia
Tito Ferradans
Sound Design
May Guimarães
Operador de Boom
Válter Ribeiro
Youtube results:
4:24
René Descartes - (em português)
Fundador da filosofia moderna; Pai da matemática moderna; Sinfonia 40 - Mozart...
published: 12 Jan 2011
author: lipinha92
René Descartes - (em português)
Fundador da filosofia moderna; Pai da matemática moderna; Sinfonia 40 - Mozart
- published: 12 Jan 2011
- views: 4575
- author: lipinha92
3:31
Der Gottesbeweis von Rene Descartes
Der ontologische Gottesbeweis aus Rene Descartes' Meditationen über die erste Philosophie ...
published: 21 Feb 2011
author: PhilosophenUndDenker
Der Gottesbeweis von Rene Descartes
Der ontologische Gottesbeweis aus Rene Descartes' Meditationen über die erste Philosophie ( lat. "Meditationes de prima philosophia").
- published: 21 Feb 2011
- views: 20332
- author: PhilosophenUndDenker
2:57
René Descartes
Trailer do DVD - René Descartes - da coleção Filósofos ea Educação - ATTA Mídia...
published: 30 Mar 2010
author: nittasvideo
René Descartes
Trailer do DVD - René Descartes - da coleção Filósofos ea Educação - ATTA Mídia
- published: 30 Mar 2010
- views: 7157
- author: nittasvideo
9:30
Descartes sub español 1-15
Descartes subtitulado español rossellini parte 1-15...
published: 24 Sep 2010
author: AlfonsoMoraleja
Descartes sub español 1-15
Descartes subtitulado español rossellini parte 1-15
- published: 24 Sep 2010
- views: 20335
- author: AlfonsoMoraleja
photo: AP / Ronald Mendes-Agencia RBS
27 Jan 2013
Tweet. Police say at least 232 people have died in a fire that swept through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil. Around 117 others were injured after the blaze broke out while a band was performing at the Kiss club in the southern city of Santa Maria at about 2am (local time). Police earlier said more than 245 people had died in the fire. It is thought pyrotechnics being used for the concert may have caused the blaze ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)
photo: US DoD / U.S. Army Staff Sgt Sun L. Vega, Joint Staff
27 Jan 2013
TEL AVIV – Now that he has secured his second term, President Barack Obama has already secretly pledged to the Palestinians he will press Israel into a new round of so-called land-for-peace negotiations, a top Palestinian Authority negotiator told WND. The negotiator said top members of the Obama administration told the Palestinians the U.S....(size: 2.2Kb)
photo: AP / Hossam Ali
26 Jan 2013
An Egyptian court has handed down 21 death sentences in connection with the deadly riot last year at a football stadium in Port Said located along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The defendants sentenced on Saturday are mostly members of the "Ultras," die-hard football fans who support Port Said's al-Masry squad ... Al-Masry fans stormed the pitch after their team won, throwing stones, bottles and fireworks at al-Ahly supporters....(size: 17.2Kb)
photo: AP / Khalil Hamra
28 Jan 2013
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy on Sunday declared a state of emergency and a nightime curfew for one month in three restive cities after days of deadly violence. Mr. Morsy, facing his worst crisis since taking office in June, said the measures would take effect on Sunday night in the cities of Port Said, Suez and Ismailia ... Keywords....(size: 1.7Kb)
Business Insider
28 Jan 2013
... if I started memorizing stuff, eventually I'd just starting thinking on my own and perhaps get curious enough to get new knowledge and challenge what I had through these frameworks. I don't know if it was by design that I reference Descartes when I think about risk and uncertainty or by accident, but I wish I had started doing that earlier....(size: 5.8Kb)
The Examiner
28 Jan 2013
4. Coheed and Cambria – The Afterman ... 4-1 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... he can make an Elephant into a philosopher on par with Descartes (begun in the insanely catchy “Grist for the Malady Mill,” brought to fruition on the builder “Elephant in the Dock”) and weave a yarn about a Bear and a Fox that’s genuinely tearjerking (check penultimate track “Bear’s Vision of Saint Agnes”—but, please, not before listening and learning the album’s story up to that point)....(size: 12.2Kb)
U~T San Diego
26 Jan 2013
Madrid, 26 ene (EFE) ... La nueva generación de flores artificiales para el hogar no tiene complejos y luce en los lugares más llamativos de la casa, tan delicadas como si se tratara de flores naturales ... "Pero no es descartable en un futuro", dice García, la responsable de Sia, que añade que hay una búsqueda constante de materiales y técnicas "para reproducir de la forma más fiel las flores naturales y una parte de ellas es su aroma" ... ....(size: 4.2Kb)
noodls
24 Jan 2013
The Descartes Systems Group Inc) ... 24, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Descartes Systems Group (Nasdaq.DSGX) (TSX.DSG), the global leader in uniting logistics-intensive businesses in commerce, announced that OHL, a leading global 3PL and freight forwarder, is enhancing its security operations with Descartes' cloud-based Air Cargo Advance Screening (ACAS) solution ... About Descartes ... Learn more at www.descartes.com....(size: 6.6Kb)
Stockhouse
24 Jan 2013
24, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Descartes Systems Group (Nasdaq.DSGX) (TSX.DSG), the global leader in uniting logistics-intensive businesses in commerce, announced that OHL, a leading global 3PL and freight forwarder, is enhancing its security operations with Descartes' cloud-based Air Cargo Advance Screening (ACAS) solution ... About Descartes ... Learn more at www.descartes.com ... 202416 msilveira@descartes.com....(size: 5.5Kb)
The Saigon Times
24 Jan 2013
Prof. Dr. Shozo Hibino delivers his speech at the workshop “Breakthrough Thinking” - Photo. Kinh Luan. HCMC – In a volatile era with the world as a whole and everything constantly changing, business leaders have to design the future, rather than predicting it, said Prof. Dr ... The breakthrough thinking paradigm is different from the Descartes paradigm ... ....(size: 1.9Kb)
StreetInsider
24 Jan 2013
Tweet. NEW YORK, Jan. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- International Developer EPGI awarded 11 Million Square Metre oil and gas project in Iraq. Basra, Iraq ... The Free Trade Zone is located within 125 kilometers of over 70% of Iraq's proven oil and gas reserves ... Media Contact. ... News distributed by PR Newswire iReach ... OHL Enhances Security Operations With Descartes' Cloud-Based Air Cargo Advance Screening Solution Canacol Energy Ltd ... ....(size: 3.3Kb)
Denver Post
23 Jan 2013
Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o during an interview with ESPN on Jan. 18. (Ryan Jones, ESPN Images). I am still not entirely coherent after reading Deadspin's story that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o's cancer-stricken girlfriend was a hoax. And I had no idea who any of these people were in the first place. If you have not yet, read the story ... Yet no one ever checked. Perhaps not even Te'o ... It starts to get awfully Descartes awfully fast....(size: 4.2Kb)
photo: WN / Yeshe Choesang
23 Jan 2013
Article by Yeshe Choesang, WN Correspondent Dharamshala. Karnataka, India ... The tail-end of the afternoon sessions were given to the audience to interact with the speakers ... Christof Koch, who has pioneered the scientific investigation of consciousness, acknowledged that he belonged to a tradition that included Plato, Descartes, Darwin and his own mentor, Francis Crick. He said, "We take a physicalist approach to investigating the world ... ....(size: 5.0Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
22 Jan 2013
Free training to take place Jan. 24 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Murray Public Library. Salt Lake City (PRWEB) January 22, 2013 In the U.S. 44 percent of 17-year-olds and minority youth are functionally illiterate. The problem stems from three main sources ... "The workshop is packed full of instantly usable ideas, marvelously organized and equally well presented, often with active audience participation," said Descartes Docabo, Teacher ... ....(size: 2.9Kb)
Chicago Tribune
22 Jan 2013
"It has never been a goal to have a company, a set number of dancers who I always work with and host in studio class each week," Gutierrez, 41, said ... the Powerful People ... There's a strong populist impulse in my work. ... 31-Feb ... Gutierrez, somewhat boldly, sees the text and his own clearly thought-provoking piece as blunt contradictions to the renowned declaration by 17th-Century philosopher Rene Descartes, that "I think, therefore, I am."....(size: 4.7Kb)
The New York Times
22 Jan 2013
The American Realness festival, which ended on Sunday, was in many ways not just a demonstration but also a celebration of the alternative and unorthodox ... Enlarge This Image. Ian Douglas ... Connect With Us on Twitter ... Arts Twitter List ... Gutierrez ... When Mr ... (She uttered the word “down” 12 times in succession, and “falling” 18 times, but still managed to include Shakespeare, Descartes, Beckett, Kubrick, Cage and Dylan.)....(size: 11.4Kb)
noodls
20 Jan 2013
(Source. The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama). January 20th 2013 ... His Holiness the Dalai Lama has participated in all these sessions so far with attentive interest ... Christof Koch, who has pioneered the scientific investigation of consciousness, opened with an acknowledgement that he belonged to a tradition that has included Plato, Descartes, Darwin and his own mentor, Francis Crick ... Photo/Jeremy Russell/OHHDL ... This seems natural....(size: 9.6Kb)
"Descartes" redirects here. For other uses, see Descartes (disambiguation).
