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- Academic rank
- Acosmism
- Adaptationism
- Afterlife
- Agnosticism
- Alan Turing
- Albert Einstein
- Albrecht Ritschl
- Alchemy
- Alexander Bain
- Alfred Jules Ayer
- Algorithmic
- Alvin Goldman
- Alvin Plantinga
- American philosopher
- American philosophy
- Analysis
- Analytic philosophy
- Animism
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Anthony Kenny
- Anti-realism
- Antireligion
- Antony Flew
- Aortic dissection
- Apophatic theology
- Argument from beauty
- Argument from degree
- Argument from desire
- Argument from love
- Argument from reason
- Aristotle
- Arthur Holly Compton
- Atheism
- Atheist
- Atheist's Wager
- Auguste Comte
- Augustine of Hippo
- Augustinian theodicy
- Autodidacticism
- Averroes
- Bachelor of Arts
- Baron d'Holbach
- Baruch Spinoza
- Bas van Fraassen
- Behaviorism
- Beirut
- Berlin Circle
- Bertrand Russell
- Biologist
- Blaise Pascal
- Boethius
- Boston
- Brahman
- Brainstorms
- Brights movement
- C. D. Broad
- Carl Gustav Hempel
- Cartesian theater
- Causality
- Charles Darwin
- Charles Hartshorne
- Charlotte Dennett
- Chinese room
- Christian humanism
- Christopher Hitchens
- Coevolution
- Cognition
- Cognitive science
- Cognitive scientist
- Coherentism
- Compatibilism
- Concept
- Concept and object
- Confirmation holism
- Conscious Robots
- Consciousness
- Contextualism
- Conventionalism
- Criticism of science
- Daniel Dennett
- David C. Geary
- David Hume
- David Sloan Wilson
- Deathbed conversion
- Deepity
- Definite description
- Deism
- Demarcation problem
- Demiurge
- Denotation
- Desiderius Erasmus
- Desire (emotion)
- Determinism
- Dharma
- Dharmakirti
- Divine simplicity
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Douglas Hofstadter
- Dualism
- E. O. Wilson
- East Asian religions
- Edmund Husserl
- Elbow Room (book)
- Emergent materialism
- Emil Brunner
- Empirical
- Empiricism
- Epicureanism
- Epiphenomenalism
- Epistemology
- Erasmus Prize
- Ernst Cassirer
- Ernst Haeckel
- Ernst Troeltsch
- Esotericism
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- Evolution of emotion
- Evolutionary biology
- Exclusivism
- Exegesis
- Existence of God
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- Fact
- Faith
- Fallibilism
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- Feminist theology
- Foundationalism
- Four Horsemen
- Francis Bacon
- Free will
- Freedom Evolves
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Fulbright Fellowship
- Fundamentalism
- G. E. M. Anscombe
- G. E. Moore
- Galileo Galilei
- George Santayana
- Gilbert Ryle
- Gnosticism
- God in Buddhism
- God in Christianity
- God in Hinduism
- God in Islam
- God in Jainism
- God in Mormonism
- God in Sikhism
- Gottlob Frege
- Greedy reductionism
- Group selection
- Harald Høffding
- Harvard University
- Henotheism
- Henri Bergson
- Henri Poincaré
- Henry Margenau
- Heraclitus
- Herbert Spencer
- Heterophenomenology
- Hilary Putnam
- History of religions
- History of science
- Holism
- Holy Spirit
- Hugh of Saint Victor
- Human evolution
- Humanism
- Idea
- Immanuel Kant
- Imre Lakatos
- Inclusive fitness
- Inclusivism
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- Inductive reasoning
- Infinitism
- Ingenuity
- Inquiry
- Instrumentalism
- Intelligence
- Intentional stance
- Intentionality
- Introspection
- Intuition pump
- Irenaean theodicy
- Isaac Newton
- J. L. Austin
- J. L. Mackie
- Jaakko Hintikka
- Jared Diamond
- Jean Nicod Prize
- Jean-Luc Marion
- John Dewey
- John Haugeland
- John Searle
- John Stuart Mill
- John Tooby
- John Wisdom
- Jürgen Habermas
- Karl Barth
- Karl Marx
- Karl Pearson
- Karl Popper
- Karl Theodor Jaspers
- Kin selection
- Language of thought
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- Larry Laudan
- Lebanon
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- List of philosophies
- Logical atomism
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- Naïve realism
- Ned Block
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- New Age
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- Noam Chomsky
- Nondualism
- Nontheism
- North Andover
- Observation
- Occam's razor
- Omnipotence paradox
- Ontological argument
- Otto Neurath
- P. F. Strawson
- Pain (philosophy)
- Paleontologist
- Pandeism
- Panentheism
- Pantheism
- Paradigm
- Paradox of analysis
- Pascal Boyer
- Pascal's Wager
- Paul Feyerabend
- Paul Grice
- Paul Häberlin
- Paul Tillich
- Pavel Florensky
- Perennial philosophy
- Personal god
- Peter Geach
- Peter Hacker
- Peter Kropotkin
- Peter Singer
- Phenomenalism
- Philosophical logic
- Philosophy of mind
- Philosophy of self
- Philosophy Talk
- Physicalism
- Pierre Duhem
- Pierre Gassendi
- Plato
- Polytheism
- Portal Philosophy
- Portal Psychology
- Portal Thinking
- Positivism
- Possible world
- Pragmatism
- Problem of evil
- Problem of Hell
- Problem of induction
- Process theology
- Property dualism
- Pseudoscience
- Qualia
- R.B. Braithwaite
- Randomness
- Rationalism
- Ray Jackendoff
- Reciprocal altruism
- Reductionism
- Reinhold Niebuhr
- Religion
- Religious belief
- Religious humanism
- Religious language
- Religious naturalism
- Religious philosophy
- René Descartes
- René Guénon
- Rhetoric of science
- Richard Dawkins
- Richard Lewontin
- Richard Rorty
- Richard Swinburne
- Rigid designator
- Robert Kilwardby
- Robert Trivers
- Robin Dunbar
- Roger Bacon
- Rudolf Carnap
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- Sergei Bulgakov
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- Stephen Jay Gould
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- Theory choice
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- Thomas Aquinas
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- Thomas Nagel
- Thomas Samuel Kuhn
- Thought experiment
- Transcendentalism
- Tufts University
- Type physicalism
- Understanding
- University of Oxford
- Unmoved mover
- Vasubandhu
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- W. V. Quine
- W.V.O. Quine
- Wesleyan University
- Western Philosophy
- Wikipedia Persondata
- Wikisource
- Wilfrid Sellars
- Wilhelm Windelband
- Wilhelm Wundt
- William Alston
- William James
- William L. Rowe
- William Lane Craig
- William of Ockham
- William Whewell
- William Wollaston
- World War II
- Writer
- Zhuangzi
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Beirut
Coordinates: 33°53′13″N 35°30′47″E / 33.88694°N 35.51306°E / 33.88694; 35.51306
Beirut (Arabic: بيروت Bayrūt, Greek: Βηρυττός, Latin: Berytus, French: Beyrouth, Hebrew: ביירות Beyrut) is the capital and largest city of Lebanon. As there has been no recent population census, the exact population is unknown; estimates in 2007 ranged from slightly less than 1 million to slightly more than 2 million. Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coast, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport. The Beirut metropolitan area consists of the city and its suburbs. The first mention of this metropolis is found in the ancient Egyptian Tell el Amarna letters, dating from the 15th century BC. The city has been inhabited continuously since then.
Beirut is Lebanon's seat of government and plays a central role in the Lebanese economy, with many banks and corporations based in its city centre, Hamra Street, Rue Verdun and Ashrafieh. The city is the focal point of the region's cultural life, renowned for its press, theatres, cultural activities and nightlife. After the destructive Lebanese Civil War, Beirut underwent major reconstruction, and the redesigned historic city centre, marina, pubs and nightlife districts have once again made it a tourist attraction. Beirut was named the top place to visit by The New York Times in 2009, and as one of the ten liveliest cities in the world by Lonely Planet in the same year.
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Boston
Boston (pronounced /ˈbɒstən/ or locally /ˈbɔstən/ (
listen)) is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper, covering only 48.43 square miles, had a population of 617,594 according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Boston is also the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country. Greater Boston as a commuting region is home to 7.6 million people, making it the fifth-largest Combined Statistical Area in the United States.
In 1630, Puritan colonists from England founded the city on the Shawmut Peninsula. During the late 18th century, Boston was the location of several major events during the American Revolution, including the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. Several early battles of the American Revolution, such as the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, occurred within the city and surrounding areas. Through land reclamation and municipal annexation, Boston has expanded beyond the peninsula. After American independence was attained Boston became a major shipping port and manufacturing center, and its rich history now helps attract many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone attracting over 20 million every year. The city was the site of several firsts, including America's first public school, Boston Latin School (1635), and the first subway system in the United States (1897).
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Harvard University
Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
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Lebanon
Lebanon (
i/ˈlɛbənɒn/ or /ˈlɛbənən/; Arabic: لبنان Libnān or Lubnān, Lebanese Arabic: [lɪbˈneːn]), officially the Lebanese Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية اللبنانية al-Jumhūrīyah al-Libnānīyah, Lebanese Arabic: [elˈʒʊmhuːɾɪjje l.ˈlɪbneːnɪjje]), is a country in the East Mediterranean. It is bordered by Syria to the north and east, and Israel to the south. Lebanon's location at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian hinterland has dictated its rich history, and shaped a cultural identity of religious and ethnic diversity.
The earliest evidence of civilization in Lebanon dates back more than 7,000 years—predating recorded history. Lebanon was the home of the Phoenicians, a maritime culture that flourished for nearly 2,500 years (3000–539 BC). Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the five provinces that comprise modern Lebanon were mandated to France. The French expanded the borders of Mount Lebanon, which was mostly populated by Maronite Catholics and Druze, to include more Muslims. Lebanon gained independence in 1943, and established a unique political system, known as confessionalism, a power-sharing mechanism based on religious communities – Bechara El Khoury who became independent Lebanon's first President and Riad El-Solh, who became Lebanon's first prime minister, are considered the founders of the modern Republic of Lebanon and are national heroes for having led the country's independence. French troops withdrew from Lebanon in 1946.
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Massachusetts
Massachusetts (i/ˌmæsəˈtʃuːsɨts/), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. Massachusetts is the 7th least extensive, but the 14th most populous and the 3rd most densely populated of the 50 United States. The state features two separate metropolitan areas – the eastern Boston metropolitan area and the western Springfield metropolitan area. Approximately two thirds of the state's population lives in Greater Boston, most of which is either urban or suburban. Western Massachusetts features one urban area – the Knowledge Corridor along the Connecticut River – and a mix of college towns and rural areas. Massachusetts is the most populous of the six New England states and has the US's sixth highest GDP per capita.
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North Andover
North Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. North Andover is the home of Merrimack College, a private, Catholic four-year institution (though the college has expanded into Andover as well).
From 1646 to her death in 1672, North Andover was the home of America's first published poet, Anne Dudley Bradstreet and her family. Mistress Bradstreet, her husband Simon and six of their children (Dudley and John were born after moving from Ipswich) helped found this original Andover Parish.
North Andover is the parent town of the Andovers. The lands south of the Merrimack River around Lake Cochichewick and the Shawsheen River were set aside by the Massachusetts General Court in 1634 for the purpose of creating an inland plantation. The Cochichewick Plantation, as it was called, was purchased on May 6, 1646 when Reverend John Woodbridge, who had settled the land for the English, paid Penacook chief Cutshmache six pounds for the lands. The plantation was then incorporated as Andover, most likely in honor of the hometown of many early residents, Andover, Hampshire, England. The town was centered in what is now North Andover, but the spread of settlement south and west of the old town center created much conflict in the early years about the location of the parish church. In 1709, the matter was brought to the General Court, which set aside two parish churches, north and south. The parishes grew apart as the years went on and on April 7, 1855 the North parish (ironically, the original parish) separated from the south and was incorporated as North Andover.
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Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. The university is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts. The university emphasizes active citizenship and public service in all of its disciplines more than any peer school and is well known for its internationalism and study abroad programs. Among its schools is the United States' oldest graduate school of international relations, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
In 1852, Tufts College was founded by Christian Universalists who worked for years to open a non-sectarian institution of higher learning.Charles Tufts donated the land for the campus on Walnut Hill, the highest point in Medford, saying that he wanted to set a "light on the hill." The name was changed to Tufts University in 1954, although the corporate name remains "the Trustees of Tufts College." After more than a century, Tufts was a small New England liberal arts college. The French-American nutritionist Jean Mayer became president of Tufts in the late 1970s and, through a series of mergers with other institutions, transformed the school into an internationally renowned research university. It consistently ranks among the country's best colleges.
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University of Oxford
Coordinates: 51°45′40″N 1°15′12″W / 51.7611°N 1.2534°W / 51.7611; -1.2534
The University of Oxford (informally Oxford University or Oxford) is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096. The University grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. In post-nominals, the University of Oxford was historically abbreviated as Oxon. (from the Latin Oxoniensis), although Oxf is now used in official university publications.
After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge, where they established what became the University of Cambridge. The two ancient English universities have many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge. In addition to their cultural and practical associations, as a historic part of British society, they have a long history of rivalry with each other.
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Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, United States founded in 1831. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and sciences, also provides graduate research in many academic disciplines, and grants PhD degrees primarily in the sciences and mathematics. Wesleyan is the second most productive liberal arts college in the United States with respect to the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs in all fields of study.
Founded under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the now secular university was the first institution of higher education to be named after John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. About 20 unrelated colleges and universities were subsequently named after Wesley. Wesleyan, along with Amherst College and Williams College, is a member of the historic Little Three colleges and has long been known as one of the Little Ivies.
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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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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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Alfred Jules Ayer
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer /ɛər/ (29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989) was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956).
Ayer was a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent during the Second World War. He was the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959, when he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952. He was knighted in 1970.
Ayer was born in St John's Wood, London, to a wealthy European family. His mother, Reine Citroën, was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France. His father, Jules Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.
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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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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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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 Holly Compton
Arthur Holly Compton (September 10, 1892 – March 15, 1962) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery of the Compton effect. He served as Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1945 to 1953.
Arthur Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio in 1892 to Elias and Otelia Compton. They were an academic family. His father Elias was dean of Wooster University (later The College of Wooster), which Arthur attended, and also became a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. His eldest brother Karl also attended Wooster University, became a physicist, and was later president of MIT. His second brother Wilson Martindale Compton also attended Wooster University and became a diplomat and president of the State College of Washington, later Washington State University. All three brothers earned their Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University.
Around 1913, Arthur Compton devised a demonstration method for the Earth's rotation. In 1918, he began studying X-ray scattering. In 1922, while on faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, Compton found that X-ray wavelengths increase due to scattering of the radiant energy by "free electrons". The scattered quanta have less energy than the quanta of the original ray. This discovery, known as the "Compton effect," or "Compton scattering" demonstrates the "particle" concept of electromagnetic radiation and earned Compton the Nobel Prize in physics in 1927. Compton developed the method for observing at the same instant individual scattered X-ray photons and the recoil electrons (developed with Alfred W. Simon). In Germany, Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger independently developed a similar method.
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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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Baron d'Holbach
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (8 December 1723 – 21 January 1789) was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He is best known for his atheism and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being the System of Nature (1770).
D’Holbach's mother Catherine Jacobina née Holbach (1684–1743) was the daughter of Johannes Jacobus Holbach († 1723) the Prince-Bishop's tax collector, or better for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Speyer. His father, Johann Jakob Dietrich, (with other notations: ger.: Johann Jakob Dirre; fr.: Jean Jacques Thiry) (1672–1756) was a wine-grower.
He was raised in Paris by his uncle Franz Adam Holbach, (or Adam François d’Holbach or Messire François-Adam, Baron d’Holbach, Seigneur de Heeze, Leende et autres Lieux) (approx. 1675–1753), who had become a millionaire by speculating on the Paris stock-exchange. With his financial support, d’Holbach attended the University of Leiden from 1744 to 1748 and went on to marry his second cousin, Basile-Geneviève d'Aine (1728–1754), on 11 December 1750. In 1753 both his uncle and his father died, leaving the 30-year-old d'Holbach with an enormous inheritance, such as Heeze Castle, Kasteel Heeze te Heeze.
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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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Bas van Fraassen
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen (born in Goes, the Netherlands on 5 April 1941) is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, teaching courses in the philosophy of science, philosophical logic and the role of models in scientific practice. He previously taught at Yale University, the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He coined the term "constructive empiricism" in his 1980 book The Scientific Image. Van Fraassen earned his B.A. (1963) from the University of Alberta and his M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1966, under the direction of Adolf Grünbaum) from the University of Pittsburgh.