 Portrait after Frans Hals, 1648[1] |
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| Born | (1596-03-31)31 March 1596 La Haye en Touraine, Touraine (present-day Descartes, Indre-et-Loire), France |
|---|---|
| Died | 11 February 1650(1650-02-11) (aged 53) Stockholm, Sweden |
| Era | 17th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Cartesianism, Rationalism, Foundationalism |
| Main interests | Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mathematics |
| Notable ideas | Cogito ergo sum, method of doubt, Cartesian coordinate system, Cartesian dualism, ontological argument for the existence of Christian God; Folium of Descartes |
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Influenced by
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| Signature |  |
René Descartes (French pronunciation: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; Latinized form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian";[3] 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings,[4][5] which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system — allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes in a two-dimensional coordinate system — was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution and has been described as an example of genius.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St. Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the schools on two major points: First, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to ends—divine or natural—in explaining natural phenomena.[6] In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation.
Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.
He is perhaps best known for the philosophical statement "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discourse on the Method (1637 – written in French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644 – written in Latin).
Contents |
Biography[link]
Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine (now Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France. When he was one year old, his mother Jeanne Brochard died. His father Joachim was a member in the provincial parliament. At the age of eight, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche.[7] After graduation in December 1616, he studied at the University of Poitiers, earning a Baccalauréat and Licence in law, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer.[8]
"I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it." (Descartes, Discourse on the Method).
In 1618, Descartes was engaged in the army of Maurice of Nassau in the Dutch Republic, but as a truce had been established between Holland and Spain, Descartes used his spare time to study mathematics.[9] In this way he became acquainted with Isaac Beeckman, principal of Dordrecht school. Beeckman had proposed a difficult mathematical problem, and to his astonishment, it was the young Descartes who found the solution. Both believed that it was necessary to create a method that thoroughly linked mathematics and physics.[10] While in the service of the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, Descartes was present at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, in November 1620.[11]
On the night of 10–11 November 1619, while stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, Germany, Descartes experienced a series of three powerful dreams or visions that he later claimed profoundly influenced his life. He concluded from these visions that the pursuit of science would prove to be, for him, the pursuit of true wisdom and a central part of his life's work.[12] Descartes also saw very clearly that all truths were linked with one another, so that finding a fundamental truth and proceeding with logic would open the way to all science. This basic truth, Descartes found quite soon: his famous "I think".[10]
In 1622 he returned to France, and during the next few years spent time in Paris and other parts of Europe. It was during a stay in Paris that he composed his first essay on method: Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind).[10] He arrived in La Haye in 1623, selling all of his property to invest in bonds, which provided a comfortable income for the rest of his life. Descartes was present at the siege of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu in 1627.
He returned to the Dutch Republic in 1628, where he lived until September 1649. In April 1629 he joined the University of Franeker, living at the Sjaerdemaslot, and the next year, under the name "Poitevin", he enrolled at the Leiden University to study mathematics with Jacob Golius and astronomy with Martin Hortensius.[13] In October 1630 he had a falling-out with Beeckman, whom he accused of plagiarizing some of his ideas. In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helena Jans van der Strom, with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer, at which time Descartes taught at the Utrecht University. Francine Descartes died in 1640 in Amersfoort, from Scarlet Fever.
While in the Netherlands he changed his address frequently, living among other places in Dordrecht (1628), Franeker (1629), Amsterdam (1629–30), Leiden (1630), Amsterdam (1630–32), Deventer (1632–34), Amsterdam (1634–35), Utrecht (1635–36), Leiden (1636), Egmond (1636–38), Santpoort (1638–1640), Leiden (1640–41), Endegeest (a castle near Oegstgeest) (1641–43), and finally for an extended time in Egmond-Binnen (1643–49).
Despite these frequent moves he wrote all his major work during his 20-plus years in the Netherlands, where he managed to revolutionize mathematics and philosophy. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and Descartes abandoned plans to publish Treatise on the World, his work of the previous four years. Nevertheless, in 1637 he published part of this work in three essays: Les Météores (The Meteors), La Dioptrique (Dioptrics) and La Géométrie (Geometry), preceded by an introduction, his famous Discours de la Métode (Discourse on the Method). In it Descartes lays out four rules of thought, meant to ensure that our knowledge rests upon a firm foundation.
Descartes continued to publish works concerning both mathematics and philosophy for the rest of his life. In 1641 he published a metaphysics work, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy), written in Latin and thus addressed to the learned. It was followed, in 1644, by Principia Philosophiæ (Principles of Philosophy), a kind of synthesis of the Meditations and the Discourse. In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes began his long correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, devoted mainly to moral and psychological subjects. Connected with this correspondence, in 1649 he published Les Passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul), that he dedicated to the Princess. In 1647, he was awarded a pension by the King of France. Descartes was interviewed by Frans Burman at Egmond-Binnen in 1648.
A French translation of Principia Philosophiæ, prepared by Abbot Claude Picot, was published in 1647. This edition Descartes dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. In the preface Descartes praised true philosophy as a means to attain wisdom. He identifies four ordinary sources to reach wisdom, and finally says that there is a fifth, better and more secure, consisting in the search for first causes.[14]
René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a tutor for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia; accustomed to working in bed until noon, he may have suffered damage to his health from Christina's demands for early morning study (the lack of sleep could have severely compromised his immune system). Descartes stayed at the French ambassador Pierre Chanut.
In 1663, the Pope placed his works on the Index of Prohibited Books.
As a Roman Catholic in a Protestant nation, he was interred in a graveyard used mainly for unbaptized infants in Adolf Fredriks kyrka in Stockholm. Later, his remains were taken to France and buried in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Although the National Convention in 1792 had planned to transfer his remains to the Panthéon, they are, two centuries later, still resting between two other graves — those of the scholarly monks Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon — in a chapel of the abbey. His memorial, erected in the 18th century, remains in the Swedish church.
Religious beliefs[link]
The religious beliefs of René Descartes have been rigorously debated within scholarly circles. He claimed to be a devout Roman Catholic, claiming that one of the purposes of the Meditations was to defend the Christian faith. However, in his own era, Descartes was accused of harboring secret deist or atheist beliefs. Contemporary Blaise Pascal said that "I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God."[15]
Stephen Gaukroger's biography of Descartes reports that "he had a deep religious faith as a Catholic, which he retained to his dying day, along with a resolute, passionate desire to discover the truth."[16] After Descartes died in Sweden, Queen Christina abdicated her throne to convert to Roman Catholicism (Swedish law required a Protestant ruler). The only Roman Catholic with whom she had prolonged contact was Descartes, who was her personal tutor.[17]
Philosophical work[link]
Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences.[18] For him the philosophy was a thinking system that embodied all knowledge, and expressed it in this way:[19]
| “ | Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics. By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom. | ” |
In his Discourse on the Method, he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, also sometimes referred to as methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.[20]
Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy). Most famously, this is known as cogito ergo sum (English: "I think, therefore I am"). Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."[21]
Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is what he does, and his power must come from his essence. Descartes defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which he is immediately conscious.[22]
To further demonstrate the limitations of the senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as the Wax Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still the same piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he should put aside the senses. He must use his mind. Descartes concludes:
| “ | And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind. | ” |
In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method. In the third and fifth Meditation, he offers an ontological proof of a benevolent God (through both the ontological argument and trademark argument). Because God is benevolent, he can have some faith in the account of reality his senses provide him, for God has provided him with a working mind and sensory system and does not desire to deceive him. From this supposition, however, he finally establishes the possibility of acquiring knowledge about the world based on deduction and perception. In terms of epistemology therefore, he can be said to have contributed such ideas as a rigorous conception of foundationalism and the possibility that reason is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge. He, nevertheless, was very much aware that experimentation was necessary in order to verify and validate theories.[19]
Descartes also wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.
Dualism[link]
Further information: Mind-body dichotomy and dualism
Descartes in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has material properties. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial and does not follow the laws of nature. Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion. Most of the previous accounts of the relationship between mind and body had been uni-directional.
Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" for several reasons. First, the soul is unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appeared to be unitary (though subsequent microscopic inspection has revealed it is formed of two hemispheres). Second, Descartes observed that the pineal gland was located near the ventricles. He believed the cerebrospinal fluid of the ventricles acted through the nerves to control the body, and that the pineal gland influenced this process. Cartesian dualism set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind–body problem for many years after Descartes's death.
Although Descartes realized that both humans and animals have pineal glands (see Passions of the Soul Part One, Section 50, AT 369), he believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes's practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment.
- Reference: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online): Descartes and the Pineal Gland.
Descartes' moral philosophy[link]
For Descartes, Morals was a science, the highest and most perfect of them, and like the rest of sciences had its roots in Metaphysics.[19] In this way he argues for the existence of God, investigates the place of men in nature, formulates the theory of mind-body dualism and defends free will. But, he being a convinced rationalist, clearly estates that Reason suffices us in the search for the goods we should seek, and for him, virtue consists in the correct reasoning that should guide our actions. Nevertheless, the quality of this reasoning depends on knowledge, as a well informed mind will be more capable of making good choices, and also on mental condition. For this reason he said that a complete moral philosophy should include the study of the body. He discussed this subject in the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, and as a result wrote his work The Passions of the Soul, that contains a study of the psychosomatic processes and reactions in man, with an emphasis on emotions or passions.[23]
Men should seek the sovereign good that Descartes, following Zeno, identifies with virtue, as this produces a solid blessedness or pleasure. For Epicurus the sovereign good was pleasure, and Descartes says that in fact this is not in contradiction with Zeno's teaching, because virtue produces a spiritual pleasure, that is better than bodily pleasure. Regarding Aristotle opinion that happiness depends on the goods of fortune, Descartes does not deny that this goods contribute to happiness, but remarks that they are in great proportion outside our control, whereas our mind is under our complete control.[23]
The moral writings of Descartes came at the last part of his life, but earlier, in his Discourse on Method he adopted three maxims to be able to act while he put all his ideas into doubt. This is known as his "Provisional Morals".
Historical impact[link]
Emancipation from Church doctrine[link]
Descartes has been often dubbed as the father of modern Western philosophy, the philosopher that with his sceptic approach has profoundly changed the course of Western philosophy and set the basis for modernity.[4][24] The first two of his Meditations on First Philosophy, those that formulate the famous methodic doubt, are the portion of Descartes writings that most influenced modern thinking.[25] It has been argued that Descartes himself didn't realize the extent of his revolutionary gesture.[26] In shifting the debate from "what is true" to "of what can I be certain?," Descartes shifted the authoritative guarantor of truth from God to Man (While traditional concept of "truth" implies an external authority, "certainty" instead relies on the judgement of the individual Man). In an anthropocentric revolution, Man is now raised to the level of a subject, an agent, an emancipated being equipped with autonomous reason. This is a revolutionary step which posed the basis of modernity (whose repercussion are still ongoing): the emancipation of man from Christian revelational truth and Church doctrine, a man that makes his own law and takes its own stand.[27][28][29] In modernity, the guarantor of truth is not God anymore but Man, a "self-conscious shaper and guarantor" of his reality.[30][31] Man in this way is turned into a reasoning adult, a subject and agent,[30] as opposed to a child obedient to God. This change in perspective was characteristic of the shift from the Christian mediaval period to the modern period, it had been anticipated in other fields and now Descartes was giving it a formulation in the field of philosophy.[30][32]
This anthropocentric perspective, establishing human reason as autonomous, posed the basis for the Enlightenment's emancipation from God and the Church. It also posed the basis for all subsequent anthropology.[33] Descartes philosophical revolution is sometimes said to have sparked modern anthropocentrism and subjectivism.[4][34][35][36]
Mathematical legacy[link]
One of Descartes' most enduring legacies was his development of Cartesian or analytic geometry, which uses algebra to describe geometry. He "invented the convention of representing unknowns in equations by x, y, and z, and knowns by a, b, and c". He also "pioneered the standard notation" that uses superscripts to show the powers or exponents, for example the 4 used in x4 to indicate squaring of squaring.[37] He was first to assign a fundamental place for algebra in our system of knowledge, and believed that algebra was a method to automate or mechanize reasoning, particularly about abstract, unknown quantities. European mathematicians had previously viewed geometry as a more fundamental form of mathematics, serving as the foundation of algebra. Algebraic rules were given geometric proofs by mathematicians such as Pacioli, Cardan, Tartaglia and Ferrari. Equations of degree higher than the third were regarded as unreal, because a three dimensional form, such as a cube, occupied the largest dimension of reality. Descartes professed that the abstract quantity a2 could represent length as well as an area. This was in opposition to the teachings of mathematicians, such as Vieta, who argued that it could represent only area. Although Descartes did not pursue the subject, he preceded Leibniz in envisioning a more general science of algebra or "universal mathematics," as a precursor to symbolic logic, that could encompass logical principles and methods symbolically, and mechanize general reasoning.[38]
Descartes’ work provided the basis for the calculus developed by Newton and Leibniz, who applied infinitesimal calculus to the tangent line problem, thus permitting the evolution of that branch of modern mathematics.[39] His rule of signs is also a commonly used method to determine the number of positive and negative roots of a polynomial.
Descartes discovered an early form of the law of conservation of mechanical momentum (a measure of the motion of an object), and envisioned it as pertaining to motion in a straight line, as opposed to perfect circular motion, as Galileo had envisioned it. He outlined his views on the universe in his Principles of Philosophy.
Descartes also made contributions to the field of optics. He showed by using geometric construction and the law of refraction (also known as Descartes's law or more commonly Snell's law, who discovered it 16 years earlier) that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees (i.e., the angle subtended at the eye by the edge of the rainbow and the ray passing from the sun through the rainbow's centre is 42°).[40] He also independently discovered the law of reflection, and his essay on optics was the first published mention of this law.[41]
Contemporary reception[link]
Although Descartes was well known in academic circles towards the end of his life, the teaching of his works in schools was controversial. Henri de Roy (Henricus Regius, 1598–1679), Professor of Medicine at the University of Utrecht, was condemned by the Rector of the University, Gijsbert Voet (Voetius), for teaching Descartes's physics.[42]
Writings[link]
- 1618. Compendium Musicae. A treatise on music theory and the aesthetics of music written for Descartes's early collaborator, Isaac Beeckman.
- 1626–1628. Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind). Incomplete. First published posthumously in 1684. The best critical edition, which includes an early Dutch translation, is edited by Giovanni Crapulli (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
- 1630–1633. Le Monde (The World) and L'Homme (Man). Descartes's first systematic presentation of his natural philosophy. Man was published posthumously in Latin translation in 1662; and The World posthumously in 1664.
- 1637. Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method). An introduction to the Essais, which include the Dioptrique, the Météores and the Géométrie.
- 1637. La Géométrie (Geometry). Descartes's major work in mathematics. There is an English translation by Michael Mahoney (New York: Dover, 1979).
- 1641. Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy), also known as Metaphysical Meditations. In Latin; a French translation, probably done without Descartes's supervision, was published in 1647. Includes six Objections and Replies. A second edition, published the following year, included an additional objection and reply, and a Letter to Dinet.
- 1644. Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy), a Latin textbook at first intended by Descartes to replace the Aristotelian textbooks then used in universities. A French translation, Principes de philosophie by Claude Picot, under the supervision of Descartes, appeared in 1647 with a letter-preface to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.
- 1647. Notae in programma (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet). A reply to Descartes's one-time disciple Henricus Regius.
- 1647. The Description of the Human Body. Published posthumously.
- 1648. Responsiones Renati Des Cartes... (Conversation with Burman). Notes on a Q&A session between Descartes and Frans Burman on 16 April 1648. Rediscovered in 1895 and published for the first time in 1896. An annotated bilingual edition (Latin with French translation), edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade, was published in 1981 (Paris: PUF).
- 1649. Les passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul). Dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate.
- 1656. Musicae Compendium (Instruction in Music). Posth. Publ.: Johannes Janssonius jun., Amsterdam
- 1657. Correspondance. Published by Descartes's literary executor Claude Clerselier. The third edition, in 1667, was the most complete; Clerselier omitted, however, much of the material pertaining to mathematics.