A philosopher of science, van Fraassen's 1989 book Laws and Symmetry attempted to lay the ground-work for explaining physical phenomena without using the assumption that such phenomena are caused by rules or laws which can be said to cause or govern their behavior. Focusing on the problem of underdetermination, he argued for the possibility that theories could have empirical equivalence but differ in their ontological commitments. He rejects the notion that the aim of science is to produce an account of the physical world that is literally true, but rather that its aim is to produce theories that are empirically adequate. Van Fraassen has also studied the philosophy of quantum mechanics, philosophical logic, and epistemology.
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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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C. D. Broad
C. D. Broad (full name Charlie Dunbar Broad; 30 December 1887 – 11 March 1971) was an English epistemologist, historian of philosophy, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, and writer on the philosophical aspects of psychical research. He was known for his thorough and dispassionate examinations of arguments in such works as Scientific Thought, published in 1923, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, published in 1925, and Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, published in 1933.
Broad's essay on "Determinism, Indeterminism, and Libertarianism" in Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952) introduced the philosophical terms "occurrent causation" and "non-occurrent causation", which became the basis for today's "agent causal" and "event causal" distinctions in the debates on Libertarian Free Will.
Broad was born in Harlesden, in Middlesex, England. He was educated at Dulwich College from 1900 until 1906. He gained a scholarship to study at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1906. In 1910 he graduated with First-Class Honours, with distinction.
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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 Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.
Darwin published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.
Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.
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Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.
Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.
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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 C. Geary
David C. Geary (born June 7, 1957 in Providence, Rhode Island) is a notable United States cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences. He is currently a Curators’ and Thomas Jefferson Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
Geary received a BS degree in psychology from Santa Clara University (California) in 1979, and an MS from the clinical child/school psychology program at California State University at Hayward (now East Bay) in 1981. After completing the MS degree, he worked for the emergency treatment center of the Mental Research Institute [1] in Palo Alto, California, and began the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Riverside, in 1982. His initial interests were in hemispheric laterality and associated sex differences, but focused his dissertation work on mathematical cognition under the direction of Keith Widaman (now at UC, Davis). After completing his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1986, he took a one-year teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso and then moved to the University of Missouri, first at the Rolla campus (1987–89) and then in Columbia. During this time, he served as chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences (2002–2005) and contributed heavily to the creation of the Ph.D. program in developmental psychology [2].
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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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David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson (born 1949) is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is a son of the author Sloan Wilson.
Wilson graduated with a B.A. with high Honors in 1971 from the University of Rochester. He then completed his Ph.D. in 1975 from Michigan State University. He then worked as a Research Fellow in the Biological Laboratories at Harvard University from 1974-1975. He then held a dual position as a Research Associate in Zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Washington from 1975-1976. After this he was a Senior Research Officer at the South African National Research Institute for the Mathematical Sciences from 1976-1977. Wilson then moved back to the United States and held an Assistant Professorship in the Division of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Davis from 1977-1980. He then served as an Assistant and then Associate Professor at the Kellogg Biological Station and Department of Zoology of Michigan State University from 1980-1988. Wilson was then promoted to full Professor of Biological Sciences at the State University of New York, Binghamton in 1988. He was then given a joint appointment as Professor of Anthropology in 2001.
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Deepity
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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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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Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Award for Science.
Hofstadter was born in New York City, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor, and he attended the International School of Geneva in 1958–1959. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1965. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.
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E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants.
Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He is known for his scientific career, his role as "the father of sociobiology", his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.
As of 2007, he is Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
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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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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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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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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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G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore OM, (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher. He was, with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (before them) Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Along with Russell, he led the turn away from idealism in British philosophy, and became well known for his advocacy of common sense concepts, his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, and "his exceptional personality and moral character." He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a highly influential member of the Bloomsbury Group, and the editor of the influential journal Mind.
Moore was educated at Dulwich College, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and Moral Sciences. He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1898, and went on to hold the University of Cambridge chair of mental philosophy and logic, from 1925 to 1939. He was the brother of the writer and engraver Thomas Sturge Moore.
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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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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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Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925, pronounced [ˈɡɔtloːp ˈfreːɡə ]) was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on the philosophy of language and mathematics. While he was mainly ignored by the intellectual world when he published his writings, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) introduced his work to later generations of logicians and philosophers.
Frege was born in 1848 in Wismar, in the state of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (the modern German federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). His father Carl (Karl) Alexander Frege (3 August 1809 – 30 November 1866) was the co-founder and headmaster of a girls' high school until his death. After Carl's death, the school was led by Frege's mother Auguste Wilhelmine Sophie Frege (née Bialloblotzky, 12 January 1815 – 14 October 1898).
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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 Margenau
Henry Margenau (1901 - February 8, 1997) was a German-U.S. physicist, and philosopher of science.
Born in Bielefeld, Germany, Margenau obtained his bachelor's degree from Midland Lutheran College, Nebraska before his M.Sc. from the University of Nebraska in 1926, and PhD from Yale University in 1929.
Margenau worked on the theory of microwaves and the development of duplexing systems that enabled a single radar antenna both to transmit and receive signals. He also worked on spectral line broadening, a technique used to analyse and review the dynamics of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Margenau wrote extensively on science, his works including: Ethics and Science, The Nature of Physical Reality, Quantum Mechanics and Integrative Principles of Modern Thought.
In 1968, Margenau was invited to give the Wimmer Lecture at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. His topic was Scientific Indeterminism and Human Freedom. Margenau embraced indeterminism as the first step toward a solution of the problem of human freedom.
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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 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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J. L. Austin
John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911, Lancaster– 8 February 1960, Oxford) was a British philosopher of language, notable as author of the revolutionary idea claiming that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through speech acts, which for linguistics was as revolutionary a discovery as the discovery that measurement itself can change the measured reality was for physics.
The second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and his wife Mary Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948), Austin was born in Lancaster. In 1922 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonard's School, St Andrews.
Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford, holding classical scholarships at both.
He arrived at Oxford in 1929 to read Literae Humaniores ('Greats'), and in 1931 gained a First in classical moderations and also won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. Greats introduced him to serious philosophy and gave him a life-long interest in Aristotle. In 1933, he got first class honours in his Finals.
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J. L. Mackie
John Leslie Mackie (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on meta-ethics, especially his defence of moral skepticism.
He authored six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating that "There are no objective values". It goes on to argue that because of this ethics must be invented, rather than discovered.
John Leslie Mackie was born 25 August 1917 in Sydney. His mother, Annie Burnett Duncan, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Alexander Mackie, was professor of education at the University of Sydney as well as the principal of the Sydney Teachers College, and was influential in the educational system of New South Wales. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938 after studying under John Anderson, sharing the medal in philosophy with eminent jurist Harold Glass. Mackie received the Wentworth Travelling Fellowship to study Greats at Oriel College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in 1940.
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Jaakko Hintikka
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (born January 12, 1929) is a Finnish philosopher and logician.
Hintikka was born in Vantaa. After teaching for a number of years at Florida State University, Stanford, University of Helsinki, and the Academy of Finland, he is currently Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. The prolific author or co-author of over 30 books and over 300 scholarly articles has contributed to mathematical logic, philosophical logic, the philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, language theory, and the philosophy of science. His works have appeared in over nine languages.
Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. Early in his career, he devised a semantics of modal logic essentially analogous to Kripke's frame semantics, and discovered the now widely taught semantic tableau, independently of Evert Willem Beth. In recent decades, he has worked mainly on game semantics, and on independence-friendly logic, known for its "branching quantifiers" which he believes do better justice to our intuitions about quantifiers than does conventional first-order logic. He has done important exegetical work on Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, and C.S. Peirce. Hintikka's work can be seen as a continuation of analytic tendency in philosophy founded by Brentano and Peirce, advanced by Frege and Bertrand Russell, and continued by Carnap, Quine, and by Hintikka's teacher Georg Henrik von Wright. For instance, in 1998 he wrote The Principles of Mathematics Revisited which takes an exploratory stance comparable to that Russell made with his The Principles of Mathematics in 1903.
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Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, and he is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Bessarabian Jewish family. His father Louis K. Diamond was a physician and his mother Flora Kaplan a teacher, musician, and linguist. He attended the Roxbury Latin School and earned an A.B. from Harvard College in 1958 and a Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1961.
After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties, he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands. Then in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999 and an honorary doctorate by Westfield State University in 2009.
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Jean-Luc Marion
Jean-Luc Marion (born 3 July 1946) is a postmodern philosopher and a former student of Jacques Derrida. Marion's take on the postmodern is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. Although much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, it is rather his explicitly religious works that have garnered much recent attention. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida.
Marion was born in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine. Marion studied at the University of Nanterre (now the University Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) and the Sorbonne and then did graduate work in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. At the same time, Marion's deep interest in theology was privately cultivated under the personal influence of theologians such as Louis Bouyer, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. After receiving his doctorate in 1980, he began teaching at the University of Poitiers.
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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 Haugeland
John Haugeland (March 13, 1945 – June 23, 2010) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He was chair of the philosophy department from 2004 to 2007. He spent at most of his career teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. He had also been a visiting professor at Helsinki University, Finland.
Haugeland was a research fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He had also been a member of the Council for Philosophical Studies. Before attending graduate school Haugeland served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga.
Haugeland studied at Harvey Mudd College, where he obtained an undergraduate degree in physics. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Hans Sluga. At Berkeley, Hubert Dreyfus served as one of his important mentors.
In Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, Haugeland coined the term GOFAI. Haugeland's work has focused on the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, and Heidegger.
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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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John Tooby
John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology.
Tooby received his Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 1992, together with Leda Cosmides and Jerome Barkow, Tooby edited The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Tooby and Cosmides also co-founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology.
Tooby is currently working on a book on the evolution of sexual reproduction and genetic systems.
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John Wisdom
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom (John Wisdom; 12 September 1904, Leyton, Essex – 9 December 1993, Cambridge) was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician. He was influenced by G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work.
Wisdom was for most of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge, and became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. Near the end of his career he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1950 to 1951.
His famous "Parable of the Invisible Gardener" is a dialectic on the existence or absence of God.
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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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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 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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Leda Cosmides
Leda Cosmides, (born May 7, 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology.
Cosmides originally studied biology at Harvard University, receiving her A.B. in 1979. While an undergraduate she was influenced by the renowned evolutionary biologist Robert L. Trivers who was her advisor. In 1985, Cosmides received a Ph.D in cognitive psychology from Harvard and, after completing postdoctoral work under Roger Shepard at Stanford University, joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1991, becoming a full professor in 2000.
In 1992, together with John Tooby and Jerome Barkow, Cosmides edited The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. She and Tooby also co-founded and co-direct the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.
Cosmides was awarded the 1988 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research, the 1993 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2005 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Michael Dummett
Professor Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett, FBA, D.Litt (27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was a British philosopher. He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, most notably as an interpreter of Frege, and has made original contributions to the subject, particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications for the debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped popularize. He devised the Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the Borda count.
Dummett was the son of a merchant of silks. He studied at Sandroyd School and was a First Scholar at Winchester College, later winning a Major Scholarship to study History at Christ Church, Oxford in 1943. He was called up that year and served, initially as a private in the Royal Artillery before joining the Intelligence Corps in India and Malaya. He was also awarded a fellowship to All Souls College, Oxford.
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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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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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P. F. Strawson
Sir Peter Frederick Strawson FBA (23 November 1919 – 13 February 2006) was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) from 1968 to 1987. Before that he was appointed as a college lecturer at University College, Oxford in 1947 and became a tutorial fellow the following year until 1968. On his retirement in 1987, he returned to the college and continued working there until shortly before his death.
Peter Strawson was born in Ealing, West London, and brought up in Finchley, Middlesex, by his parents, both of whom were teachers. He was educated at Christ's College, Finchley, followed by St John's College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Strawson first became well known with his article "On Referring" (1950), a criticism of Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions (see also Definite descriptions). He was largely responsible for establishing metaphysics as a worthwhile direction in analytic philosophy.[citation needed]
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Pascal Boyer
Pascal Boyer is a French anthropologist, and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.
He advocates the idea that human instincts provide us with the basis for an intuitive theory of mind that guides our social relations, morality, and predilections toward religious beliefs. Boyer and others propose that these innate mental systems make human beings predisposed to certain cultural elements such as belief in supernatural beings.
Boyer has conducted long term ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, where he studied the transmission of oral epics, and has held teaching and research positions at several universities.
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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 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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Peter Hacker
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker (born 15 July 1939 in London) is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is known for his detailed exegesis of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his outspoken conceptual critique of cognitive neuroscience.
Peter Hacker studied philosophy, politics and economics at The Queen's College, Oxford from 1960-63. In 1963-65 he was senior Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he began graduate work under the supervision of Professor H. L. A. Hart. His D.Phil thesis "Rules and Duties" was completed in 1966 during a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.
Since 1966 Peter Hacker has been a fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and of the Oxford University philosophy department. His visiting positions at other universities include Makerere College, Uganda (1968); Swarthmore College, USA (1973 and 1986); University of Michigan, USA (1974); Milton C. Scott visiting professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada (1985); Visiting Fellow in Humanities at University of Bologna, Italy (2009). From 1985 to 1987 he was a British Academy Research Reader in the Humanities. In 1991-94 he was a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. Peter Hacker retired in 2006, but he has been appointed an Emeritus Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.
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Peter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geographer, writer, and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists.
Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.
Peter Kropotkin was born in Moscow, into the highest level of the Russian aristocracy. His mother was the daughter of a Cossack general. His father, Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, was a prince in Smolensk, of the Rurik dynasty which had ruled Russia before the rise of the Romanovs. Kropotkin's father owned large tracts of land and nearly 1200 male serfs in three provinces.
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Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective.
He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he unsuccessfully stood as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. He has been voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer serves on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.
Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.
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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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R.B. Braithwaite
Richard Bevan Braithwaite (15 January 1900–21 April 1990) was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. He was a lecturer in moral science at the University of Cambridge from 1934 to 1953, then Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy there from 1953 to 1967. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1946 to 1947, and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1957.
Braithwaite was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire. His father was the historian of early Quaker history, William Charles Braithwaite.
He entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1919 to study physics and mathematics, gaining a BA in 1923 and an MA in 1926. "He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge from 1924 to 1990. He was appointed Cambridge University Lecturer in Moral Sciences in 1928."
He was married (secondly) to the computational linguist and philosopher Margaret Masterman with whom he founded the Epiphany Philosophers a group of (largely) Anglicans and Quakers seeking a new view of the relationship between philosophy and science (see the Pardshaw Dialogues, below).
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Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that meshes well with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics).
Jackendoff's research deals with the semantics of natural language, its bearing on the formal structure of cognition and its lexical and syntactic expression. He has also done extensive research on the relationship between conscious awareness and the computational theory of mind, on syntactic theory, and, with Fred Lerdahl, on musical cognition. His theory of conceptual semantics developed into a comprehensive theory on the foundations of language, which indeed is the title of a recent monograph (2002): Foundations of Language. Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Much earlier, in his 1983 Semantics and Cognition, he was one of the first linguists to integrate the vision faculty into his account of meaning and human language.
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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 Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.
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Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin (born March 29, 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to questions of genetic variation and evolution.
In a pair of 1966 papers co-authored with J.L. Hubby in the journal Genetics, Lewontin helped set the stage for the modern field of molecular evolution.
In 1979 he and Stephen Jay Gould introduced the term "spandrel" into evolutionary theory.
Lewontin strongly opposes genetic determinism, especially as allegedly expressed by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
Lewontin was born in New York City to Jewish parents. Lewontin attended Forest Hills High School and the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York. In 1951, he obtained a bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard University. In 1952, he received a master's degree in mathematical statistics followed by a doctorate in zoology in 1954, both from Columbia University where he was a student of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Lewontin held faculty positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago. In 1973 Lewontin served as Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard until 1998, and as of 2003 was the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard. Lewontin has worked with and had great influence on many philosophers of biology, including William C. Wimsatt, Elliott Sober, Philip Kitcher, Elisabeth Lloyd, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Sahotra Sarkar, and Robert Brandon, often inviting them to work in his lab.
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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 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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Robin Dunbar
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour. He is currently Professor of Evolutionary Psychology and head of the Social Neuroscience Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. From 2007-2012, he was Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford and the Co-director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, roughly 150, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
Dunbar, son of an engineer, received his early education at Magdalen College School, Brackley. He then went onto Magdalen College, Oxford, where his teachers included Nico Tinbergen and completed his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy in 1969. Dunbar then went onto the Department of Psychology of the University of Bristol and completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology in 1973.
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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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Sam Harris (author)
Sam Harris (born 1967) is an American author, public intellectual, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith, which was published in 2004 and appeared on The New York Times best seller list for 33 weeks. The book also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2005 for nonfiction. In 2006 Harris published his book Letter to a Christian Nation, a response to criticism of The End of Faith. This work was followed by The Moral Landscape published in 2010, his long-form essay Lying in 2011 and the short book Free Will in 2012.
Harris is a well-known contemporary critic of religion and proponent of scientific skepticism and the "New Atheism." He is also an advocate for the separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and the liberty to criticize religion. Harris has written numerous articles for the Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, and the journal Nature. His articles touch upon a diversity of topics, including religion, morality, neuroscience, free will, and terrorism.
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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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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo.
Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.
Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or "magisteria") whose authorities do not overlap.
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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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Steven Mithen
Steve Mithen is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He has written a number of books including The Singing Neanderthals and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science.
Cognitive fluidity is a term first popularly applied by Mithen in his book The Prehistory of the Mind, a search for the origins of Art, Religion and Science.
The term cognitive fluidity describes how a modular primate mind has evolved into the modern human mind by combining different ways of processing knowledge and using tools to create a modern civilization. By arriving at original thoughts, which are often highly creative and rely on metaphor and analogy modern humans differ from archaic humans. As such, cognitive fluidity is a key element of the human attentive consciousness. The term has been principally used to contrast the mind of modern humans, especially those after 50,000 B.P. (before present), with those of archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The latter appear to have had a mentality that was original domain-specific in structure; a series of largely isolated cognitive domains for thinking about the social, material, and natural worlds. These are termed “Swiss penknife minds” with a set of special modules for specific domains such as Social, Natural history, General, Technical and Language intelligence. With the advent of modern humans the barriers between these domains appear to have been largely removed in the attentive mode and hence cognition became more fluid. Consciousness is of course attentive and self-reflective, and the role of the modular intelligences in neurological “Default mode” is a topic for current research in self-reflective human consciousness.
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Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).
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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 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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Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.
Kuhn has made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well.
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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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W. V. Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van") was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continuously affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A recent poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine one of the five most important philosophers of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993, for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning."
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W.V.O. Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van") was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continuously affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A recent poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine one of the five most important philosophers of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993, for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning."
wn.com/W.V.O._Quine -
Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan (BA 1933), the University at Buffalo, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During WWII, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh. He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977.
Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology, but his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision. Sellars was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of American pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism. His work also reflects a sustained engagement with the German tradition of transcendental idealism, most obviously in his book Science and Metaphysics: Kantian Variations.
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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.
wn.com/William_Alston -
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 L. Rowe
William Leonard Rowe (born 26 July 1931) is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Purdue University who specialises in the philosophy of religion. His work has played a leading role in the "remarkable revival of analytic philosophy of religion since the 1970s". He is most notable for his formulation of the evidential argument from evil.
According to Rowe, he became an evangelical Christian during his teenage years and planned to become a minister, eventually enrolling at the Detroit Bible Institute for his collegiate education. He later transferred to Wayne State University.
After his graduation from Wayne State, Rowe began his post-graduate education at the Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS). He reports that it was at this time he began to take a more critical look at the Bible, learn about its origins and meet theologians who, unlike himself, did not have a fundamentalist perspective. The result was that his own fundamentalism began to wane.
He received a Master of Divinity degree from CTS, and then went on to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan. He completed his doctorate in 1962, taught briefly at the University of Illinois and later that year, joined the faculty of Purdue University.
wn.com/William_L._Rowe -
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.
wn.com/William_Lane_Craig -
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."
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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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Dan Dennett: Responding to Pastor Rick Warren
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 25:31
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
www.ted.com Philosopher Dan Dennett calls for religion -- all religion -- to be taught in schools, so we can understand its nature as a natural phenomenon. Then he takes on The Purpose-Driven Life, disputing its claim that, to be moral, one must deny evolution.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennett_Responding_to_Pastor_Rick_Warren
www.ted.com Philosopher Dan Dennett calls for religion -- all religion -- to be taught in schools, so we can understand its nature as a natural phenomenon. Then he takes on The Purpose-Driven Life, disputing its claim that, to be moral, one must deny evolution.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
Full Length Talk by Daniel Dennett - 'How To Tell You're An Atheist'
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 44:57
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Philosopher Daniel Dennett was one of the stars of the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne and gave a brilliant and whimsical talk on defining the atheist. He is the uber-philospher of the mind and a great provocateur, though he was speaking to 4000 non believers at this convention. He talks specifically about The Clergy Project in the middle of his talk at 19 min 15 sec. For more info: see clergyproject.org
http://wn.com/Full_Length_Talk_by_Daniel_Dennett_'How_To_Tell_You're_An_Atheist'
Philosopher Daniel Dennett was one of the stars of the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne and gave a brilliant and whimsical talk on defining the atheist. He is the uber-philospher of the mind and a great provocateur, though he was speaking to 4000 non believers at this convention. He talks specifically about The Clergy Project in the middle of his talk at 19 min 15 sec. For more info: see clergyproject.org
- published: 23 May 2012
- views: 99168
- author: TheClergyProject
DAN DENNETT AT HIS BEST
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 52:05
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
In this interview with Bill Moyers, Dan Dennett delivers a sharp and clear synthesis of a library of evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. Composer John Adams bit.ly
http://wn.com/DAN_DENNETT_AT_HIS_BEST
In this interview with Bill Moyers, Dan Dennett delivers a sharp and clear synthesis of a library of evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. Composer John Adams bit.ly
- published: 21 Oct 2012
- views: 3334
- author: joshuacolumbus
Daniel Dennett lecture on "Free Will" (Edinburgh University)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 83:38
- Updated: 19 Dec 2012
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO EdinburghUniversity IF YOU ENJOYED THIS VIDEO: www.youtube.com This video is reposted here for educational and commentary purposes. I believe this falls under "fair use". (@EdinburghUniversity: PM me if you want me to take this video down and I will be happy to oblige!)
http://wn.com/Daniel_Dennett_lecture_on_Free_Will_Edinburgh_University
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO EdinburghUniversity IF YOU ENJOYED THIS VIDEO: www.youtube.com This video is reposted here for educational and commentary purposes. I believe this falls under "fair use". (@EdinburghUniversity: PM me if you want me to take this video down and I will be happy to oblige!)
- published: 24 Apr 2009
- views: 98495
- author: RabidApe
Daniel C. Dennett on What Should Replace Religions?
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 37:26
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Daniel C. Dennett, Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, on What Should Replace Religions?
http://wn.com/Daniel_C_Dennett_on_What_Should_Replace_Religions?
Daniel C. Dennett, Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, on What Should Replace Religions?
- published: 24 Jan 2011
- views: 80791
- author: tvochannel
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett - SUBTITLE
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 117:14
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
FULL DEBATE about Religion and Atheism - Subtitle on the buttons of the player. Anyone can put on your channel excerpts of that conversation, just click the "Remix this video!"
http://wn.com/Richard_Dawkins,_Christopher_Hitchens,_Sam_Harris,_Daniel_Dennett_SUBTITLE
FULL DEBATE about Religion and Atheism - Subtitle on the buttons of the player. Anyone can put on your channel excerpts of that conversation, just click the "Remix this video!"
- published: 01 Aug 2012
- views: 70715
- author: nagoldocs
Free will as moral competence. Professor Daniel Dennett at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 63:16
- Updated: 20 Dec 2012
Do recent discoveries of neuroscience prove that we have no free will? Some neuroscientists claim that free will is an illusion. But according to Prof Dennett, this claim rests on a mistaken understanding of free will and moral practices. This is a public lecture presented at the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, on Thursday 12 April 2012.
http://wn.com/Free_will_as_moral_competence_Professor_Daniel_Dennett_at_the_University_of_Melbourne,_Australia
Do recent discoveries of neuroscience prove that we have no free will? Some neuroscientists claim that free will is an illusion. But according to Prof Dennett, this claim rests on a mistaken understanding of free will and moral practices. This is a public lecture presented at the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, on Thursday 12 April 2012.
- published: 08 May 2012
- views: 4601
- author: GSHSSmelb
Daniel Dennett on Deflating Consciousness
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:06
- Updated: 07 Dec 2012
This is an excerpt from an episode of "Big Thinkers" which was a half-hour long documentary program on ZDTV (later TechTV). Recently the user "onetirednumbers" has been uploading many of the episodes to YouTube, and I just couldnt help myself from mirroring this clip. Also, he is criminally undersubscribed, and so if you like this clip please subscribe to him. OneTiredNumbers' Channel: www.youtube.com All three parts of this program: Part 1: www.youtube.com Part 2: www.youtube.com Part 3: www.youtube.com More info on Daniel Dennett: en.wikipedia.org
http://wn.com/Daniel_Dennett_on_Deflating_Consciousness
This is an excerpt from an episode of "Big Thinkers" which was a half-hour long documentary program on ZDTV (later TechTV). Recently the user "onetirednumbers" has been uploading many of the episodes to YouTube, and I just couldnt help myself from mirroring this clip. Also, he is criminally undersubscribed, and so if you like this clip please subscribe to him. OneTiredNumbers' Channel: www.youtube.com All three parts of this program: Part 1: www.youtube.com Part 2: www.youtube.com Part 3: www.youtube.com More info on Daniel Dennett: en.wikipedia.org
- published: 24 Aug 2009
- views: 32482
- author: LennyBound
Dan Dennett: The illusion of consciousness
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 23:45
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
www.ted.com Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennett_The_illusion_of_consciousness
www.ted.com Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
- published: 03 May 2007
- views: 164629
- author: TEDtalksDirector
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 62:28
- Updated: 12 Dec 2012
Richard Dawkins Daniel Dennett Sam Harris Ayaan Hirsi Ali
http://wn.com/Richard_Dawkins,_Daniel_Dennett,_Sam_Harris_Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali
Richard Dawkins Daniel Dennett Sam Harris Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- published: 10 Nov 2012
- views: 773
- author: Juan Varni
Richard Dawkins & Daniel Dennett Oxford, 9 May 2012
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 72:14
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
"richard dawkins god" "richard dawkins quotes" "god delusion" "the god delusion" "richard dawkins youtube" "richard dawkins atheist" "richard dawkins religion" "christopher hitchens" "richard dawkins hate mail" "richard dawkins bill o'reilly" "richard dawkins 2012" "richard dawkins what if...
http://wn.com/Richard_Dawkins_Daniel_Dennett_Oxford,_9_May_2012
"richard dawkins god" "richard dawkins quotes" "god delusion" "the god delusion" "richard dawkins youtube" "richard dawkins atheist" "richard dawkins religion" "christopher hitchens" "richard dawkins hate mail" "richard dawkins bill o'reilly" "richard dawkins 2012" "richard dawkins what if...
- published: 25 Nov 2012
- views: 554
- author: derrick3DX
Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:46
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
www.ted.com Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things. For a topping, try his introduction to a new theory by Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennett_Cute,_sexy,_sweet,_funny
www.ted.com Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things. For a topping, try his introduction to a new theory by Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
- published: 16 Mar 2009
- views: 153934
- author: TEDtalksDirector
![Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher]](http://web.archive.org./web/20121223053552im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/41orN2hT8X4/default.jpg "Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher]")
Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 21:48
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Big Thinkers is a former ZDTV (later TechTV) television program. It featured a half-hour interview with a "big thinker" in science, technology, and other fields. Interviews were filmed in a 16:9 format and intercut with public domain material from the Prelinger Archives. This archival footage (mostly film clips from the 1940's and 50's) was used to create visual metaphors highlighting the speaker's points. This episode features Daniel Dennett. He is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on 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 also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement. (Text from Wikipedia)
http://wn.com/Big_Thinkers_Daniel_Dennett_Philosopher_
Big Thinkers is a former ZDTV (later TechTV) television program. It featured a half-hour interview with a "big thinker" in science, technology, and other fields. Interviews were filmed in a 16:9 format and intercut with public domain material from the Prelinger Archives. This archival footage (mostly film clips from the 1940's and 50's) was used to create visual metaphors highlighting the speaker's points. This episode features Daniel Dennett. He is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on 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 also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement. (Text from Wikipedia)
- published: 14 Oct 2011
- views: 20229
- author: Pete Machnik
Dan Dennet: Award & Speech at AAI 07 pt1 of 2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 38:19
- Updated: 06 Dec 2012
Jump to 17:20 to start the speech (Intros by Julia Sweeney and Richard Dawkins) Dan Dennett receives the "Richard Dawkins Award" at the AAI 07 conference in Washington, DC Julia Sweeney introduces Richard Dawkins, and Richard Dawkins introduces Dan Dennett. Margaret Downey at: www.Margaretdowney.com Visit the AAI website at atheistalliance.org See more videos like this at http and video.rationalresponders.com Video by The Richard Dawkins Foundation Camera Wayne Marsala Josh Timonen Edited by Josh Timonen
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennet_Award_Speech_at_AAI_07_pt1_of_2
Jump to 17:20 to start the speech (Intros by Julia Sweeney and Richard Dawkins) Dan Dennett receives the "Richard Dawkins Award" at the AAI 07 conference in Washington, DC Julia Sweeney introduces Richard Dawkins, and Richard Dawkins introduces Dan Dennett. Margaret Downey at: www.Margaretdowney.com Visit the AAI website at atheistalliance.org See more videos like this at http and video.rationalresponders.com Video by The Richard Dawkins Foundation Camera Wayne Marsala Josh Timonen Edited by Josh Timonen
- published: 26 Oct 2007
- views: 41344
- author: RationalResponse
Dan Dennett on our consciousness, Best Brain Supplements
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 21:52
- Updated: 17 Dec 2012
www.excelerol.com - Best Brain Supplements One of our most important living philosophers, Dan Dennett is best known for his provocative and controversial arguments that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes in the brain. He argues that the brain's computational circuitry fools us into thinking we know more than we do, and that what we call consciousness — isn't. This mind-shifting perspective on the mind itself has distinguished Dennett's career as a philosopher and cognitive scientist. And while the philosophy community has never quite known what to make of Dennett (he defies easy categorization, and refuses to affiliate himself with accepted schools of thought), his computational approach to understanding the brain has made him, as Edge's John Brockman writes, "the philosopher of choice of the AI community." In recent years, Dennett has become outspoken in his atheism, and his 2006 book Breaking the Spell calls for religion to be studied through the scientific lens of evolutionary biology. Dennett regards religion as a natural -- rather than supernatural -- phenomenon, and urges schools to break the taboo against empirical examination of religion. He argues that religion's influence over human behavior is precisely what makes gaining a rational understanding of it so necessary "If we don't understand religion, we're going to miss our chance to improve the world in the 21st century." A prolific writer, Dennett's landmark books include The ...
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennett_on_our_consciousness,_Best_Brain_Supplements
www.excelerol.com - Best Brain Supplements One of our most important living philosophers, Dan Dennett is best known for his provocative and controversial arguments that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes in the brain. He argues that the brain's computational circuitry fools us into thinking we know more than we do, and that what we call consciousness — isn't. This mind-shifting perspective on the mind itself has distinguished Dennett's career as a philosopher and cognitive scientist. And while the philosophy community has never quite known what to make of Dennett (he defies easy categorization, and refuses to affiliate himself with accepted schools of thought), his computational approach to understanding the brain has made him, as Edge's John Brockman writes, "the philosopher of choice of the AI community." In recent years, Dennett has become outspoken in his atheism, and his 2006 book Breaking the Spell calls for religion to be studied through the scientific lens of evolutionary biology. Dennett regards religion as a natural -- rather than supernatural -- phenomenon, and urges schools to break the taboo against empirical examination of religion. He argues that religion's influence over human behavior is precisely what makes gaining a rational understanding of it so necessary "If we don't understand religion, we're going to miss our chance to improve the world in the 21st century." A prolific writer, Dennett's landmark books include The ...
- published: 10 Mar 2012
- views: 5392
- author: excelerol
Dan Dennett - His TED Talk Response to Rick Warren
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 24:49
- Updated: 12 Dec 2012
Dan Dannett does an exciting talk at TED.
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennett_His_TED_Talk_Response_to_Rick_Warren
Dan Dannett does an exciting talk at TED.