In January 2010, a previously unknown letter from Descartes, dated 27 May 1641, was found by the Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos when browsing through Google. Bos found the letter mentioned in a summary of autographs kept by Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The College was unaware that the letter had never been published. This was the third letter by Descartes found in the last 25 years.[43][44]
See also[link]
- 3587 Descartes, asteroid
- Analytic geometry
- Balloonist theory
- Baruch Spinoza
- Philosophy of Spinoza
- Cartesian circle
- Cartesian coordinate system
- Cartesian diagram
- Cartesian diver
- Cartesian morphism
- Cartesian product
- Cartesian product of graphs
- Cartesian tree
- Defect (geometry)
- Descartes' rule of signs
- Descartes' theorem
- Dualistic interactionism
- Folium of Descartes
- Self-organization
- Scientific Revolution
- Solipsism
Notes[link]
- ^ Russell Shorto. Descartes' Bones. (Doubleday, 2008) p. 218; see also The Louvre, Atlas Database, http://cartelen.louvre.fr
- ^ Marenbon, John (2007). Medieval Philosophy: an historical and philosophical introduction. Routledge. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-415-28112-6. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415281133/. ISBN 978-0-415-28113-3
- ^ Colie, Rosalie L. (1957). Light and Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. p. 58.
- ^ a b c Bertrand Russell (2004) History of western philosophy pp.511, 516-7
- ^ Watson, Richard A. (31 March 2012). "René Descartes". Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc). http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/158787/Rene-Descartes. Retrieved 31 March 2012.
- ^ Carlson, Neil R. (2001). Physiology of Behavior. Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Pearson: Allyn & Bacon. p. 8. ISBN 0-205-30840-6.
- ^ Desmond, p. 24
- ^ Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 373–377. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.
- ^ "René Descartes". FamousScientists.org. http://www.famousscientists.org/rene-descartes. Retrieved 15 December 2011.
- ^ a b c Guy Durandin, Les Principes de la Philosophie. Introduction et notes, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 1970.
- ^ Battle of White Mountain, Britannica Online Encyclopedia
- ^ Clarke, Desmond (2006). Descartes: A biography, pp. 58–59. Cambridge U. Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=W3D9KGVyz6sC
- ^ A.C. Grayling, Descartes: The Life of Rene Descartes and Its Place in His Times, Simon and Schuster, 2006, pp 151–152
- ^ Blom, John J., Descartes. His Moral Philosophy and Psychology. New York University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-8147-0999-0
- ^ Think Exist on Blaise Pascal. Retrieved 12 February 2009.
- ^ The Religious Affiliation of philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. Webpage last modified 5 October 2005.
- ^ Smith, Kurt (Fall 2010). "Descartes' Life and Works". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-works/.
- ^ Emily Grosholz (1991). Cartesian method and the problem of reduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824250-6. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=2EtAVLU1eIAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1. "But contemporary debate has tended to...understand [Cartesian method] merely as the ‘method of doubt’...I want to define Descartes's method in broader terms...to trace its impact on the domains of mathematics and physics as well as metaphysics."
- ^ a b c René Descartes. "Letter of the Author to the French Translator of the Principles of Philosophy serving for a preface". http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/principles/preface.htm. Retrieved December 2011.
- ^ Rebecca, Copenhaver. "Forms of skepticism". Archived from the original on 8 January 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050108095032/http://www.lclark.edu/~rebeccac/forms.html. Retrieved 15 August 2007.
- ^ "Ten books: Chosen by Raj Persuade". The British Journal of Psychiatry. http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/181/3/258.
- ^ Descartes, René (1644). The Principles of Philosophy (IX).
- ^ a b Blom, John J., Descartes. His moral philosophy and psychology. New York University Press. 1978. ISBN 0-8147-0999-0
- ^ Heidegger [1938] (2002) p.76 quotation:
Descartes... that which he himself founded... modern (and that means, at the same time, Western) metaphysics.
- ^ Schmaltz, Tad M. Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes p.27 quotation:
The Descartes most familiar to twentieth-century philosophers is the Descartes of the first two Meditations, someone proccupied with hyperbolic doubt of the material world and the certainty of knowledge of the self that emerges from the famous cogito argument.
- ^ Roy Wood Sellars (1949) Philosophy for the future: the quest of modern materialism quotation:
Husserl has taken Descartes very seriously in a historical as well as in a systematic sense [...] [in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl] finds in the first two Meditations of Descartes a depth which it is difficult to fathom, and which Descartes himself was so little able to appreciate that he let go "the great discovery" he had in his hands.
- ^ Martin Heidegger [1938] (2002) The Age of the World Picture quotation:
For up to Descartes...a particular sub-iectum...lies at the foundation of its own fixed qualities and changing circumstances. The superiority of a sub-iectum...arises out of the claim of man to a...self-supported, unshakable foundation of truth, in the sense of certainty. Why and how does this claim acquire its decisive authority? The claim originates in that emancipation of man in which he frees himself from obligation to Christian revelational truth and Church doctrine to a legislating for himself that takes its stand upon itself.
- ^ Ingraffia, Brian D. (1995) Postmodern theory and biblical theology: vanquishing God's shadow p.126
- ^ Norman K. Swazo (2002) Crisis theory and world order: Heideggerian reflections pp.97-9
- ^ a b c Lovitt, Tom (1977) introduction to Martin Heidegger's The question concerning technology, and other essays, pp.xxv-xxvi
- ^ Briton, Derek The modern practice of adult education: a postmodern critique p.76
- ^ Martin Heidegger The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead pp.88-90
- ^ Heidegger [1938] (2002) p.75 quotation:
With the interpretation of man as subiectum, Descartes creates the metaphysical presupposition for future anthropology of every kind and tendency.
- ^ Benjamin Isadore Schwart China and Other Matters p.95 quotation:
... the kind of anthropocentric subjectivism which has emerged from the Cartesian revolution.
- ^ Charles B. Guignon Heidegger and the problem of knowledge p.23
- ^ *Husserl, Edmund (1931) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology quotation:
When, with the beginning of modern times, religious belief was becoming more and more externalized as a lifeless convention, men of intellect were lifted by a new belief, their great belief in an autonomous philosophy and science. [...] in philosophy, the Meditations were epoch-making in a quite unique sense, and precisely because of their going back to the pure ego cogito. Descartes, in fact, inaugurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Changing its total style, philosophy takes a radical turn: from naïve Objectivism to transcendental subjectivism.
- ^ Tom Sorelli, Descartes: A Very Short Introduction, (2000). New York: Oxford University Press. p. 19.
- ^ Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, (1972). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 280-281
- ^ Gullberg, Jan (1997). Mathematics From The Birth Of Numbers. W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-04002-X.
- ^ Tipler, P. A. and G. Mosca (2004). Physics For Scientists And Engineers. W. H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-4389-2.
- ^ "René Descartes". Encarta. Microsoft. 2008. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761555262/Rene_Descartes.html#s3. Retrieved 15 August 2007.
- ^ Cottingham, John, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothof. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. 293.
- ^ Vlasblom, Dirk (2010-02-25). ""Unknown letter from Descartes found"". Nrc.nl. http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2492445.ece/Unknown_letter_from_Descartes_found. Retrieved 2012-05-30.
- ^ (Dutch)" Hoe Descartes in 1641 op andere gedachten kwam – Onbekende brief van Franse filosoof gevonden"
Bibliography[link]
References[link]
Collected works[link]
- 1983. Oeuvres de Descartes in 11 vols. Adam, Charles, and Tannery, Paul, eds. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. This work is traditionally cited with the initials AT (for Adam and Tannery) followed by a volume number in Roman numerals; thus ATVII refers to Oeuvres de Descartes volume 7.
Collected English translations[link]
- 1955. The Philosophical Works, E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, trans. Dover Publications. This work is traditionally cited with the initials HR (for Haldane and Ross) followed by a volume number in Roman numerals; thus HRII refers to volume 2 of this edition.
- 1988. The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes in 3 vols. Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Kenny, A., and Murdoch, D., trans. Cambridge University Press.
Single works[link]
- 1618. Compendium Musicae.
- 1628. Rules for the Direction of the Mind.
- 1637. Discourse on the Method ("Discours de la Methode"). An introduction to Dioptrique, Des Météores and La Géométrie. Original in French, because intended for a wider public.
- 1637. La Géométrie. Smith, David E., and Lantham, M. L., trans., 1954. The Geometry of René Descartes. Dover.
- 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. Cottingham, J., trans., 1996. Cambridge University Press. Latin original. Alternative English title: Metaphysical Meditations. Includes six Objections and Replies. A second edition published the following year, includes an additional ‘’Objection and Reply’’ and a Letter to Dinet. HTML Online Latin-French-English Edition
- 1644. Les Principes de la philosophie. Miller, V. R. and R. P., trans., 1983. Principles of Philosophy. Reidel.
- 1647. Comments on a Certain Broadsheet.