- published: 20 Nov 2011
- views: 3619
- author: godisafrauddotcom
Dan Dennett on creating meaning in life
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:51
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
www.theatheistbook.com http
http://wn.com/Dan_Dennett_on_creating_meaning_in_life
Daniel Dennett on William Lane Craig
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:54
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Following a presentation of theistic arguments by William Lane Craig, Daniel Dennett gives an impromptu appraisal. Enjoy. And don't forget to rate and subscribe.
http://wn.com/Daniel_Dennett_on_William_Lane_Craig
Following a presentation of theistic arguments by William Lane Craig, Daniel Dennett gives an impromptu appraisal. Enjoy. And don't forget to rate and subscribe.
- published: 12 Aug 2009
- views: 197570
- author: riversonthemoon
Dennett '06: Religion's a Natural Phenomenon
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 56:22
- Updated: 19 Dec 2012
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THIS CHANNEL & MY OTHER ONE TOO:- www.youtube.com CHEERS ! The University of Edinburgh ~ one of the world's top 20 universities www.ed.ac.uk www.ed.ac.uk Lecture: March 14th, 2006 ase.tufts.edu en.wikipedia.org Dennett is University Professor & Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, & Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, & has a daughter, a son, & three grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his BA in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at UC Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the LSE & the American University of Beirut. His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred ...
http://wn.com/Dennett_'06_Religion's_a_Natural_Phenomenon
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THIS CHANNEL & MY OTHER ONE TOO:- www.youtube.com CHEERS ! The University of Edinburgh ~ one of the world's top 20 universities www.ed.ac.uk www.ed.ac.uk Lecture: March 14th, 2006 ase.tufts.edu en.wikipedia.org Dennett is University Professor & Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, & Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, & has a daughter, a son, & three grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his BA in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at UC Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the LSE & the American University of Beirut. His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred ...
- published: 12 Dec 2011
- views: 7726
- author: nightjarflying
Daniel Dennett -"A Phenomenal Confusion About Access and Consciousness"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 66:18
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
Dennett's talk at the Evolution and Function of Consciousness conference ("Turing Consciousness 2012") held at the University of Montreal as part of Alan Turing Year. All videos can be found here: users.ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://wn.com/Daniel_Dennett_-A_Phenomenal_Confusion_About_Access_and_Consciousness
Dennett's talk at the Evolution and Function of Consciousness conference ("Turing Consciousness 2012") held at the University of Montreal as part of Alan Turing Year. All videos can be found here: users.ecs.soton.ac.uk
- published: 03 Jul 2012
- views: 3983
- author: Richard Brown
Daniel Dennett, "Whole-Body Apoptosis and the Meanings of Lives"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 77:24
- Updated: 19 Dec 2012
Daniel Dennett delivers an address, "Whole-Body Apoptosis and the Meanings of Lives," to the National Humanities Center's 2007 Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity conference. National Humanities Center
http://wn.com/Daniel_Dennett,_Whole-Body_Apoptosis_and_the_Meanings_of_Lives
Daniel Dennett delivers an address, "Whole-Body Apoptosis and the Meanings of Lives," to the National Humanities Center's 2007 Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity conference. National Humanities Center
- published: 14 May 2012
- views: 1606
- author: Phillip Barron
![Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher] (1 of 3)](http://web.archive.org./web/20121223053552im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/f0wetQwH9nY/default.jpg "Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher] (1 of 3)")
Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher] (1 of 3)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:40
- Updated: 17 Dec 2012
Big Thinkers is a former ZDTV (later TechTV) television program. It featured a half-hour interview with a "big thinker" in science, technology, and other fields. Interviews were filmed in a 16:9 format and intercut with public domain material from the Prelinger Archives. This archival footage (mostly film clips from the 1940's and 50's) was used to create visual metaphors highlighting the speaker's points. This episode features Daniel Dennett. He is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on 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 also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement. (Text from Wikipedia) Here are links to all 3 parts: 1 - www.youtube.com 2 - www.youtube.com 3 - www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Big_Thinkers_Daniel_Dennett_Philosopher_1_of_3
Big Thinkers is a former ZDTV (later TechTV) television program. It featured a half-hour interview with a "big thinker" in science, technology, and other fields. Interviews were filmed in a 16:9 format and intercut with public domain material from the Prelinger Archives. This archival footage (mostly film clips from the 1940's and 50's) was used to create visual metaphors highlighting the speaker's points. This episode features Daniel Dennett. He is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on 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 also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement. (Text from Wikipedia) Here are links to all 3 parts: 1 - www.youtube.com 2 - www.youtube.com 3 - www.youtube.com
- published: 30 Jun 2009
- views: 42757
- author: Pete Machnik
Professor Daniel Dennett at Creative Innovation 2011
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 18:10
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Professor Daniel Dennett, one of the world's leading philosophers and cognitive scientist talks about the 'Prospective gains and losses from the information explosion'. Dan Dennett begins his presentation with a question: "Are we dependent on technology? And are we in fact enslaved by it?". No surprises here -- the theme of the conference IS 'The challenges & opportunities of a super-connected world'. But then he says something that scares me. "Do you have a plan for how to keep doing business if the internet was to go down?" No. "Do papers, tv networks, hospitals & police stations?" Now I'm terrified. Undoubtedly, our lives do depend on technology. The opportunities that have come with this technological age are almost immeasurable. But within this, we also have more opportunity than ever now to fill ourselves with guilt -- now that we CAN do XYZ, we have no excuse. When XYZ still goes undone, we feel guilty. More than that -- what jobs will exist in the future if technology is to continue its exponential growth as (other Ci2011 speaker) Ray Kurzweil suggests? Will doctors become "medical receptionists & doormen", pushing a few buttons and smiling politely? Where's the adventure in that? Read more: www.creativeinnovationglobal.com.au Creative Innovation is an annual future-shaping conference event. It is the place to learn from world-changing innovators, futurists, inspired thinkers and curious souls gathered together in an interactive community. To receive updates ...
http://wn.com/Professor_Daniel_Dennett_at_Creative_Innovation_2011
Professor Daniel Dennett, one of the world's leading philosophers and cognitive scientist talks about the 'Prospective gains and losses from the information explosion'. Dan Dennett begins his presentation with a question: "Are we dependent on technology? And are we in fact enslaved by it?". No surprises here -- the theme of the conference IS 'The challenges & opportunities of a super-connected world'. But then he says something that scares me. "Do you have a plan for how to keep doing business if the internet was to go down?" No. "Do papers, tv networks, hospitals & police stations?" Now I'm terrified. Undoubtedly, our lives do depend on technology. The opportunities that have come with this technological age are almost immeasurable. But within this, we also have more opportunity than ever now to fill ourselves with guilt -- now that we CAN do XYZ, we have no excuse. When XYZ still goes undone, we feel guilty. More than that -- what jobs will exist in the future if technology is to continue its exponential growth as (other Ci2011 speaker) Ray Kurzweil suggests? Will doctors become "medical receptionists & doormen", pushing a few buttons and smiling politely? Where's the adventure in that? Read more: www.creativeinnovationglobal.com.au Creative Innovation is an annual future-shaping conference event. It is the place to learn from world-changing innovators, futurists, inspired thinkers and curious souls gathered together in an interactive community. To receive updates ...
- published: 23 Feb 2012
- views: 2268
- author: CInnovationGlobal
photo: AP / Carolyn Kaster
20 Dec 2012
Obama held a White House news conference on Wednesday to announce that Vice President Joe Biden will lead an interagency effort to craft new gun policies. The group is expected to offer its proposals in January. “We know this is a complex issue that stirs deeply held passions and political divides,” Obama said. “But the fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing.” ... WAKE-UP CALL ... ....(size: 6.1Kb)
photo: AP / Fahd al-Bakoush
20 Dec 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three senior U.S. State Department officials were asked to resign after an official inquiry harshly criticized their offices for failing to provide adequate security at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, before it came under attack in September, a U.S. official said on Wednesday ... State Department officials declined to comment on the matter, saying it was a personnel issue ... Joint Chiefs of Staff ... facilities....(size: 5.4Kb)
photo: AP / Alfred de Montesquiou
21 Dec 2012
UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council on Thursday authorized military action to wrest northern Mali from the control of al-Qaida-linked extremists, but it demanded progress first on political reconciliation, elections and training African troops and police ... Instead, it set out benchmarks to be met before the start of offensive operations, starting with progress on a political roadmap to restore constitutional order ... U.N ... On Nov ... ....(size: 3.1Kb)
photo: Public Domain / Tm
21 Dec 2012
The UN Security Council on Thursday unanimously approved sending an African-led intervention force to help Mali’s army reconquer much of the country from Islamist militants. The 15-member council gave the force an initial one year mandate to use “all necessary measures” to help the Mali government take back the northern half of the country from “terrorist, extremist and armed groups.” ... Agence France-Presse ....(size: 1.9Kb)
photo: AP / Ahn Young-joon
20 Dec 2012
SEOUL, South Korea — Park Geun-hye's election as South Korea's first female president could mean a new drive to start talks with bitter rival North Korea, though it's unclear how much further she will go than the hard-line incumbent, a member of her own conservative party ... On Thursday, Park mentioned the North Korean rocket launch during a nationally televised speech ... Ties between the Koreas plummeted during Lee's term ... ....(size: 4.5Kb)
The Examiner
22 Dec 2012
The problem of pain and suffering, sometimes called the problem of evil, is the most persistent thorn in the side of those who believe in a loving and compassionate God ... Only a few die, peacefully, in their sleep ... That place is called heaven ... Another concept is what philosopher Daniel Dennett once called a "deepity," which Law defines as "saying something with two meanings" — one true but trivial, the other false but seemingly profound....(size: 8.5Kb)
The New York Times
13 Dec 2012
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. Tags.. Philosophy. Philosophy and science haven’t been getting along ... Quine, A.J ... Also.. Speaking of philosophers on video, here is a lecture by Charles Taylor at ABC Democracy, and an interview with Daniel Dennett at 3quarksdaily. At the Quarterly Conversation, Daniel Green takes issue with James Wood’s “aesthetic philosophy.” ... 47....(size: 13.5Kb)
Irish Times
11 Dec 2012
MICHAEL JAMES REGAN. RITE & REASON. Atheistic secularism need not be aggressive, mocking and spiteful ... Richard Dawkins, the late and great Christopher Hitchens, (and scarcely as exclusive or corrosive) Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. It ought to be celebrated. Underpinning the depiction of the 21st century atheist as a secular vitriolic polemicist are two misconceptions ... Dawkins answered readily ... ....(size: 3.5Kb)
Canada Dot Com
08 Dec 2012
One early Saturday morning in May 1987, Kenneth Parks arose from his bed and went outside to his car ... One year later, a jury agreed ... NO FREE WILL? ... Philosopher Daniel Dennett similarly labels freedom from all prior causes - what he calls "metaphysical" free will - a "preposterous idea." ... But according to Dennett, there is another kind of free will, and in contrast to the preposterous metaphysical variety, it is "free will worth having."...(size: 16.1Kb)
noodls
14 Nov 2012
So we are delighted that Dr Dennett has written a special essay for us on free will, building on the debate between Erasmus and Luther ... The board of our Foundation has decided to award the 2012 Erasmus Prize to the American philosopher Daniel Dennett ... Broadly speaking, Daniel Dennett has grappled with two of the major cultural questions of our time ... Dennett chose the broadest and most fundamental questions he could imagine ... Dr Dennett,....(size: 8.7Kb)
The New York Times
14 Nov 2012
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. Tags.. Internet, Philosophy. At Rationally Speaking, Massimo Pagliucci weighs in on questions addressed in a roundtable discussion at Slate ... Daniel Dennett’s view is more cautious — he thinks that computational architecture matters when it comes to consciousness, and that the brain’s architecture is nothing like the Internet’s ... The Little Picture ... Also.....(size: 12.8Kb)
The Examiner
11 Nov 2012
Related topics. The Week AheadfreethinkersColorado Springs. Advertisement. Sunday, November 11. Atheist Community of Colorado Springs will hike Black Forest Section 16. 9.00am. The Pikes Peak Skeptics Society will have Secular Sundays Brunch at Southside Panera. 9.30am. The Denver Atheists Meetup Group will be attending the Evolution of Comedy tour. 7.00pm ... Boulder Atheists Book Club will be discussing "Breaking the Spell" by Daniel Dennett ... ....(size: 7.3Kb)
PR Newswire
08 Nov 2012
Daniel Dennett is praised for his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience ... In the week from 10 to 18 November a number of activities will take place in which Daniel Dennett himself takes part ... The digital channel Holland Doc 24 will broadcast interviews with, and documentaries on, Daniel Dennett....(size: 3.3Kb)
StreetInsider
08 Nov 2012
Tweet. Get Alerts HVB Hot Sheet. Price. $15.80 --0%. Overall Analyst Rating.. NEUTRAL ( Up). Dividend Yield. 4.2%. EPS Growth %. -66.7%. YONKERS, N.Y., Nov. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Hudson Valley Holding Corp. (NYSE. HVB), parent of Hudson Valley Bank, announced plans to participate at the Sandler O'Neill & Partners, L.P ... 1079263715# ... R ... Signs Option Agreement with Penn State University Erasmus Prize 2012 Awarded to Daniel C. Dennett. ....(size: 2.4Kb)
CounterPunch
07 Nov 2012
That biologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher Daniel Dennett have made spirited arguments for replacing “atheist” with the word “bright” should make us smell trouble right away and cause us to ask ourselves whether what we have here is yet another kind of secular elitism ... Atheist bloggers who have written about this issue include philosophy professor Daniel Fincke, author Hank Fox, scientist PZ Myers, and author Greta Christina....(size: 52.8Kb)
Reuters
22 Oct 2012
GENEVA (Reuters) - Paul Kurtz, a leading U.S. philosopher who devoted his life to fighting prejudice against people who reject belief in a god and promoting a non-religious stance in life, has died at the age of 86, websites reported on Monday ... When receiving a lifetime award for his work in 2007, he declared. "I am a secular humanist because I am not religious ... professor Daniel Dennett....(size: 2.9Kb)
Huffington Post
20 Oct 2012
Don't get me wrong. I consider Dinesh to be wasting his time and brain power believing and proselytising things that are objectively untrue ... Fancy losing one's job over dating ... Where's the scandal? ... And if you'd like to see just how wrong Dinesh is about pretty much everything to do with religion, watch a debate or two between him and Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Dan Barker, David Silverman, Bart Ehrman or Michael Shermer ... Like ... ....(size: 7.3Kb)
Canberra Times
09 Oct 2012
Albert Einstein pictured in 1948. Take a quick quiz. Who discovered evolutionary theory? Who was the first to come up with relativity theory? And whose brainchild is the weird but wonderful theory of quantum mechanics? ... Uniting the complex and seemingly disconnected facts of biology, Darwin's 19th-century theory was described once by American philosopher Daniel Dennett as "the best idea anyone ever had" ... Modern takes ... Charting the past ... ....(size: 9.0Kb)
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| Born | (1942-03-28) March 28, 1942 (age 70) Boston, Massachusetts |
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| Era | 20th / 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Main interests | Philosophy of mind Philosophy of biology Philosophy of science Cognitive science |
| Notable ideas | Heterophenomenology Intentional stance Intuition pump Multiple Drafts Model Greedy reductionism Deepity |
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Influenced by
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Influenced
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Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942)[1][2] 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.[3] 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,[4] 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.[5]
Contents |
Early life and education[link]
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.[6] When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash.[7] His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.[6]
He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W. V. Quine. In 1965, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College.
Academic career[link]
As of January 2012, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts University.[8]
Dennett describes himself as "an autodidact — or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists."[9]
He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science.[10] He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.[11] He was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.[12]
In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.[13]
In 2012 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize, an annual award for a person who has made an exceptional contribution to European culture, society or social science, "for his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience."[14]
Free will[link]
While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" — Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms,[15] Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.
The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.[16]
While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:
- First...The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
- Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
- Third...from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
- A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
- Fifth — and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model — it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
- Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.
These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.[17]
Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:
[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred.
But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.[18]
Other philosophical views[link]
Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren) that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his original dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in The Intentional stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in Consciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views.[19]
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an integral part of his program. He defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. His strategy mirrors his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first person phenomena in third person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with. Much of Dennett's work since the 1990s has been concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (Kinds of Minds), to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (Freedom Evolves). In his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.
Dennett self-identifies with a few terms:
[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless — a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors.
— Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium
Yet, in Consciousness Explained, he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist". In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon he admits to being "a bright", and defends the term.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality. He rejects the idea of the naturalistic fallacy as the idea that ethics is in some free-floating realm, writing that the fallacy is to rush from facts to values.
Role in evolutionary debate[link]
Dennett sees evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process (though he spells out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness).[20] This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e. its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one).
Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with his theory of the intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.[21] Strong disagreements have been launched against Dennett from Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".[22]
Dennett's theories have had a significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He has also written about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, most recently in his "Brains, Computers, and Minds," a three part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.
He has recently been doing research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a "Don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. That made unbelieving preachers feel isolated but they did not want to lose their jobs and sometimes their church-supplied lodgings and generally consoled themselves that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual.[23] The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include other denominations and non-Christian clerics.[24]
Personal life[link]
Dennett lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren.[25] He is also an avid sailor.
In October 2006, Dennett was hospitalized due to an aortic dissection. After a nine-hour surgery, he was given a new aorta. In an essay posted on the Edge website, Dennett gives his firsthand account of his health problems, his consequent feelings of gratitude towards the scientists, cardiologist, surgeons, EMT's, phlebotomists, orderlies, housekeepers, physician assistants, X-ray technicians, meal-bringers, launderers, physical therapists, perfusionist, neurologist, and nurses whose hard work made his recovery possible, and his complete lack of a "deathbed conversion".
To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.
— Daniel C. Dennett, Thank Goodness!
By his account, upon having been told by friends and relatives that they had prayed for him, he resisted the urge to ask them, "Did you also sacrifice a goat?"[26][27]
Selected books[link]
- Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (MIT Press 1981) (ISBN 0-262-54037-1)
- Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (MIT Press 1984) — on free will and determinism (ISBN 0-262-04077-8)
- The Mind's I (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2)
- Content and Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed. January 1986) (ISBN 0-7102-0846-4)
- The Intentional Stance (6th printing), Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996, ISBN 0-262-54053-3 (First published 1987)
- Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0-316-18066-1)
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster; reprint edition 1996) (ISBN 0-684-82471-X)
- Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Basic Books 1997) (ISBN 0-465-07351-4)
- Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind) (MIT Press 1998) (ISBN 0-262-04166-9) — A Collection of Essays 1984–1996
- Freedom Evolves (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN 0-670-03186-0)
- Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press 2005) (ISBN 0-262-04225-8)
- Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin Group 2006) (ISBN 0-670-03472-X).
- Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (Columbia University Press 2007) (ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7), co-authored with Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle
- Science and Religion (Oxford University Press 2010) (ISBN 0-199-73842-4), co-authored with Alvin Plantinga
See also[link]
- The Atheism Tapes
- Cartesian materialism
- Conscious Robots
- Evolutionary psychology of religion
- Greedy reductionism
- Geoffrey Miller
- Heterophenomenology
- Intentional stance
- List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates
- Memetics
- Multiple drafts theory of consciousness
- Philosophy of Religion
- American philosophy
- List of American philosophers
Further reading[link]
- John Brockman (1995). The Third Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80359-3 (Discusses Dennett and others).
- Daniel C. Dennett (1997), "Chapter 3. True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works", in John Haugeland, Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN 0-262-08259-4 (reprint of 1981 publication).[a]
- Andrew Brook and Don Ross (editors) (2000). Daniel Dennett. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00864-6
- Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson (editors) (2000) Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18200-9
- John Symons (2000) On Dennett. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. ISBN 0-534-57632-X
- Matthew Elton (2003). Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception. Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press. ISBN 0-7456-2117-1
- P.M.S. Hacker and M.R. Bennett (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford, and Malden, Mass: Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-0855-X (Has an appendix devoted to a strong critique of Dennett's philosophy of mind)
Notes[link]
a. ^ "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works" is a reprint of a paper first published in 1981 in Scientific Explanation, edited by A.F. Heath (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The paper was originally presented as a Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in November 1979. It was also published as chapter 2 in Dennett's book The Intentional Stance (see further reading above).
References[link]
- ^ Autobiography
- ^ About the Author
- ^ Beardsley, T. (1996) Profile: Daniel C. Dennett – Dennett's Dangerous Idea, Scientific American 274(2), 34-35.
- ^ Secular Coalition for America Advisory Board Biography
- ^ [1]
- ^ a b Feuer, Alan (2007-10-23), "A Dead Spy, a Daughter’s Questions and the C.I.A.", New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/nyregion/23spydad.html, retrieved 2008-09-16
- ^ Brown, Andrew (2004-04-17). "The semantic engineer". The Guardian. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1193371,00.html. Retrieved 2010-02-01.
- ^ Center for Cognitive Studies
- ^ Dennett, Daniel C. (2005-09-13) [2004], "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up", in John Brockman, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, New York: Vintage Books, ISBN 1-4000-7686-2, http://www.edge.org/books/curious_index.html
- ^ American Scientist
- ^ Secular Humanism Laureate
- ^ Humanist of the Year
- ^ "Honorary FFRF Board Announced". http://ffrf.org/news/releases/honorary-ffrf-board-announced/. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
- ^ "Erasmus Prize 2012 Awarded to Daniel C. Dennett". http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=346065. Retrieved 2012-01-25.
- ^ Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, MIT Press (1978), pp.286-299
- ^ Brainstorms, p.295
- ^ Brainstorms, pp.295-97
- ^ Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, Oxford (2005) p.64-5
- ^ Guttenplan, Samuel (1994), A companion to the philosophy of mind, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 642, ISBN 0-631-19996-9
- ^ p. 52-60, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster; reprint edition 1996) (ISBN 0-684-82471-X)
- ^ Although Dennett has expressed criticism of human sociobiology, calling it a form of "greedy reductionism", he is generally sympathetic towards the explanations proposed by evolutionary psychology. Gould also is not one sided, and writes: "Sociobiologists have broadened their range of selective stories by invoking concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection to solve (successfully I think) the vexatious problem of altruism—previously the greatest stumbling block to a Darwinian theory of social behavior. . . . Here sociobiology has had and will continue to have success. And here I wish it well. For it represents an extension of basic Darwinism to a realm where it should apply." Gould, 1980. "Sociobiology and the Theory of Natural Selection" In G. W. Barlow and J. Silverberg, eds., Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture? Boulder CO: Westview Press, pp. 257-269.
- ^ 'Evolution: The pleasures of Pluralism' — Stephen Jay Gould's review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, June 26, 1997
- ^ Preachers who are not Believers (PDF), Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 8, Issue 1, March, 2010, pp. 122-50, (ISSN 1474-7049).
- ^ Podcast: interview with Daniel Dennett. Further developments of the research: pastors, priests, and an Imam who are closet atheists.
- ^ Daniel C. Dennett's Home Page
- ^ Richard Dawkins: 'The Genius of Charles Darwin' (2008.).
- ^ 'Thank Goodness!', edge 195, Nov. 3, 2006
External links[link]
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Daniel Dennett |
- Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr at The MIT Press
- Faculty webpage
- Daniel C. Dennett at Internet Movie Database
- Scientific American Frontiers Profile: Daniel Dennett 2000-12-19
- Searchable bibliography of Dennett's works
- Daniel Dennett on Information Philosopher
- Media
- Edge/Third Culture: Daniel C. Dennett
- Daniel Dennett multimedia files
- Profile at TED several videos on dangerous memes, consciousness, others
- Radio interview on Philosophy Talk 2009-12-06
- The Nature of Knowledge Lecture at the University of Edinburgh 2006-03-14
- On Preaching and Teaching The Science Network interview with Daniel Dennett 2007-11-02
- The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Daniel Dennett 2010-03-05 (with transcript)
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Dennett, Daniel |
| Alternative names | Dennett, Dan |
| Short description | American philosopher |
| Date of birth | (1942-03-28) March 28, 1942 (age 70) |
| Place of birth | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This article is about the Biblical figure called Daniel. For other uses, see Daniel (disambiguation).
| Daniel | |
|---|---|
 Daniel's Answer to the King by Briton Rivière |
|
| Prophet | |
| Born | 7th Century B.C |
| Died | 6th Century B.C Babylon (?) |
| Honored in | Roman Catholic Church Eastern Catholic Churches Eastern Orthodox Church Lutheranism adventism Islam[1] Armenian Apostolic Church |
| Major shrine | Tomb of Daniel, Susa, Iran |
| Feast | July 21 December 17 |
| Attributes | Often depicted in the den of the lions |
Daniel (Hebrew: דָּנִיֵּאל, Modern Daniyyel Tiberian Dāniyyêl ; Arabic: دانيال, meaning in Hebrew "God is my Judge") is the protagonist in the Book of Daniel of the Hebrew Bible. In the narrative, when Daniel was a young man, he was taken into Babylonian captivity where he was educated in Chaldean thought. However, he never converted to Neo-Babylonian ways. By Divine Wisdom from his God, Yahweh, he interpreted dreams and visions of kings, thus becoming a prominent figure in the court of Babylon. Eventually, he had apocalyptic visions of his own that have been interpreted as the Four monarchies. Some of the most famous tales of Daniel are: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, The writing on the wall and Daniel in the lions' den.
Contents |
Narrative of Daniel[link]
Induction into Babylon[link]
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim (BC 606), Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were among the young Jewish nobility carried off to Babylon. The four were chosen for their intellect and beauty to be trained as advisors to the Babylonian court,(Daniel 1) Daniel was given the name Belteshazzar, i.e., prince of Bel, or Bel protect the king!(not to be confused with the neo-Babylonian king, Belshazzar). Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were given the Babylonian names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, respectively.[2]
Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar[link]
Main article: Daniel 2
See also: Nebuchadnezzar II#Portrayal in the books of Daniel and Jeremiah and Book of Daniel#Nebuchadnezzar or Nabonidus
In the narrative of Daniel chapter 2, it is the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and the king is distressed by his dreams.[v.1] Thus he summons his interpreters,[v.2] however, they are unable to relay or interpret the dreams.[v.10-11] The King acts in fury and demands the execution of all the wise men in Babylon.[v.12] When Daniel discovers the King's executive order, he requests from the captain of the guard, Arioch, to see the King.[v.13-16] Daniel prays for God’s mercy to receive a revelation from the King’s dream.[v.15-18] God then reveals the mystery to Daniel in a vision that night.[v.19] Daniel praises his God with a doxology.[v.20-23] After meeting with Arioch again, Daniel is granted access to the king[v.24-30] and relays the description of the dream,[v.31-36] followed by its interpretation.[v.37-45] With Daniel's successful interpretation of the dream, the king expresses homage,[v.46] followed by his own doxology that affirms that Daniel's God is God of gods for revealing this mystery of his dream.[v.47] Daniel is then promoted as chief governor over the whole province of Babylon.[v.48] At Daniel’s request, his companions are also promoted, thus they remain at the king’s court.[v.49][3]
Nebuchadnezzar's madness[link]
Nebuchadnezzar recounts a dream of a huge tree which is suddenly cut down at the command of a heavenly messenger. Daniel is summoned and interprets the dream. The tree is Nebuchadnezzar himself, who for seven years will lose his mind and become like a wild beast. All of this comes to pass until, at the end of the specified time, Nebuchadnezzar acknowledges that "heaven rules" and his kingdom and sanity are restored and his kingdom is restored to him.
Daniel and Belshazzar[link]
Main article: The writing on the wall
See also: Belshazzar#Belshazzar in literature
In Daniel's later years, king Belshazzar holds a great feast for all his nobles. In a drunken state, the king calls for the sacred vessels captured from the Jerusalem temple and blasphemously drinks from them. Suddenly, the fingers of a man's hand appear before the king and write on the wall of the palace. When none of his wise men are able to interpret the message, Daniel is called in at the suggestion of the queen-mother. After reprimanding the king for his impiety, Daniel interprets the handwriting on the wall to mean that Belzhazzar is about to lose his kingdom to the Medes and the Persians. For successfully reading the cryptic handwriting, Daniel is rewarded with a purple robe and elevated to the rank of "third ruler" of the kingdom. "That very night", we are told, "Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain" and his successor was King Darius the Mede, aged 62.
Daniel and Darius the Mede[link]
Main article: Daniel in the lions' den
After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Daniel is depicted as one of three senior administrators of the empire in the reign of Darius the Mede. When the king decides to set Daniel over the whole kingdom, the other officials plot his downfall. Unable to uncover any corruption, they use Daniel's religious devotion to defeat him. The officials trick the king into issuing an irrevocable decree that no god is to be worshiped for a thirty day period. When Daniel continues to pray three times a day towards Jerusalem, he is thrown into a den of lions, much to the distress of Darius. After an angel shuts the lions' mouths, Daniel is delivered and his opponents thrown into the den where they are devoured instantly.
Daniel's visions[link]
Main article: Four monarchies
See also: Prophecy of seventy weeks
Daniel's ministry as a prophet began late in life. Whereas his early exploits were a matter of common knowledge within his community, these same events, with his pious reputation, serve as the basis for his prophetic ministry. The recognition for his prophetic message is that of other prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel whose backgrounds are the basis for their revelations.
From Chapter 7 to the end of the book of Daniel, an apocalyptic vision is being described, supposedly from the perspective of Daniel.[2] This marks a change in the narrative from Daniel interpreting to messengers of God interpreting for Daniel. Daniel dreams of four beasts that come out of the sea: a lion with eagles wings, a bear with three tusks, a leopard with four wings and four heads, and a beast with iron teeth, ten horns and one little horn and human eyes.(Daniel 7:4-8) These beasts are all present at a convening of the divine counsel. Presiding over the counsel is the Ancient of Days, which may, in fact, be the Israelite God.[2] The Ancient One proceeds to put to death the beast with the one little horn. (Daniel 7:9-11) Daniel also describes the fates of the other beasts saying that while their dominion was taken away, their lives were prolonged. (Daniel 7:12) This introduction leads into a series of dreams and visions where these events are expressed in greater detail.
Scholars argue that each of these beasts represent an emperor or kingdom that ruled over the Israelites. The first being Babylon, then Media, then Persia, and finally the Greeks. The horns of the last beast may be symbolic of the rulers that replaced Alexander the Great upon his death, culminating with the little horn, or Antiochus IV.[2] There are additional details in the text that allude to Antiochus IV, including some form of desecration to the temple (Daniel 11:31) and persecution (Daniel 11:23).[2] The final message of the second half of Daniel is that God will deliver the people from oppression, the latest of which is Antiochus IV.[2]
Daniel's final days[link]
The time and circumstances of Daniel's death have not been recorded. However, tradition maintains that Daniel was still alive in the third year of Cyrus according to the Tanakh (Daniel 10:1). He would have been almost 100 years old at that point, having been brought to Babylon when he was in his teens, more than 80 years previously. Many[who?] posit that he possibly died at Susa in Iran. Tradition holds that his tomb is located in Susa at a site known as Shush-e Daniyal. Other locations have been claimed as the site of his burial, including Daniel's Tomb in Kirkuk, Iraq, as well as Babylon, Egypt, Tarsus and, notably, Samarkand, which claims a tomb of Daniel (see "The Ruins of Afrasiab" in the Samarkand article), with some traditions suggesting that his remains were removed, perhaps by Tamerlane, from Susa to Samarkand (see, for instance, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, section 153).
References to Daniel[link]
Book of Ezekiel[link]
The prophet Ezekiel, with whom Daniel was a contemporary, describes a Daniel as a "pattern of righteousness" in the Book of Ezekiel 14:14, 20 and "wisdom" (28:3).[4] In the Book of Daniel, the name is spelled with a middle letter suggesting the i of that name — but this letter is not included in Ezekiel,[5] suggesting that the reference there may be to another person, possibly the "Danel" ("Judgement of God") known from Caananite Ugaritic literature (such as the Epic of Aqhat and Anat), whose reputation for wisdom and righteousness had made him legendary. (Vowel-points were not added to the consonantal Hebrew text before well into the Common Era, and the scribes may then have slipped in a vowel-point for "i" as a middle syllable.)
Bel and the Dragon[link]
In the Deuterocanonical portion of Daniel known as Bel and the Dragon, the prophet Habakkuk is miraculously transported by an angel to take a meal to Daniel while he is in the lions' den. In response, Daniel prays, "Thou hast remembered me, O God; neither hast thou forsaken them that seek Thee and love Thee".[6]
Six tombs of Daniel[link]
Main article: Tomb of Daniel
There are six different locations claiming to be the site of the tomb of the biblical figure Daniel: Babylon, Kirkuk and Muqdadiyah in Iraq, Susa and Malamir in Iran, and Samarkand in Uzbekistan.