- 1647. The Description of the Human Body.
- 1648. Conversation with Burman.
- 1649. Passions of the Soul. Voss, S. H., trans., 1989. Indianapolis: Hackett. Dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Secondary literature[link]
- Carriero, John (2008). Bewtween Two Worlds. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13561-8.
- Boyer, Carl (1985). A History of Mathematics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02391-3.
- Clarke, Desmond (2006). Descartes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82301-3.
- Costabel, Pierre (1987). René Descartes – Exercices pour les éléments des solides. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-040099-X.
- Cottingham, John (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36696-8.
- Duncan, Steven M. (2008). The Proof of the External World: Cartesian Theism and the Possibility of Knowledge. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. ISBN 978-02271-7267-4 http://www.lutterworth.com/jamesclarke/jc/titles/proofew.htm.
- Farrell, John. “Demons of Descartes and Hobbes.” Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Cornell UP, 2006), chapter 7.
- Garber, Daniel (1992). Descartes' Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-28219-8.
- Garber, Daniel; Michael Ayers (1998). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53721-5.
- Gaukroger, Stephen (1995). Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-823994-7.
- Giuseppe Leone, [Il quarto centenario dalla nascita di Cartesio (1596)], Una "ragione" per l'Europa Unita, in "Ricorditi di me...", su Lecco 2000, Aprile 1996.
- Grayling, A.C. (2005). Descartes: The Life and times of a Genius. New York: Walker Publishing Co., Inc.. ISBN 0-8027-1501-X.
- Gillespie, A. (2006). Descartes’ demon: A dialogical analysis of ‘Meditations on First Philosophy.’[1] Theory & Psychology, 16, 761–781.
- Martin Heidegger [1938] (2002) The Age of the World Picture in Off the beaten track
- Keeling, S. V. (1968). Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN.
- Melchert, Norman (2002). The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. New York: McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-19-517510-7.
- Moreno Romo, Juan Carlos (Coord.), Descartes vivo. Ejercicios de hermenéutica cartesiana, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2007'
- Ozaki, Makoto (1991). Kartenspiel, oder Kommentar zu den Meditationen des Herrn Descartes. Berlin: Klein Verlag.. ISBN 3-927199-01-X.
- Moreno Romo, Juan Carlos, Vindicación del cartesianismo radical, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2010.
- Schäfer, Rainer (2006). Zweifel und Sein – Der Ursprung des modernen Selbstbewusstseins in Descartes' cogito. Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen&Neumann. ISBN 3-8260-3202-0.
- Serfati, M., 2005, "Geometria" in Ivor Grattan-Guinness, ed., Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics. Elsevier: 1–22.
- Sorrell, Tom (1987). Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.. ISBN 0-19-287636-8.
- Vrooman, Jack Rochford (1970). René Descartes: A Biography. Putnam Press.
- Watson, Richard A. (31 March 2012). "René Descartes". Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc). http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/158787/Rene-Descartes. Retrieved 31 March 2012.
- Naaman-Zauderer, Noa (2010). Descartes' Deontological Turn: Reason, Will and Virtue in the Later Writings. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-76330-1.
External links[link]
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General
- Detailed biography of Descartes
"René Descartes" in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.- Descartes featured on the 100 French Franc banknote from 1942.
- More easily readable versions of Meditations, Objections and Replies, Principles of Philosophy, Discourse on the Method, Correspondence with Princess Elisabeth, and Passions of the Soul.
- 1984 John Cottingham translation of Meditations and Objections and Replies.
- René Descartes (1596–1650) Published in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition (1996)
- Original texts of René Descartes in French at La Philosophie
- Descartes Philosophical Writings tr. by Norman Kemp Smith at archive.org
- Studies in the Cartesian philosophy (1902) by Norman Kemp Smith at archive.org
- The Philosophical Works Of Descartes Volume II (1934) at archive.org
- Works by or about René Descartes in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Free scores by René Descartes at the International Music Score Library Project
- René Descartes (1596—1650): Overview(IEP)
- René Descartes:The Mind-Body Distinction(IEP)
- Cartesian skepticism(DEP)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Descartes, René |
| Alternative names | Cartesius |
| Short description | French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist |
| Date of birth | 31 March 1596 |
| Place of birth | La Haye en Touraine, Indre-et-Loire, France |
| Date of death | 11 February 1650 |
| Place of death | Stockholm, Sweden |
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For other people named Bernard Williams, see Bernard Williams (disambiguation).
| 200px | |
| Born | (1929-09-21)21 September 1929 Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex |
|---|---|
| Died | 10 June 2003(2003-06-10) (aged 73) Rome |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Main interests | Moral philosophy Personal identity |
| Notable ideas | Internal v. external reasons for action |
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Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English moral philosopher, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time.[1] His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and in particular to the Greeks.[2] Described as an analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist, he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another.[3] He rejected scientism, and scientific or evolutionary reductionism, calling "morally unimaginative" reductionists "the people I really do dislike." For Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and meaningful.[4]
He became known as a supporter of women in academia, seeing in women the possibility of a synthesis of reason and emotion that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum said he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be."[5] He was also famously sharp in conversation. Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle once said of him that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence."[6]
Contents |
Life[link]
Early life and education[link]
Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chigwell School, and read Greats (Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1951 with a congratulatory first-class honours degree,[1] before spending his year-long national service in the Royal Air Force flying Spitfires in Canada.[6] While on leave in New York, he met his future wife, Shirley Brittain-Catlin—daughter of political scientist George Catlin and novelist Vera Brittain—who was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford in 1951, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post. They were married in 1955.[6]
Career[link]
Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London, where he worked from 1959 until 1964. He was later appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, while his wife worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values—Williams was a confirmed atheist, his wife a devout Catholic—placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner. Williams and Skinner subsequently married and had two sons.[6] Shirley Williams said of her marriage to Williams:
... [T]here was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing—we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly judgemental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say "That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.[6]
Williams conceded that he could be tough. "I like to think that this is usually when I'm confronted with self-satisfaction. In philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly scientistic smugness."[6] He was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, vacating the chair to serve as Provost of King's College from 1979 until 1987.[1] He left England in 1988 to become Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, citing the relative prosperity of American academic life, and the so-called "brain drain" from England of academics moving to the U.S. He told a British newspaper at the time that he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an academic. He told The Guardian in November 2002 that he regretted his departure becoming so public: "I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicized this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky." Bemoaning the challenge of cross-cultural adjustment, he observed "it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed."[6]
He held several positions at Berkeley (1986–2003) where he was Mills Professor (1986–1988), Sather Classics Lecturer and Sather Professor (1988–1989),[7] and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy (1988–2003),[8] and also served, at the same time, as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1990–1996), eventually becoming a Fellow of All Souls College again in 1997.[6]
Royal commissions[link]
Williams served on a number of royal commissions and government committees. He chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, which reported in 1979 that: "Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background."[2] The Committee's report was evidently influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what he called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone." Williams concluded that pornography could not be shown to be harmful, and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today." The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they see fit. Margaret Thatcher's first administration put an end to the liberal agenda on sex, and nearly put an end to Williams's political career too; he was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years.[6] Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining the role of British private schools in 1965–70, drug abuse in 1971, gambling in 1976–78, and social justice in 1993–94. "I did all the major vices," he said.[1]
Opera[link]
Williams was interested in opera from the age of 15, and served on the board of the English National Opera for 20 years.[4] A collection of his essays, On Opera, was published in 2006, edited by his widow, Patricia.[9]
Honours and death[link]
Williams was knighted in 1999. He became a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[8] He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Harvard University in 2002. He died on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He was survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, and a daughter from his first marriage.[1]
Work[link]
Approach to moral philosophy[link]
In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he wrote that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring... contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all." The study of morality, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to psychology, history, politics, and culture. In his rejection of morality as what he called "a peculiar institution," by which he meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, some people have seen a resemblance to the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite at first seeing Nietzsche as a crude reductionist, Williams came to admire him, once remarking that he wished he could quote him every twenty minutes.[10]
Although Williams's disdain for reductionism could make him appear a moral relativist, he argued in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that moral concepts could be "thick" or "thin". The former—such as courageous or cruel—are about real features of the world, and disputes about them can be resolved objectively.[10]
Critique of utilitarianism[link]
Further information: Utilitarianism, Act utilitarianism, Rule utilitarianism, Preference utilitarianism, and Deontological ethics
Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, a consequentialist position, the simplest version of which is that actions are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
One of his best-known arguments against utilitarianism centres on Jim, a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. One day Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 Indians who have been randomly captured and tied up as examples of what will happen to rebels. The captain who has arrested the Indians says that if Jim will kill one of them, the others will be released in honour of Jim's status as a guest, but if he does not, all the Indians will be killed.[11] For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this; all that matters is the outcome. Simple act utilitarianism would therefore favour Jim killing one of the men. Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed by someone else because of an act or omission of mine. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers. He argued that moral decisions must preserve our psychological identity and integrity.[11]