Religious perspectives[link]
Rabbinic literature[link]
Main article: Daniel in rabbinic literature
According to Rabbinical tradition, Daniel was of royal descent; and his fate, together with that of his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, was foretold by the prophet Isaiah to King Hezekiah in these words, "and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon".Isaiah 39:7[7][8]
According to this view, Daniel and his friends were eunuchs, and were consequently able to prove the groundlessness of charges of immorality brought against them, which had almost caused their death at the hands of the king.[8]
Islamic views[link]
Main article: Islamic view of Daniel
Muslims traditionally consider Daniel (Arabic: دانيال, Danyal) as an Islamic prophet, alongside the other major prophets of the Old Testament. Although Daniel is not mentioned in the Qur'an, there are accounts of Daniel's life which feature in later Muslim literature. There are debates, however, that go on about Daniel's time of preaching and some Muslims believe that he was not a prophet but a saintly man. Daniel is listed as a prophet in all major versions of Stories of the Prophets.[9] When the Muslims conquered Alexandria in 641 C.E, a mosque was immediately built dedicated to Daniel.[10]
Muslim literature[link]
Muslim exegesis, including Tabari's History of the Prophets and Kings narrates that Daniel was carried off to Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar's attack on Jerusalem. It goes onto state that there he was thrown into the den of the lions, but was later rescued. In one such account, Daniel is aided by Jeremiah, who comes to Babylon to help Daniel in the lions den.[11] In the apocryphal Bel and the Dragon, however, there is a very similar tale which states that the Hebrew prophet Habbakuk was miraculously transported to the den of the lions, to give a meal to Daniel.
All sources, classical and modern, describe Daniel as a saintly and spiritual man. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, in his Qur'anic commentary says:
Daniel was a righteous man of princely lineage and lived about 506-538 B.C. He was carried off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, the Assyrian, but was still living when Assyria was overthrown by the Medes and Persians. In spite of the "captivity" of the Jews, Daniel enjoyed the highest offices of state at Babylon, but he was ever true to Jerusalem. His enemies (under the Persian monarch) got a penal law passed against any one who "asked a petition of any god or man for 30 days" except the Persian King. But Daniel continued true to Jerusalem. "His windows being open in his chambers towards Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime."
Commemorations[link]
Eastern Orthodox commemorations[link]
On the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, the feast days celebrating St. Daniel the Prophet together with the Three Young Men, falls on December 17 (during the Nativity Fast), on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers[13] (the Sunday which falls between 11 and 17 December), and on the Sunday before Nativity.[14] Daniel's prophesy regarding the stone which smashed the idol (Daniel 2:34-35) is often used in Orthodox hymns as a metaphor for the Incarnation: the "stone cut out" being symbolic of the Logos (Christ), and the fact that it was cut "without hands" being symbolic of the virgin birth. Thus the hymns will refer to the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) as the "uncut mountain"
Roman Catholic Commemorations[link]
The Roman Catholic Church commemorates St. Daniel in the Roman Martyrology on July 21.[15] However, his commemoration at Mass occurs only on local calendars of particular dioceses, sometimes on July 21 and sometimes on another day. For example, the archdiocese of Gorizia celebrates the feast of St. Daniel, prophet and confessor, on September 11. The reading of the Mass is taken from the Book of Daniel, chapter 14; the Gradual from Psalm 91; the Alleluia verse from the Epistle of James 1; and the Gospel from Matthew 24.[16]
Coptic Church Commemoration[link]
The prophet is commemorated in the Coptic Church on the 23rd day of the Coptic month of Baramhat.[17]
Protestant Commemorations[link]
He is commemorated as a prophet in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod together with the Three Young Men (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), on December 17.[18]
| Chapters of the Book of Daniel |
|---|
 |
|
1: Induction into Babylon |
See also[link]
- Book of Daniel
- List of names referring to El
- Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Neo-Babylon
- Arioch, Captain of the guard
- Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, Daniel's narrative companions
- Belshazzar, possible last King of Neo-Babylon
- Darius the Mede
- Cyrus the Persian, King of Achaemenid Empire
- Ezekiel, Daniel's narrative contemporary
- Persian Jews
- Apocalypse of Daniel
References[link]
- James B. Jordan (1995). "Daniel: Historical & Chronological Comments (II)" (– Scholar search). Biblical Chronology 7 (1). http://www.biblicalhorizons.com/ch/ch7_01.htm. [dead link]
- Francis E. Gigot (1889). "Daniel". Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM. New Advent. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04620a.htm.
- T. E. Gaston (2009). Historical Issues in the Book of Daniel. Taanathshiloh.
- ^ Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism, B. M. Wheeler, Daniel: "Daniel is not mentioned by name in the Qur'an but there are accounts of his prophethood in later Muslim literature..."
- ^ a b c d e f Coogan, Michael. A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- ^ Collins, John J. (1984). Daniel : with an introduction to apocalyptic literature (Reprinted. ed.). Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans. pp. 47–49. ISBN 0-8028-0020-3.
- ^ This article incorporates text from Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897), a publication now in the public domain.
- ^ NIV footnote on Ezekiel 14:14
- ^ Dixon, Henry Lancelot (1903). "Saying Grace" Historically Considered and Numerous Forms of Grace:Taken from Ancient and Modern Sources; With Appendices. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co.. p. 11. http://books.google.com/?id=CVsNAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=daniel+prays+%22thou+hast+remembered+me+o+god+neither+hast+thou+forsaken+them+that+seek+thee+and+love+thee%22.
- ^ (Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 93b; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer lii)
- ^ a b JewishEncyclopedia.com - DANIEL
- ^ See, for example, Ibn Kathir's Stories of the Prophets: "The Story of Daniel"
- ^ Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism, B. M. Wheeler, Daniel
- ^ Stories of the Prophets, The Story of Daniel, Part 1. Food in the Lions Den
- ^ Abdullah Yusuf Ali|The Holy Qur'an: Text, Translation and Commentary, Note.150
- ^ Sergei Bulgakov, Manual for Church Servers, 2nd ed. (Kharkov, 1900) pp. 453-5. December 11–17: Sunday of the Holy Forefathers Translation: Archpriest Eugene D. Tarris
- ^ Bulgakov, 'Manual for Church Servers', pp. 461-2. December 18–24: Sunday before the Nativity of Christ of the Holy Fathers
- ^ Francis E. Gigot (1889). "Daniel". Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM. New Advent. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04620a.htm.
- ^ [1]
- ^ The Departure of the great prophet Daniel
- ^ Today in History - December 17
External links[link]
- Book of Daniel (Biblical Passage)
- Daniel by Rob Bradshaw Detailed dictionary-style article.
- Daniel in the TaNaKh Detailed authorized Jewish translation of the original
- Who is Ezekiel's Daniel? : The Ugaritic Danel
- Daniel 11 in Context Overview of the allusions to the Syrian Wars in Daniel 11
|
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Daniel |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | Babylon (?) |
http://wn.com/Daniel
Related pages:
http://it.wn.com/Daniele (profeta)
http://cs.wn.com/Daniel (prorok)
http://id.wn.com/Daniel
http://es.wn.com/Daniel (profeta)
http://ru.wn.com/Даниил (пророк)
http://nl.wn.com/Daniël (Hebreeuwse Bijbel)
http://pt.wn.com/Daniel (profeta)
http://pl.wn.com/Daniel (postać biblijna)
http://fr.wn.com/Daniel (prophète)
http://de.wn.com/Daniel (Prophet)
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel
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.
| Rick Warren | |
|---|---|
| Born | Richard Duane Warren (1954-01-28) January 28, 1954 (age 58) San Jose, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Pastor, Author |
| Religion | Southern Baptist, Evangelical |
| Spouse | Kay Warren |
| Website | |
| RickWarren.com | |
Richard Duane "Rick" Warren (born January 28, 1954) is an American evangelical Christian minister and author.[1][2][3] He is the founder and senior pastor of Saddleback Church, an evangelical megachurch located in Lake Forest, California, currently the eighth-largest church in the United States (this ranking includes multi-site churches).[4] He is also a bestselling author of many Christian books, including his guide to church ministry and evangelism, The Purpose Driven Church, which has spawned a series of conferences on Christian ministry and evangelism. He is perhaps best known for the subsequent devotional The Purpose Driven Life which has sold over 30 million copies, making Warren a New York Times bestselling author.[5][6]
Warren holds conservative theological views[7] and holds traditional evangelical views on social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research. Warren has called on churches worldwide to also focus their efforts on fighting poverty and disease, expanding educational opportunities for the marginalized, and caring for the environment. During the 2008 United States presidential election, Warren hosted the Civil Forum on The Presidency at his church with both presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. Obama later sparked controversy when he asked Warren to give the invocation at the presidential inauguration in January 2009.[8]
Contents |
Biography[link]
| Part of a series on the |
| Southern Baptist Convention |
|---|
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Background
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Seminaries
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Early life and education[link]
Warren was born in San Jose, California, the son of Jimmy and Dot Warren. His father was a Baptist minister, his mother a high school librarian.[clarification needed] He was raised in Ukiah, California, and graduated from Ukiah High School in 1972, where he founded the first Christian club on the school's campus, The Fishers of Men Club.[9] His sister Chaundel is married to Saddleback pastor Tom Holladay. His brother Jim C. Warren died in 2007.
Warren received a Bachelor of Arts degree from California Baptist University in Riverside, California; a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (1979) in Fort Worth, Texas; and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.[10]
Personal[link]
Warren has been married to Elizabeth K. Warren (Kay) for 32 years in 2011. They have three adult children (Amy, Josh, and Matthew) and four grandchildren. He considers Billy Graham, Peter Drucker and his own father to be among his mentors.
Due to the success of his book sales, in 2005 Warren returned his 25 years of salary to the church and discontinued taking a salary. He says he and his wife became "reverse tithers", giving away 90% of their income and living off 10%.[11]
Career[link]
Warren says he was called to full-time ministry when he was a 19-year-old student at California Baptist University. In November 1973, he and a friend skipped classes and drove 350 miles to hear W.A. Criswell preach at the Jack Tar Hotel, in San Francisco.[12] Warren waited afterwards to shake hands with Criswell who focused on Warren stating "I feel led to lay hands on you and pray for you!”[12]
During his time at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Warren worked at the Texas Ranch for Christ, a ministry facility of Billie Hanks, Jr., where he began writing books. He co-wrote two books, The Victory Scripture Memory Series and the Twelve Dynamic Bible Study Methods for Laity, with Billi Hanks, Jr. and Wayne Watts.[13]
In April 1980 Warren held Saddleback Church's first public service on Easter Sunday at the Laguna Hills High School Theater with 200 people in attendance. Warren's church growth methods led to rapid expansion, with the church using nearly 80 different facilities in its 28-year history.
Saddleback did not build its first permanent building until it had 10,000 weekly attenders. When the current Lake Forest campus was purchased in the early 1990s, a 2,300-seat plastic tent was used for worship services for several years, with four services each weekend. In 1995 the current Worship Center was completed, with a seating capacity of 3,500. A multi-million dollar children's ministry building and a staff office building were completed over the next few years. In June 2008, a $20 million student ministry facility called the "Refinery" was completed, housing the "Wildside" middle school and "HSM" high school ministries, consisting of 1,500 students. Saddleback Church averages nearly 20,000 people in attendance each week, and is currently the eighth-largest church in the United States.[14]
Warren has been invited to speak at national and international forums, including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the African Union, the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, TED, and Time’s Global Health Summit. He was an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations between 2005 and 2006, and [15] was named one of "America's Top 25 Leaders" in the October 31, 2005, issue of U.S. News and World Report.[10] Warren was named by Time magazine as one of "15 World Leaders Who Mattered Most in 2004" and one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" (2005).[16] In 2006 Newsweek called him one of "15 People Who Make America Great".[17]
In August 2008, Warren drew greater national attention by hosting the Civil Forum on the Presidency that featured senators John McCain and Barack Obama at Saddleback Church. Warren said the goal of the forum was to “restore civility in our civil discourse.”[18] The forum marked McCain and Obama's first joint appearance as the presumptive Republican and Democratic presidential nominees, and was broadcast live on national television. During the two-hour event, each candidate took the stage separately for about an hour to respond to Warren’s questions about faith and moral issues including abortion and human rights.
In December 2008, President-elect Obama chose Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration ceremony. The decision angered pro-choice and LGBT advocates and led to criticism of both Obama and Warren.[19] Obama defended his choice of Warren, saying that although he disagreed with the minister's positions on abortion and same-sex marriage, there should be room for dialogue on such difficult social issues.[20] More controversy ensued when it was announced that Warren would be the keynote speaker at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Annual Commemorative Service on January 19, 2009, the day prior to the inauguration.[21] On January 20, 2009, Warren delivered the Invocation, which was generally praised for its positive message.[22]
In January 2009, Warren and the Readers Digest Association partnered in the launch of the Purpose Driven Connection, a quarterly publication sold as part of a bundle of multimedia products.[23] In November 2009, the partners announced that the magazine had not drawn enough paying members and would cease after publication of the fourth issue that month.[24]
Warren has been invited to speak at John Piper's Desiring God Conference 2010 in Minneapolis, MN.[25]
Ministries[link]
Warren and his wife are directors of the following non-profit organizations:
- Acts of Mercy
- RKW Legacy Partners
- Equipping the Church
Purpose Driven[link]
Purpose Driven comes from the teaching of Warren, and came into use as a paradigm taught to pastors and other Christian leaders worldwide to help them be more effective in leading their churches. The teaching is embodied in Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Church, first published in 1995. Over 400,000 pastors and church leaders from around the world have attended a seminar or conference led by Warren and other pastors who seek to be more effective in fulfilling the Biblical Great Commission and Great Commandment.[citation needed] Purpose Driven refers to these pastors' attempts to balance the five "purposes"; worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism in their churches.
Christian leaders in 162 countries have used materials which stem from this movement.[citation needed] Warren says his organizations have trained 400,000 pastors worldwide.[26] Some 189,000 church leaders subscribe to Ministry Toolbox, the weekly newsletter.[citation needed]
Others express concern over what is described as the divisive nature of Warren's techniques. Wall Street Journal writer Suzanne Sataline cited examples of congregations who have split over the growth strategies and congregations that have expelled members who fought changes. She wrote, "Warren acknowledges that splits occur in congregations that adopt his ideas, though he says he opposes efforts to expel church members."[26]
PEACE Plan[link]
Main article: P E A C E Plan
The P E A C E Plan is an initiative begun by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Senior pastor Rick Warren's stated intention in launching the P E A C E (or PEACE) Plan is to involve every Christian and every church in every nation in the task of serving people in the areas of the greatest global needs. The tag-line is 'Ordinary people empowered by God making a difference together wherever they are'. P.E.A.C.E. is an acronym for the stated methodology for achieving the plan: "Promote reconciliation - Equip servant leaders - Assist the poor - Care for the sick - Educate the next generation."[27]
Political and social views[link]
Warren has worked to shift the evangelical movement away from an exclusive focus on traditional evangelical social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage (regarding the latter, he called divorce a greater threat to the American family[28]), to broader social action. Warren's five-point plan for global action, the P.E.A.C.E. Plan, calls for church-led efforts to tackle global poverty and disease, including the spread of HIV/AIDS, and to support literacy and education efforts around the world. In February 2006, he signed a statement backing a major initiative to combat global warming, thus breaking with other conservative, high-profile evangelical leaders, who had opposed such a move.[29]
Warren's softer tone on political issues once central to U.S. evangelicals and his concern for issues more commonly associated with the political left have resulted in the characterization of Warren as one of a "new breed of evangelical leaders."[30] But it has also been misunderstood by the media, according to Warren, as indicating a shift in position on traditional evangelical issues.[31]
In a conversation with atheist author Sam Harris in Newsweek magazine, Warren spoke out against evolution and in favor of creationism. He also said that brutal dictators such as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot were all atheists, when questioned on whether religion is beneficial to society.[32] In 2005, during the Terri Schiavo controversy, Warren stated that withholding feeding to Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state, was "not a right to die issue". He then called Michael Schiavo's decision to remove her feeding tube, "an atrocity worthy of Nazism",[33] and while speculating about Michael Schiavo's motives, put forward the idea that Schiavo wanted Terri to die because, if she regained consciousness, she might have "something to say that he didn‘t want said." [34]
Two weeks before the 2008 U.S. general election, Warren issued a statement to his congregation endorsing California Proposition 8, which would amend the California Constitution to say "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," thereby eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry.[35][36] Warren's position was consistent with the official position of his church's denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, and reflected his belief that this definition of marriage "has been supported by every single culture, and every single religion for 5,000 years."[35][37] Warren stated that the measure was necessary because the Supreme Court of California "threw out the will of the people" in May 2008 when it found, in the In Re Marriage Cases decision, that the previous statutory ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.[35] After the measure passed, Warren's church and others were targeted by protesters.[38]
In an interview with Beliefnet in early December, Warren again sparked controversy by appearing to equate same-sex marriages to marriages of siblings, multiple partners, and adults and minors.[39][40][41] He later released a video message saying that he does not equate gay relationships with incest or pedophilia, and that, as he had stated during the Beliefnet interview, he opposes the redefinition of marriage.[42]
Bibliography[link]
- The Purpose Driven Church (ISBN 0-310-20106-3)
- The Purpose Driven Life (ISBN 0-310-20571-9)
- Answers to Life's Difficult Questions (ISBN 0-9660895-2-9)
- The Power to Change Your Life (ISBN 0-9660895-1-0)
- What on Earth Am I Here For? Booklet (ISBN 0-310-26483-9)
- Personal Bible Study Methods (ISBN 0-9660895-0-2)
- The Purpose of Christmas (ISBN 978-1416559009)[43]
See also[link]
- Southern Baptist Convention
- List of Southern Baptist Convention affiliated people
- Celebrate Recovery
References[link]
- ^ Date of birth found on the California Birth Index 1905-1995, under Warren, Richard Duane, on 28 January 1954 in Santa Clara County.