We do not, in fact, judge actions by their consequences, he argued. To solve parking problems in London, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot people who parked illegally. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop; thus the utilitarian calculus could justify the shootings by the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring. Any theory with this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how plausible it feels to argue that we do judge actions by their consequences. In an effort to save the utilitarian account, a rule utilitarian — a version of utilitarianism that promotes not the act, but the rule that tends to lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number — would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the rule were: "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offence," the utilitarian would argue that its implementation would bring great unhappiness. For Williams, this argument simply proved his point. We do not need to calculate why threatening to shoot people over parking offences is wrong, he argued, and any system that shows us how to make the calculation is one we should reject. Indeed, we should reject any system that reduces moral decision-making to a few algorithms, because any systematization or reductionism will inevitably distort its complexity.[12]
Williams also coined the term "Government House utilitarianism" as a critique of any system of practical ethics (such as that suggested by Henry Sidgwick) which kept as distinct those who theorised about the best action in any given circumstance, and those who "unreflectively deployed" their results on a day to day basis.[13]
Critique of Kantianism[link]
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One of the main alternatives to utilitarian theory is the moral philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Williams's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s outlined the basis of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and Kantianism.[14] Martha Nussbaum wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories".[5]
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals expounded a moral system based on what he called the categorical imperative, the best known version of which is: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, by an act of will, a universal law of nature." This is a binding law, Kant argued, on any rational being with free will. Williams argued against the categorical imperative in his paper "Persons, character and morality". Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as though we are not who we are in the circumstances in which we presently find ourselves. We should not have to take an impartial view of the world, he argued. Our values, commitments, and desires do make a difference to how we see the world and how we act; and so they should, he said, otherwise we lose our individuality, and thereby our humanity.[15]
Reasons for action[link]
Further information: Internalism and externalism#Moral philosophy
Williams's insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that acting out of rational self-interest and even selfishness are not contrary to moral action, is illustrated in his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate. Philosophers have tried to argue that moral agents can have "external reasons" for performing a moral act; that is, they are able to act for reasons external to their inner mental states. Williams argued that this is meaningless. For something to be a "reason to act," it must be "magnetic"; that is, it must move people to action. But how can something entirely external to us—for example, the proposition that X is good—be "magnetic"? By what process can something external to us move us to act? Williams argued that it cannot. Cognition is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, he wrote, and a person must feel before they are moved to act. He argued that reasons for action are always internal, whether based on a desire to act in accordance with upbringing, peer pressure, or similar, and they always boil down to desire.[16]
Truth[link]
In his final completed book, Truth And Truthfulness: An Essay In Genealogy (2002), Williams identifies the two basic values of truth as accuracy and sincerity, and tries to address the gulf between the demand for truth, and the doubt that any such thing exists. The debt to Nietzsche is clear, most obviously in the adoption of a genealogical method as a tool of explanation and critique. Although part of his intention was to attack those he felt denied the value of truth, the book cautions that, to understand it simply in that sense, would be to miss part of its purpose; rather, as Kenneth Baker wrote, it is "Williams' reflection on the moral cost of the intellectual vogue for dispensing with the concept of truth."[4] The Guardian wrote in its obituary of Williams that the book is an examination of those who "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology".[10]
Legacy[link]
Williams did not propose any systematic philosophical theory; indeed, he was suspicious of any such attempt. Alan Thomas writes that his contribution to ethics was an overarching scepticism about attempts to create a foundation to moral philosophy, explicitly articulated in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993), where he argued that moral theories can never reflect the complexities of life, particularly given the radical pluralism of modern societies.[17] Jonathan Lear writes that Williams wanted to understand human beings as part of the natural world, and that the fundamental starting point of moral reflection had to be the individual perspective, the internal reasons for action. To try to transcend one's point of view, Williams argued, leads only to self-deception.[18]
In a secular humanist tradition, with no appeal to the external moral authority of a god, his ideas strike at the foundation of conventional morality, namely that one sometimes does good even if one does not want to, and can be blamed for a failure to do so. Timothy Chappell writes that, without external reasons for action, it becomes impossible to argue that the same set of moral reasons applies to all agents equally, because an agent's reasons can always be relativised to their particular lives, their internal reasons.[12] In cases where someone has no internal reason to do what others see as the right thing, they cannot be blamed for failing to do it, because internal reasons are the only reasons, and blame, Williams wrote, "involves treating the person who is blamed like someone who had a reason to do the right thing but did not do it."[19] Chappell writes that learning to be yourself, to be authentic and to act with integrity, rather than conforming to any external moral system, is arguably the fundamental motif of Williams's work.[12] "If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression," Williams said in 2002. "It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't ... The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity."[6] He moved moral philosophy away from the Kantian question, "What is my duty?" and back to the issue that mattered to the Greeks: "How should we live?"[5]
Publications[link]
- Books
- Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 1972.
- Problems of the Self. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- (with J. J. C. Smart) Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harvester Press, 1978.
- Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
- Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1993.
- Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- The Great Philosophers: Plato. London: Routledge, 1998.
- Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press, 2002.
- Papers
- "Pagan Justice and Christian Love", Apeiron 26.3–4, 1993, pp. 195–207.
- "Cratylus's Theory of Names and Its Refutation", in Language, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- "The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari", Pennsylvania Law Review 142, May 1994.
- "Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy", in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham, Oxford University Press, 1994.
- "Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts", in Aristotle and Moral Realism, ed. Robert Heinaman, Westview Press, 1995.
- "Ethics", in Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- "Identity and Identities", in Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, ed. Henry Harris, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- "Truth in Ethics", Ratio 8.3, 1995, pp. 227–42.
- "Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look", in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. N. F. Bunnin (ed.), Blackwell, 1996.
- "History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection", in The Sources of Normativity. Onora O'Neill (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- "Reasons, Values and the Theory of Persuasion", in Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behavior, ed. Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn and Stafano Vannucci, Oxford University Press, 1996.
- "The Politics of Trust", in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yeager, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
- "The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics", in The Greeks and Us, R. B. Louden and P. Schollmeier (eds.), Chicago University Press, 1996.
- "Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in Toleration: An Exclusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd, Princeton University Press, 1996.
- "Truth, Politics and Self-Deception", Social Research 63.3 (Fall 1996).
- "Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom", Cambridge Law Journal 56, 1997.
- "Stoic Philosophy and the Emotions: Reply to Richard Sorabji", in Aristotle and After, R. Sorabji (ed.), Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 68, 1997.
- "Tolerating the Intolerable", in The Politics of Toleration. ed. Susan Mendus, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
- "Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline", Philosophy 75, October 2000, pp. 477–496.
- "Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology", in Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Neil Roughley, ed. de Gruyter, 2000.
- Posthumously published
- In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Philosophy As A Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore, Princeton University Press, 2006.
- The Sense Of The Past: Essays In The Philosophy Of History, ed. Myles Burnyeat, Princeton University Press, 2006.
- On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006.
Notes[link]
- ^ a b c d e "Professor Sir Bernard Williams", The Times, 14 June 2003.
- ^ a b Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2003.
- ^ McGinn, Colin, "Isn't It the Truth?" The New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003.
- ^ a b c Baker, Kenneth. Bernard Williams: Carrying the torch for truth, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 September 2002.
- ^ a b c Nussbaum, Martha. "Tragedy and Justice", Boston Review, October/November 2003.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Jeffries, Stuart. "The Quest for Truth" The Guardian, 30 November 2002.
- ^ A List of Sather Professors, University of California, Berkeley, accessed June 14, 2009.
- ^ a b Bernard A. O. Williams, University of California, accessed June 14, 2009.
- ^ Fodor, Jerry. "Life in tune", The Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 2007.(Subscription required)
- ^ a b c d O'Grady, Jane. Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Guardian, 13 June 2003.
- ^ a b Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 98 ff.
- ^ a b c Chappell, Timothy. Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 1, 2006.
- Also see Williams, Bernard.Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 117.
- ^ Williams, Bernard.Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985, chapter 6.
- ^ Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972); Problems of the Self (1973); Utilitarianism: For and Against with J.J.C. Smart (1973); Moral Luck (1981); and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).
- ^ Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- ^ Williams, Bernard. "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame", 1989, reprinted in Making Sense of Humanity, and other philosophical papers. Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 35–45.