- ^ "TIME 100: Rick Warren". Time. April 18, 2005. http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2005/time100/scientists/100warren.html. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
- ^ "25 Most Influential Evangelicals Photo Essay". Time. July 2, 2005. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050207/photoessay/. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
- ^ The Outreach Magazine Top 100 Largest Churches
- ^ Rick Warren: Purpose-Driven Strife
- ^ "By The Numbers: Top-Earning Authors". Forbes.com. December 8, 2006. http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/08/top-earning-authors-tech-media_cz_lg_books06_1208authors.html. Retrieved January 10, 2009.
- ^ http://www.dallasvoice.com/artman/publish/article_10314.php
- ^ Mooney, Alexander (December 18, 2008). "Obama's inaugural choice sparks outrage". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/17/obama.warren/. Retrieved 2009-01-05.
- ^ Mair (2005), pp. 34.
- ^ a b Sheler, Jeffery L. (October 31, 2005). "Preacher With A Purpose". U.S. News & World Report. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051031/31warren.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ^ Nussbaum, Paul (January 26, 2006). "New purpose drives evangelical Warren". Knight Ridder News Service. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060126/news_1c26warren.html. Retrieved 2009-02-24.
- ^ a b "Interview with a Missions Leader". Woman's Missionary Union Website. Archived from the original on 2007-12-14. http://web.archive.org/web/20071214010511/http://www.wmu.com/rickwarren/. Retrieved 2007-12-18.
- ^ Mair (2005), pp. 59-60.
- ^ "The Outreach Magazine Top 100 Largest Churches"
- ^ CFR Members
- ^ Steptoe, Sonja (April 18, 2005). "Rick Warren: A Pastor with a Purpose". Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2005/time100/scientists/100warren.html. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ^ Adler, Jerry; Karen Breslau, Sean Smith, A. Christian Jean, Lisa Miller, Catharine Skipp, Arian Campo-Flores, Jonathan Darman, Barbara Kantrowitz, Keith Naughton, Daniel McGinn, Debra Rosenberg, Daren Briscoe, Claudia Kalb, Peg Tyre, Matthew Philips (July 3, 2006). "The giving Back Awards: 15 People Who Make America Great". Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.com/id/46165/output/print. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ^ Chan, Kenneth (August 17, 2008). "Church-Hosted Forum Reveals Hearts, Minds of White House Hopefuls". The Christian Post. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20080817/church-hosted-forum-reveals-hearts-minds-of-white-house-hopefuls.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ^ Paulson, Michael (December 17, 2008). "Obama taps evangelical for inauguration". The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles_of_faith/2008/12/obama_taps_evan.html. Retrieved 2008-12-31.
- ^ Salmon, Jacqueline L.; Slevin, Peter (December 19, 2008). "Obama Defends Call on Invocation". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/18/AR2008121804205_pf.html.
- ^ Quinn, Christopher (December 23, 2008). "King Day speaker’s gay marriage stance attacked". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. http://www.ajc.com/gwinnett/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2008/12/23/rick_warren_king_day.html. Retrieved 2009-01-01.
- ^ OC Register "Warren's invocation praised but some still call the choice inappropriate"
- ^ Adams, Russell (January 27, 2009). "Top-Selling Pastor Goes Quarterly". Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123301423089217559.html. Retrieved 2008-01-22.
- ^ Pérez-Peña, Richard (November 4, 2009). "Reader’s Digest Closes Rick Warren Magazine". New York Times. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/readers-digest-closes-rick-warren-magazine/. Retrieved 2009-11-07.
- ^ Rick Warren at Desiring God 2010 and Why It’s Awesome « Modern March | church theology culture
- ^ a b Sataline, Suzanne (September 5, 2006). "Strategy for church growth splits congregants". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06248/719178-84.stm. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ^ The PEACE Plan Saddleback Church - The PEACE Plan, retrieved 8/22/2010.
- ^ "Steven Waldman Interviews Rick Warren"
- ^ Goodstein, Laurie (February 8, 2006). "Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/national/08warm.html?ex=1155787200&en=19d0c89eb3b4f5c6&ei=5070. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ^ New York Times, "Emphasis Shifts for New Breed of Evangelicals"
- ^ Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121944811327665223.html
- ^ "The God Debate". Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.com/id/35784. Retrieved January 10, 2009.
- ^ "Larry King Live: Interview With Rick Warren (transcript)". CNN. March 22, 2005. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0503/22/lkl.01.html. Retrieved January 10, 2009.
- ^ "Hardball with Chris Matthews (transcript)". MSNBC. March 23, 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7286474/. Retrieved January 10, 2009.
- ^ a b c Warren's Video Message to Saddleback Church on October 23, 2008
- ^ Proposition 8 - Title and Summary - Voter Information Guide 2008
- ^ SBC Position Statement on sexuality
- ^ New York Times "In California, Protests Over Gay Marriage Vote"
- ^ Beliefnet, "Rick Warren Interview: On Gay Marriage and Divorce"
- ^ Fox News "Pastor Rick Warren defends invite to inauguration"
- ^ Beliefnet, "Steven Waldman Interviews Rick Warren"
- ^ Warren's video message to Saddleback Church on 12/22/2008
- ^ Amazon.com: The Purpose of Christmas (9781416559009): Rick Warren: Books
- Mair, George (2005). A Life With Purpose. New York: Berkley Books. ISBN 0-425-20174-0.
External links[link]
|
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rick Warren |
- Rick Warren's website
- Saddleback Church website
- Rick Warren's ministry podcast
- Purpose Driven Connection
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Rick Warren on Charlie Rose
- Rick Warren at TED Conferences
- Rick Warren at the Internet Movie Database
- Rick Warren collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Rick Warren at the Notable Names Database
- Interview about Rick Warren with Biographer Jeffrey Sheler on ReadTheSpirit.com, January 19, 2010
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Warren, Rick |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | Christian religious leader |
| Date of birth | January 28, 1954 |
| Place of birth | San Jose, California, United States |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Rick_Warren
Related pages:
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http://nl.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://pt.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://de.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://it.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://pl.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://cs.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://id.wn.com/Rick Warren
http://es.wn.com/Rick Warren
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Warren
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.
| Richard Dawkins | |
|---|---|
 Dawkins in 2010 at Cooper Union in New York City |
|
| Born | Clinton Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26) 26 March 1941 (age 71) Nairobi, Kenya Colony |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | MA, DPhil (Oxon) |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Occupation | Ethologist |
| Years active | 1967–present |
| Employer | University of California, Berkeley University of Oxford |
| Organization | Fellow of the Royal Society Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature |
| Known for | Gene-centered view of evolution, concept of the meme, as well as advocacy of atheism and science. |
| Notable work(s) | The Selfish Gene (1976) The Extended Phenotype (1982) The Blind Watchmaker (1986) The God Delusion (2006) |
| Influenced by | Charles Darwin, Ronald Fisher, George C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, Daniel Dennett, Bertrand Russell, Nikolaas Tinbergen, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers |
| Spouse | Marian Stamp Dawkins (m. 1967–1984) Eve Barham (m. 1984–?) Lalla Ward (m. 1992–present) |
| Children | Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984) |
| Parents | Clinton John Dawkins Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner) |
| Awards | ZSL Silver Medal (1989) Faraday Award (1990) Kistler Prize (2001) |
| Website | |
| The Richard Dawkins Foundation | |
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford,[1] and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.[2]
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.[3]
Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement.[4] He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief."[5] As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.[6]
Contents |
Biography[link]
Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya.[7] His father, Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010),[8] was an agricultural civil servant in the British colonial service, in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Dawkins has a younger sister.[9] His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during World War II,[10][11] returning to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park, which he turned into a commercial farm.[8] Both his parents were interested in natural sciences; they answered Dawkins' questions in scientific terms.[12]
Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".[13] He was confirmed, and embraced Christianity until his mid-teens, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god.[9] Dawkins states: "the main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing."[9]
He attended Oundle, a Church of England school,[9] from 1954 to 1959. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Nobel Prize–winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, graduating in 1962. He continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his M.A. and D.Phil. degrees by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year.[7] Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning and choice.[14] Dawkins' research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making.[15]
From 1967 to 1969, he was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. During this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became heavily involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities.[16] He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 taking a position as a lecturer, and in 1990, as a reader in zoology. In 1995 he was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field",[17] and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.[18]
Since 1970 he has been a fellow of New College.[19] He has delivered a number of inaugural and other lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), T. H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), Sheldon Doyle Lecture (1999), Tinbergen Lecture (2004) and Tanner Lectures (2003).[7] In 1991 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children. He has also served as editor of a number of journals, and has acted as editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is a senior editor of the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine, for which he also writes a column. He has been a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since its foundation.[20]
He has sat on judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards,[7] and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004 Balliol College, Oxford instituted the Dawkins Prize, awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities".[21] In September 2008, he retired from his professorship, announcing plans to "write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in 'anti-scientific' fairytales."[22]
Personal life[link]
On 19 August 1967, Dawkins married fellow ethologist Marian Stamp in Annestown, County Waterford, Ireland;[23] they divorced in 1984. Later that same year, on 1 June, he married Eve Barham (19 August 1951[24]–28 February 1999) in Oxford. They had a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984, Oxford).[24] Dawkins and Barham also divorced[25] and she later died of cancer.[26][27] In 1992 he married actress Lalla Ward[25] in Kensington and Chelsea, London.[24] Dawkins met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams,[28] who had worked with her on the BBC's Doctor Who.
Work[link]
Evolutionary biology[link]
Further information: Gene-centred view of evolution
In his scientific works, Dawkins is best known for his popularisation of the gene-centred view of evolution. This view is most clearly set out in his books The Selfish Gene (1976), where he notes that "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities", and The Extended Phenotype (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other".[29] In his role as an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour and its relation to natural selection, he advocates the idea that the gene is the principal unit of selection in evolution.
Dawkins has consistently been sceptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (such as spandrels, described by Gould and Lewontin)[30] and about selection at levels "above" that of the gene.[31] He is particularly sceptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection as a basis for understanding altruism.[32] This behaviour appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own fitness. Previously, many had interpreted this as an aspect of group selection: individuals were doing what was best for the survival of the population or species as a whole, and not specifically for themselves. British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton had used the gene-centred view to explain altruism in terms of inclusive fitness and kin selection − that individuals behave altruistically toward their close relatives, who share many of their own genes.[33][a] Similarly, Robert Trivers, thinking in terms of the gene-centred model, developed the theory of reciprocal altruism, whereby one organism provides a benefit to another in the expectation of future reciprocation.[34] Dawkins popularised these ideas in The Selfish Gene, and developed them in his own work.[35]
He has also been strongly critical of the Gaia philosophy theory of the independent scientist James Lovelock.[36][37][38]
Critics of Dawkins' approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection − of a single event in which an individual either succeeds or fails to reproduce − is misleading, but that the gene could be better described as a unit of evolution − of the long-term changes in allele frequencies in a population.[39] In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that he is using George C. Williams' definition of the gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency."[40] Another common objection is that genes cannot survive alone, but must cooperate to build an individual, and therefore cannot be an independent "unit".[41] In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins suggests that because of genetic recombination and sexual reproduction, from an individual gene's viewpoint all other genes are part of the environment to which it is adapted.
Advocates for higher levels of selection such as Richard Lewontin, David Sloan Wilson, and Elliot Sober suggest that there are many phenomena (including altruism) that gene-based selection cannot satisfactorily explain. The philosopher Mary Midgley, with whom Dawkins clashed in print concerning The Selfish Gene,[42][43] has criticised gene selection, memetics and sociobiology as being excessively reductionist[44] and suggests that the popularity of Dawkins' work is due to factors in the Zeitgeist such as the increased individualism of the Thatcher/Reagan decades.[45]
In a set of controversies over the mechanisms and interpretation of evolution (the so-called 'Darwin Wars'),[46][47] one faction was often named after Dawkins and its rival after the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting the pre-eminence of each as a populariser of pertinent ideas.[48][49] In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators in the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins generally approving and Gould generally being critical.[50] A typical example of Dawkins' position was his scathing review of Not in Our Genes by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and Richard C. Lewontin.[51] Two other thinkers on the subject often considered to be allied to Dawkins are Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett; Dennett has promoted a gene-centred view of evolution and defended reductionism in biology.[52] Despite their academic disagreements, Dawkins and Gould did not have a hostile personal relationship, and Dawkins dedicated a large portion of his 2003 book A Devil's Chaplain posthumously to Gould, who had died the previous year.