- Also see Williams, Bernard. "Replies", in Altham, J.E.J & Harrison, Ross (eds.), World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 185–224.
- And Williams, Bernard. "Postscript: Some Further Notes on Internal and External Reasons", in Millgram E. (ed.) Varieties of Practical Reasoning. MIT Press, 2001, pp. 91–97.
- ^ Thomas, Alan. "Williams, Bernard" in Audi, Robert. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- ^ Lear, Jonathan. Psychoanalysis and the Idea of a Moral Psychology, Inquiry 47: 515–522.
- ^ Williams, Bernard. "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame", 1989, reprinted in Making Sense of Humanity, and other philosophical papers. Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 42.
References[link]
- Baker, Kenneth. Bernard Williams: Carrying the torch for truth An interview with Bernard Williams, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 September 2002.
- Chappell, Timothy. Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 1, 2006.
- Fodor Jerry. Life in tune, The Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 2007.
- Jeffries, Stuart). The Quest for Truth The Guardian, 30 November 2002.
- Lear, Jonathan. Psychoanalysis and the Idea of a Moral Psychology, Inquiry 47, 2002, pp. 515–522.
- McGinn, Colin. Isn't It the Truth? The New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003.
- Nussbaum, Martha. Tragedy and Justice Boston Review, October/November 2003.
- O'Grady, Jane. Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Guardian, 13 June 2003.
- Pearson, Richard. Philosopher Bernard Williams Dies: Weighed Questions of Moral Identify The Washington Post, 18 June 2003.
- Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- Thomas, Alan. "Williams, Bernard" in Audi, Robert. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Williams, Bernard.Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
- Williams, Bernard. "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame", 1989, reprinted in Making Sense of Humanity, and other philosophical papers. Cambridge University Press, 1995: 35–45.
- Williams, Bernard. "Replies", in Altham, J.E.J & Harrison, Ross (eds.), World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Williams, Bernard. "Postscript: Some Further Notes on Internal and External Reasons", in Millgram E. (ed.) Varieties of Practical Reasoning. MIT Press, 2001.
- Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2003.
- Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Times, 14 June 2003.
- Bernard Williams The Economist, 26 June 2003.
Further reading[link]
- "A live chat with Bernard Williams", GuardianUnlimited, November 2002.
- Foot, Philippa. "Reasons for Action and Desires", in Raz, Joseph (ed). Practical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, 1978.
- McGinn, Colin. Isn't it the truth? New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003.
- Sen, Amartya. Ethics and Economics, Blackwell, 1989.
- Sen, Amartya; Williams, Bernard; and Ratoff Robinson, William (eds.). Utilitarianism and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Thomas, Alan (ed.). Bernard Williams. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Williams, Bernard. "Why Philosophy Needs History", London Review of Books, 17 October 2002.
- Williams, Bernard and Alex Voorhoeve. "A Mistrustful Animal: A Conversation with Bernard Williams" in Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009.
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Edmund Leach |
Provost of King's College, Cambridge 1979–1987 |
Succeeded by Patrick Bateson |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen |
| Alternative names | Williams, Bernard |
| Short description | English academic philosopher |
| Date of birth | 21 September 1929 |
| Place of birth | Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex |
| Date of death | 10 June 2003 |
| Place of death | Rome |
http://wn.com/Bernard_Williams
Related pages:
http://ru.wn.com/Уильямс, Бернард
http://fr.wn.com/Bernard Williams
http://nl.wn.com/Bernard Williams (filosoof)
http://pt.wn.com/Bernard Williams
http://de.wn.com/Bernard Williams
http://it.wn.com/Bernard Williams (filosofo)
http://pl.wn.com/Bernard Williams (filozof)
http://id.wn.com/Bernard Williams
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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 |
A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (April 2011) |
John Cottingham is an English philosopher, educated at Merchant Taylors’ School near London, and St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow, Heythrop College, University of London, Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and editor of Ratio: the International Journal of Analytic Philosophy. The focus of his research has been early-modern philosophy (Rene Descartes was the subject of his DPhil at Oxford), the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy.[1][2] Cottingham has served as a president of the Aristotelian Society, the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, the Mind Association and as Chairman of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. A Festschrift with responses by Cottingam, The Moral Life, was published by Palgrave in 2008.[2]
Contents |
Descartes[link]
In his work on Descartes, Cottingham introduced trialism as an alternative interpretation of the mind-body dualism of Descartes. Although composed of two substances, mind and body, the human being possesses distinctive attributes in its own right (including sensations, passions, emotions), and these form a third category, that cannot be reduced to thought or extension.[3] Cottingham has also argued that Descartes’s view of animals as ‘machines’ does not have the reductionistic implications commonly supposed.[4] Finally, Cottingham has explored the importance of Descartes as a moral philosopher, with a comprehensive picture of the good life that draws both on his scientific work (in physiology and psychology) and also on the theistic outlook that informs all his philosophy.[5] Cottingham is co-editor and translator of the three-volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.[6]
Moral philosophy and philosophy of religion[link]
In Philosophy and the Good Life and other works Cottingham criticizes the psychological impoverishment of contemporary moral philosophy, and argues that any plausible theory of a good and integrated life for human beings needs to draw on the insights available from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective.[7] His work on partiality defends the importance of self-concern as a central ingredient in virtue. [8] In On the Meaning of Life, he addresses the relationship between moral, aesthetic and religious modes of awareness in constituting a meaningful life.[9] Cottingham’s more recent work in the philosophy of religion argues for the primacy of the moral and spiritual aspects of religious allegiance over theoretical and doctrinal components.[10]
Selected Works[link]
- (2009) Why Believe? Continuum
- (2008) Cartesian Reflections, Oxford University Press
- (2007) Western Philosophy, Blackwell
- (2005) The Spiritual Dimension , Cambridge University Press
- (2003) On the Meaning of Life, Routledge
- (1998) Philosophy and the good life: reason and the passions in Greek, Cartesian and psychoanalytic ethics, Cambridge University Press
- (1997) Descartes’s Philosophy of Mind, Orion
- (1988) The Rationalists, Oxford University Press
- (1986) Descartes, Blackwell
References[link]
- ^ http://www.reading.ac.uk/philosophy/about/staff/j-g-cottingham.aspx University of Reading: John Cottingham (Accessed 7th April 2011)
- ^ a b Athanassoulis, Nafsika and Vice, Samantha eds. (2008) The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham, Palgrave Macmillan
- ^ Cottingham, John (1985) ‘Cartesian Trialism’, Mind, XCIV No. 374, April, pp. 218-30. Reprinted in René Descartes, Critical Assessments, ed. G. Moyal (London: Routledge, 1991). Vol. III, pp. 236-248, and Cottingham, Cartesian Reflections, ch. 9.
- ^ Cottingham, John ‘A Brute to the Brutes? Descartes’ Treatment of Animals’, Philosophy Vol. 53 (1978), pp. 551-59; repr. in Cottingham, Cartesian Reflections, ch. 8.
- ^ Cottingham, John, Cartesian Reflections, chs 1, 12, 13.
- ^ J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and vol. III, The Correspondence, by the same translators plus A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l991).
- ^ Cottingham, John, Philosophy and the Good Life, ch. 4.
- ^ See Cottingham ‘The ethics of self-concern’, Ethics 101 (July 1991), pp. 798-817, ‘Partiality and the Virtues’, in R. Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? Essays on the Philosophy of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 57-76, and ‘‘Impartiality and Ethical Formation,’ in B. Feltham and J. Cottingham (eds), Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships and the Wider World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 65-83.
- ^ On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003)
- ^ The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
External links[link]
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Cottingham, John |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | |
| Place of birth | London |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
| This biography of a British philosopher is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
http://wn.com/John_Cottingham
Related pages:
http://es.wn.com/John Cottingham
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cottingham
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2010) |
| Mark Steel | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Mark Steel in 2008 |
|
| Born | (1960-07-04) 4 July 1960 (age 51) Swanley, Kent, United Kingdom |
| Medium | Stand-up, Television, Radio |
| Nationality | British |
| Years active | 1983-present |
| Genres | Political satire |
| Subject(s) | Politics |
| Influences | Tony Cliff |
| Notable works and roles | The Mark Steel Lectures The Mark Steel Revolution The Mark Steel Solution Mark Steel's in Town |
| Website | http://www.marksteelinfo.com/ |
Mark Steel (born 4 July 1960)[1] is an English socialist columnist, author and comedian. A stand-up comedian known for his left-wing beliefs (he was a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party before he resigned in 2007), he has made many appearances on radio and television shows as a guest panellist, and has written regular columns in printed media. He is perhaps best known for presenting The Mark Steel Lectures, The Mark Steel Revolution, The Mark Steel Solution, and Mark Steel's in Town.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Steel was adopted a few days after he was born.[2] He grew up in Swanley, Kent. He was expelled from Swanley Comprehensive School for attending a cricket course at the age of 15,[clarification needed] and went on to work in a garage. From there he went on to make his first public performance as a poet.
In the late 1970s his father suffered a mental breakdown and was placed into care at Stonehouse Hospital. The shabby conditions of the home reinforced Steel's political beliefs.[3]
Career[link]
Steel has given varying accounts of his early life: he became bored with constantly being asked how he had started in comedy and took to telling the questioner the first thing that came into his head. He is often described as having worked as a television repair man[4] but confesses that he has no technical ability whatsoever. He worked the comedy circuit for several years, and then in 1992 presented a satirical radio show The Mark Steel Solution on BBC Radio 5, consisting of half-hour monologues which offered solutions to social problems. It ran to four series. It's Not a Runner Bean, a comic autobiography, was published in 1996, and this led to a column in The Guardian.
Steel wrote a column for The Guardian between 1996 and 1999. He was sacked by that newspaper, according to him because The Guardian wanted to "realign towards Tony Blair" - though The Guardian denies this. In 2000 he started writing a weekly column for The Independent, which appears in the Wednesday Opinion Column.
He has written and performed several radio and television series for the BBC, and authored several books, as detailed below.
In 2005 he toured the UK and Ireland, where he discussed the French revolution in a light-hearted style.
Personal life[link]
Steel is a supporter of Crystal Palace F.C. and Kent County Cricket Club and enjoys watching both play on occasion. He was interviewed by Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special during the South Africa series, giving an interview on his love of cricket.[5]
He has a son (Elliot) and a daughter (Eloise) from a relationship, but he and his partner separated in 2006.[6]
Politics[link]
During the Thatcher years, when he was in his 20s, Steel developed his left-wing political views. His anger and frustration at society's injustices were vented by political protests, punk rock and poetry.
Seeing the Soviet Union as "shit", and state capitalist rather than truly socialist, Steel joined the Socialist Workers Party rather than the Communist Party.[3] He attended marches, strikes and demonstrations, and was present at the death of Blair Peach. In the early '80s he also persuaded his mother to allow striking steelworkers to spend a night in the Steel residence.[3] His political activism continued throughout the decade, from the miners' strike through to the Poll Tax Riots. During this time he moved into a squat with his old friend Mick Hannan, before taking up residence in a flat.[3]
In 2000 Steel took part in the London Assembly elections on behalf of the London Socialist Alliance (part of the Socialist Alliance) in the Croydon and Sutton constituency; he received 1,823 votes (1.5 per cent of the vote).
In 2007 he left the SWP and justified his decision in his book What's Going On? In the book he wrote that he left the party because whilst the membership base had become smaller and smaller, the members that remained became increasingly deluded regarding the size and relevance of the organisation. He also condemned the manner in which, at a time when there was broad public support for socialist ideals, increasingly bitter and futile in-fighting on the left made political success impossible. Alex Callinicos, International Secretary of the SWP, reviewed the book in the Socialist Review, arguing that it "evinces a kind of grandiose ignorance" and that "the only principle one can detect here is that the SWP is always in the wrong".[7] Literary critic Nicholas Lezard praised the book in The Guardian, particularly for its discussion of the break-up of Steel's relationship, which "gives it a poignancy and depth which at its outset one might not have expected".[8]
Steel is a Palestinian human rights activist, having been a member of the British-based ENOUGH! coalition that seeks to end the "Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank."[9]
Radio and television[link]
Radio[link]
- The Mark Steel Solution (1992, 1994–1996) BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio 4, repeated BBC 7
- The Mark Steel Revolution (1998) BBC Radio 4, (2007) repeated BBC 7 Australia - Radio National 17.30 2009-01-13 to 2009-01-16 and 2009-01-19 to 2009-01-23
- The Mark Steel Lectures (1999–2002) BBC Radio 4, (2007) repeated BBC 7
- Dedicated Troublemaker (2004) BBC Radio 4
- Mark Steel's in Town (2009–2011) BBC Radio 4
He has also contributed to or appeared on the following shows:
- The Good Human Guide BBC Radio 2(1985). Contributing writer.
- Extra Time BBC Radio 5. Presenter. Sports programme.
- Late Edition BBC Radio 4 (1995). Regular panellist on this satirical talk show.
- The News Quiz BBC Radio 4 several occasions from the late 1990s onwards. Guest panellist on this satirical news based panel game.
- Loose Ends BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.
- Midweek BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.
- Excess Baggage BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.
- Test Match Special BBC Radio 4. Lunchtime interviewee, 1 August 2008 - England vs South Africa, 3rd test, Edgbaston.
- I've Never Seen Star Wars BBC Radio 4 (2008). Interviewee
- Heresy BBC Radio 4 (2009).
Television[link]
- The Mark Steel Lectures BBC Four (2003, 2004, 2006). Writer and Presenter. Television version of his radio programme of the same title. Produced in association with The Open University.
He also appeared in the following shows:
- Red Dwarf BBC Two (1989). Playing 'Ski-man' in episode "Timeslides" (non-speaking part).
- Loose Talk (1994). Guest.
- The Late Jonathan Ross (1996). Guest.
- Does China Exist. (1997).
- If I Ruled the World BBC Two (1998). Guest panellist.
- Lamarr's Attacks BBC Two (2000). Guest.
- Never Mind the Buzzcocks BBC Two (2000, 2001). Guest panellist on the satirical music based panel game.
- Have I Got News for You BBC One (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). Guest panellist on this satirical news based panel game.
- Question Time BBC One (2003, 2005, 2012). Guest panellist on discussion show.
- QI BBC Two, BBC Four (2004, 2005, 2006). Guest panellist.
- Mock the Week, BBC Two (2005, 2006). Guest panellist.
- Room 101 BBC Two, (2006). Guest
Bibliography[link]
- Printed
- Vive La Revolution (2003) ISBN 0-7432-0805-6, (2004) ISBN 0-7432-0806-4 History of the French Revolution.
- Reasons To Be Cheerful (2001) ISBN 0-7432-0803-X, (2002) ISBN 0-7432-0804-8 Autobiography concentrating on political activism.
- It's Not A Runner Bean (1996) ISBN 1-899344-12-8, (2004) ISBN 1-904316-43-3 Autobiography concentrating on his comedy career.
- What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion (2008) ISBN 1-84737-281-9 Autobiography charting changes to his own personal life and the politics of the left.
- Audiobooks
- Reasons to Be Cheerful: From Punk to New Labour Through the Eyes of a Dedicated Troublemaker (2001) cassette ISBN 0-7435-0062-8
See also[link]
References[link]
- ^ IMDb Mark Steel. Retrieved 2011-11-08.
- ^ "The Week with George Galloway". 4/11/2011.
- ^ a b c d Steel, Mark (2001). Reasons to be Cheerful. Scribner UK. ISBN 0-7432-0804-8.
- ^ "Open2.net: How did you get into comedy?". Open University. http://www.open2.net/marksteel/o2interview.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
- ^ Interview on BBC's Test Match Special, 1 August 2008
- ^ "Anatomy of a break-up". The Independent. 24 September 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/heartbreak/anatomy-of-a-breakup-939706.html. Retrieved 2009-03-31.
- ^ Callinicos, Alex (September 2008). "What's Going On?". Socialist Review. http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10514. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
- ^ Lezard, Nicholas (11 April 2009). "Few things are funnier than ageing and disillusionment". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/11/mark-steel-review. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
- ^ "Emma Thompson bids for Palestinian Rights | The Electronic Intifada". electronicintifada.net. 27 January 2007. http://electronicintifada.net/content/emma-thompson-bids-palestinian-rights/3079. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
External links[link]
- Mark Steel's official website
- Open University site dedicated to the television version of The Mark Steel Lectures.
- Interviews at LeftLion, The Third Estate, and Socialist Review.
- Audio Files
- The Russian Revolution: Was It A Coup? - Lecture at Marxism 1999 (MP3)
- Karl Marx - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2002 (MP3)
- The French Revolution - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2002 (MP3)
- Viva La Revolution A Stand Up History Of The French Revolution - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2003 (MP3)
- Large selection of audio (mp3) and video (mp4) files available at www.marksteelinfo.com/audiovideo/
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Steel, Mark |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | English comedian |
| Date of birth | 4 July 1960 |
| Place of birth | Swanley, Kent, United Kingdom |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Mark_Steel
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steel
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