Dawkins' book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution expounds the evidence for biological evolution.[53] All of his previous works dealing with evolution had assumed its truth, and not explicitly provided the evidence to this effect. Dawkins felt that this represented a gap in his oeuvre, and decided to write the book to coincide with Darwin's bicentennial year.[54]
Meme[link]
Main article: Meme
Dawkins coined the word meme (the behavioural equivalent of a gene) as a way to encourage readers to think about how Darwinian principles might be extended beyond the realm of genes.[55] Indeed, it was intended as an extension of his "replicators" argument, but it took on a life of its own in the hands of other authors such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore. These popularisations then led to the emergence of the field of memetics, from which he has distanced himself.[56]
Dawkins' memes refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator of a certain idea or a complex of ideas. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes are not always copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes, which may themselves prove more, or less, efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.[57]
Although Dawkins invented the specific term meme independently, he has not claimed that the idea itself was entirely novel,[58] and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. For instance, John Laurent has suggested that the term may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon.[59] In 1904 Semon published Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme). This book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences, with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent also found the term mneme used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant (1926), and has highlighted the similarities to Dawkins' concept.[59] Author James Gleick describes Dawkins’ concept of the meme as "his most famous memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity".[60]
Criticism of creationism[link]
Dawkins is a prominent critic of creationism (the religious belief that humanity, life and the universe were created by a deity,[61] without recourse to evolution[62]). He has described the Young Earth creationist view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old as "a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood",[63] and his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, contains a sustained critique of the argument from design, an important creationist argument. In the book, Dawkins argued against the watchmaker analogy made famous by the 18th-century English theologian William Paley in his book Natural Theology. Paley argued that, just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence merely by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Dawkins shares the view generally held by scientists that natural selection is sufficient to explain the apparent functionality and non-random complexity of the biological world, and can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, albeit as an automatic, nonintelligent, blind watchmaker.[64]
In 1986 Dawkins participated in an Oxford Union debate, in which he and English biologist John Maynard Smith debated Young Earth creationist A. E. Wilder-Smith and Edgar Andrews, president of the Biblical Creation Society.[b] In general, however, Dawkins has followed the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould and refused to participate in formal debates with creationists because "what they seek is the oxygen of respectability", and doing so would "give them this oxygen by the mere act of engaging with them at all". He suggests that creationists "don't mind being beaten in an argument. What matters is that we give them recognition by bothering to argue with them in public."[65]
In a December 2004 interview with American journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that "among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know." When Moyers questioned him on the use of the word theory, Dawkins stated that "evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening." He added that "it is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene... the detective hasn't actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue... Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence. It might as well be spelled out in words of English."[66]
Dawkins has ardently opposed the inclusion of intelligent design in science education, describing it as "not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one".[67] He has been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",[68] a reference to English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. He has been a strong critic of the British organisation Truth in Science, which promotes the teaching of creationism in state schools, and he plans—through the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science—to subsidise the delivery of books, DVDs and pamphlets to schools, in order to counteract what he has described as an "educational scandal".[69]
Advocacy of atheism[link]
Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and a prominent critic of religion. In an interview with Thomas Bass for a book published in 1994 he described himself as a "fairly militant atheist".[70] In 1996, when asked if he would prefer to be known as a scientist or a militant atheist, he replied "Bertrand Russell called himself the Passionate Sceptic. It's aiming high, but I'll shoot for that."[71] Dawkins is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society,[72] a vice-president of the British Humanist Association (since 1996),[7] a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society of Scotland,[73] a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board,[74] a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism,[75] and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.[76] In 2003 he became a signatory of the humanist manifesto Humanism and Its Aspirations, published by the American Humanist Association.[77] As a result of his advocacy of atheism, Dawkins has sometimes been described as a vocal, militant rationalist,[78][79] and as "the UK's Chief Atheist".[80]
Dawkins believes that his own atheism is the logical extension of his understanding of evolution[81] and that religion is largely incompatible with science.[82] In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins wrote:
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.[83]
In his 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind" (from which the term faith-sufferer originated), he suggested that memetic theory might analyse and explain the phenomenon of religious belief and some of the common characteristics of religions, such as the belief that punishment awaits non-believers. According to Dawkins, faith − belief that is not based on evidence − is one of the world's great evils. He claims it to be analogous to the smallpox virus, though more difficult to eradicate.[84] Dawkins is well known for his contempt for religious extremism, from Islamist terrorism[85] to Christian fundamentalism; but he has also argued with liberal believers and religious scientists, from biologists Kenneth Miller[86] and Francis Collins[87] to theologians Alister McGrath and Richard Harries.[88] Dawkins has stated that his opposition to religion is twofold, claiming it to be both a source of conflict and a justification for belief without evidence.[89] However, he describes himself as a "cultural Christian",[90] and proposed the slogan "Atheists for Jesus".[91]
Following the 11 September 2001 attacks, when asked how the world might have changed, Dawkins responded:
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful![92]
Dawkins has especially risen to prominence in contemporary public debates relating science and religion since the publication of his 2006 book The God Delusion, which has achieved greater sales figures worldwide than any of his other works to date. Its success has been seen by many as indicative of a change in the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, central to a recent rise in the popularity of atheistic literature.[93][94] The God Delusion was praised by among others the Nobel laureates Sir Harold Kroto and James D. Watson and by psychologist Steven Pinker.[95] In the book, Dawkins suggested that atheists should be proud, not apologetic, because atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.[96] He sees education and consciousness-raising as the primary tools in opposing what he considers to be religious dogma and indoctrination.[16][97][98] These tools include the fight against certain stereotypes, and he has adopted the term Bright as a way of associating positive public connotations with those who possess a naturalistic worldview.[98] Dawkins notes that feminists have succeeded in arousing widespread embarrassment at the routine use of "he" instead of "she". Similarly, he suggests, a phrase such as "Catholic child" or "Muslim child" should be considered just as socially absurd as, for instance, "Marxist child": children should not be classified based on their parents' ideological beliefs.[98] According to Dawkins, there is no such thing as a Christian child or a Muslim child, as children have about as much capacity to make the decision to become Christians or Muslims as they do to become Marxists.[96]
In January 2006 Dawkins presented a two-part television documentary The Root of All Evil?, addressing what he sees as the malignant influence of religion on society. The title itself is one that Dawkins disliked, noting that religion shouldn't be regarded as the root of all evil.[99] Critics have said that the programme gave too much time to marginal figures and extremists, and that Dawkins' confrontational style did not help his cause and exhibited similarities with the approaches of religious fundamentalists more than with the approaches of the dispassionate, analytic approach of 'hard' science;[100][101] Dawkins rejected these claims, citing the number of moderate religious broadcasts in everyday media as providing a suitable balance to the extremists in the programmes. He further remarked that someone who is deemed an "extremist" in a religiously moderate country may well be considered "mainstream" in a religiously conservative one.[102] The unedited recordings of Dawkins' conversations with Alister McGrath and Richard Harries, including material unused in the broadcast version, have been made available online by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.[103]
Dawkins' work has been controversial, and a number of Christian thinkers have responded to it. For example, Oxford theologian Alister McGrath (author of The Dawkins Delusion and Dawkins' God) maintains that Dawkins is ignorant of Christian theology and therefore unable to engage religion and faith intelligently.[104] In reply, Dawkins asks "do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in leprechauns?",[105] and − in the paperback edition of The God Delusion − he refers to the American biologist PZ Myers, who has satirised this line of argument as "The Courtier's Reply".[106] Dawkins had an extended debate with McGrath at the 2007 Sunday Times Literary Festival.[107]
Dawkins argues that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other".[108] He disagrees with Stephen Jay Gould's principle of nonoverlapping magisteria. In an interview with Time magazine, Dawkins said:
I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.[109]
Astrophysicist Martin Rees, who has described himself as an unbeliever who identifies with Christianity from a cultural perspective, has suggested that Dawkins' attack on mainstream religion is unhelpful.[110] Regarding Rees' claim in his book Our Cosmic Habitat that "such questions lie beyond science", Dawkins asks "what expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?"[111][112] Elsewhere, Dawkins has written that "there's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic, and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority or revelation."[84] As examples of "good scientists who are sincerely religious", Dawkins names Arthur Peacocke, Russell Stannard, John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins, but says "I remain baffled ... by their belief in the details of the Christian religion."[113][114][115][116][117] He has said that the publication of The God Delusion is "probably the culmination" of his campaign against religion.[118]
In 2007 Dawkins founded the Out Campaign to encourage atheists worldwide to declare their stance publicly and proudly.[119] Inspired by the gay rights movement, Dawkins hopes that atheists' identifying of themselves as such, and thereby increasing public awareness of how many people hold these views, will reduce the negative opinion of atheism among the religious majority.[120][121]
In September 2008, following a complaint by Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar, a court in Turkey blocked access to Dawkins' website richarddawkins.net. The court decision was made due to "insult to personality".[122][123][124][125][126][127] As of 8 July 2011, richarddawkins.net is no longer blocked in Turkey.[128]
In October 2008, Dawkins officially supported the UK's first atheist advertising initiative, the Atheist Bus Campaign. Created by Guardian journalist Ariane Sherine and administered by the British Humanist Association the campaign aimed to raise funds to place atheist adverts on buses in the London area, and Dawkins pledged to match the amount raised by atheists, up to a maximum of £5,500. However, the campaign was an unprecedented success, raising over £100,000 in its first four days, and generating global press coverage.[129][130] The campaign, started in January 2009, features adverts across the UK with the slogan: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Dawkins said that "this campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think—and thinking is anathema to religion."[131]
In 2010 Dawkins supported legal efforts to charge Pope Benedict XVI with crimes against humanity. Dawkins and fellow anti-religion campaigner Christopher Hitchens were believed to have explored the option of attempting to have the Pope arrested under the same legal principle that saw Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested during a visit to Britain in 1998.[132]
Dawkins has given support to the idea of a "free thinking" school which he calls "Think for Yourself Academy".[133] The school would not "indoctrinate children in atheism, any more than in religion" but it would teach children to "ask for evidence, to be sceptical, critical, open-minded".[134][135]
On 15 September 2010, Dawkins, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the United Kingdom, while acknowledging his right to tour the UK as head of the Roman Catholic Church.[136]
Richard Dawkins Foundation[link]
Main article: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
In 2006 Dawkins founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), a non-profit organisation. The foundation is in developmental phase. It has been granted charitable status in the United Kingdom and the United States. RDFRS plans to finance research on the psychology of belief and religion, finance scientific education programs and materials, and publicise and support secular charitable organisations. The foundation also offers humanist, rationalist and scientific materials and information through its website.[137]
Dawkins has said the "trend toward theocratic thinking in the United States is a danger not only for America but for the entire world."[138] Connected to this concern, Dawkins invited Sean Faircloth to serve as opening speaker on Dawkins' 2011 US book tour. Faircloth is author of the book Attack of the Theocrats, How the Religious Right Harms Us All and What We Can Do About It. The Richard Dawkins Foundation (United States branch) later hired Faircloth, who has ten years experience as a state legislator, as Director of Strategy and Policy.[138]
Other fields[link]
In his role as professor for public understanding of science, Dawkins has been a critic of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. His 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow takes John Keats' accusation that, by explaining the rainbow, Isaac Newton had diminished its beauty, and argues for the opposite conclusion. He suggests that deep space, the billions of years of life's evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity contain more beauty and wonder than do "myths" and "pseudoscience".[139] Dawkins wrote a foreword to John Diamond's posthumously published Snake Oil, a book devoted to debunking alternative medicine, in which he asserted that alternative medicine was harmful, if only because it distracted patients from more successful conventional treatments and gave people false hopes.[140] Dawkins states that "there is no alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work."[141]
Dawkins has expressed concern about the growth of the planet's human population and about the matter of overpopulation.[142] In The Selfish Gene, he briefly mentions population growth, giving the example of Latin America, whose population, at the time the book was written, was doubling every 40 years. He is critical of Roman Catholic attitudes to family planning and population control, stating that leaders who forbid contraception and "express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation" will get just such a method in the form of starvation.[143]
As a supporter of the Great Ape Project – a movement to extend certain moral and legal rights to all great apes – Dawkins contributed the article "Gaps in the Mind" to the Great Ape Project book edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In this essay, he criticises contemporary society's moral attitudes as being based on a "discontinuous, speciesist imperative".[144]
Dawkins also regularly comments in newspapers and weblogs on contemporary political questions; his opinions include opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[145] the British nuclear deterrent and the actions of US President George W. Bush.[146] Several such articles were included in A Devil's Chaplain, an anthology of writings about science, religion and politics. He is also a supporter of the Republic campaign to replace the British monarchy with a democratically elected president.[147] Dawkins has described himself as a Labour voter in the 1970s[148] and voter for the Liberal Democrats since the party's creation.[149] In 2009 he spoke at the party's conference in opposition to blasphemy laws, alternative medicine and faith schools. In the UK general election of 2010, Dawkins officially endorsed the Liberal Democrats, in support of their campaign for electoral reform and for their "refusal to pander to 'faith'."[150]
In the 2007 TV documentary The Enemies of Reason,[151] Dawkins discusses what he sees as the dangers of abandoning critical thought and rationale based upon scientific evidence. He specifically cites astrology, spiritualism, dowsing, alternative faiths, alternative medicine and homoeopathy. He also discusses how the Internet can be used to spread religious hatred and conspiracy theories with scant attention to evidence-based reasoning.
Continuing a long-standing partnership with Channel 4, Dawkins participated in a five-part television series Genius of Britain, along with fellow scientists Stephen Hawking, James Dyson, Paul Nurse, and Jim Al-Khalili. The five-episode series was broadcast in June 2010.[152] The series focussed on major British scientific achievements throughout history.
Dawkins presented a More4 documentary entitled Faith School Menace? in which he argued for "us to reconsider the consequences of faith education, which... bamboozles parents and indoctrinates and divides children."[153][154]
In 1998 Dawkins expressed his appreciation for two books, famous for their criticism of postmodernism in US universities, in departments like literary studies, anthropology and other cultural studies; the two books are Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (by Gross and Levitt) and Intellectual Impostures (by Sokal and Bricmont), both related to the Sokal affair hoax.[155] In the same occasion Dawkins also criticised Cambridge University for awarding philosopher Jacques Derrida an honorary doctorate.[155]
In 2011 Dawkins joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, a new private university in London established by A. C. Grayling, which is scheduled to open in September 2012.[156]
Awards and recognition[link]
Dawkins was awarded a Doctor of Science by the University of Oxford in 1989. He holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Huddersfield, University of Westminster, Durham University,[157] the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, and the University of Oslo,[158] and honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen,[159] Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel,[7] and the University of Valencia.[160] He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and the Australian National University (HonLittD, 1996), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and the Royal Society in 2001.[7] He is one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society.
In 1987 Dawkins received a Royal Society of Literature award and a Los Angeles Times Literary Prize for his book, The Blind Watchmaker. In the same year, he received a Sci. Tech Prize for Best Television Documentary Science Programme of the Year, for the BBC Horizon episode The Blind Watchmaker.[7]
His other awards have included the Zoological Society of London Silver Medal (1989), Finlay innovation award (1990), the Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002)[7] and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009).[161]
Dawkins topped Prospect magazine's 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, as decided by the readers, receiving twice as many votes as the runner-up.[162][163] He has been short-listed as a candidate in their 2008 follow-up poll.[164] In 2005 the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him its Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge". He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 2006 and the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year Award for 2007.[165] In the same year, he was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007,[166] and he was ranked 20th in The Daily Telegraph's 2007 list of 100 greatest living geniuses.[167] He was awarded the Deschner Award, named after German anti-clerical author Karlheinz Deschner.[168]
Since 2003, the Atheist Alliance International has awarded a prize during its annual conference, honouring an outstanding atheist whose work has done most to raise public awareness of atheism during that year. It is known as the Richard Dawkins Award, in honour of Dawkins' own work.[169]
In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.[170]
Media[link]
Selected publications[link]
Main article: List of publications by Richard Dawkins
- The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.
- The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982. ISBN 0-19-288051-9.
- The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1986. ISBN 0-393-31570-3.
- River Out of Eden. New York: Basic Books. 1995. ISBN 0-465-06990-8.
- Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1996. ISBN 0-393-31682-3.
- Unweaving the Rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. ISBN 0-618-05673-4.
- A Devil's Chaplain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2003. ISBN 0-618-33540-4.
- The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2004. ISBN 0-618-00583-8.
- The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2006. ISBN 0-618-68000-4.
- The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press (United States), Transworld (United Kingdom and Commonwealth). 2009. ISBN 0-593-06173-X.
- The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Free Press (United States), Bantam Press (United Kingdom). 2011. ISBN 978-1-4391-9281-8. OCLC 709673132. [171]
Documentary films[link]
- Nice Guys Finish First (1986)
- The Blind Watchmaker (1987)[172]
- Growing Up in the Universe (1991)
- Break the Science Barrier (1996)
- The Root of All Evil? (2006)
- The Enemies of Reason (2007)
- The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)
- Faith School Menace? (2010)
Other appearances[link]
- Doctor Who: "The Stolen Earth" (2008) – as himself
- Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) – as himself
- The Purpose of Purpose (2009) – Lecture tour among American universities
- Beautiful Minds (April 2012) – BBC4 documentary
Notes[link]
a. ^ W. D. Hamilton hugely influenced Dawkins and the influence can be seen throughout Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene.[16] They became friends at Oxford and following Hamilton's death in 2000, Dawkins wrote his obituary and organised a secular memorial service.[173]
b. ^ The debate ended with the motion "That the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution" being defeated by 198 votes to 115.[174][175]
References[link]
- ^ Emeritus and Honorary Fellows of New College, Oxford
- ^ "Previous holders of The Simonyi Professorship". The University of Oxford. http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/previous-holders-simonyi-professorship. Retrieved 2010-09-23.
- ^ "European Evolutionary Biologists Rally Behind Richard Dawkins' Extended Phenotype". Sciencedaily.com. 20 January 2009. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119081333.htm. Retrieved 2011-06-28.
- ^ "Richard Dawkins on militant atheism". TED Conferences, LLC. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html. Retrieved 2011-12-14.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. Transworld Publishers. p. 5. ISBN 0-593-05548-9.
- ^ "The God Delusion – back on the Times extended list at #24". Richard Dawkins at RichardDawkins.net. 27 January 2010. http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5000#455619. Retrieved 6 February 2010.
- "Richard Dawkins — Science and the New Atheism". Richard Dawkins at Point of Inquiry. 8 December 2007. http://media.libsyn.com/media/pointofinquiry/POI_2007_12_7_Richard_Dawkins.mp3. Retrieved 2008-03-14.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i "Curriculum vitae of Richard Dawkins". The University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 23 April 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080423211133/http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/CV.shtml. Retrieved 2008-03-13. [dead link]
- ^ a b Dawkins, Richard (11 December 2010). "Lives Remembered: John Dawkins". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lives-remembered-john-dawkins-2157459.html. Retrieved 12 December 2010.
- ^ a b c d Hattenstone, Simon (10 February 2003). "Darwin's child". London: The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/10/religion.scienceandnature. Retrieved 2008-04-22.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (2004-10). The Ancestor's Tale. p. 317. ISBN 978-0-618-00583-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=Tub-X6wydKgC&pg=PA317.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard. "Brief Scientific Autobiography". RichardDawkins.net. http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4757-brief-scientific-autobiography. Retrieved 2010-07-17.
- ^ "Richard Dawkins: The foibles of faith". BBC News. 12 October 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/1595744.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
- ^ Pollard, Nick (1995-04). "High Profile". Third Way (Harrow, England) 18 (3): 15. ISSN 0309-3492. http://books.google.com/?id=17rzvh_Ve0IC&pg=PA15&dq=%22a+normal+Anglican+upbringing%22+dawkins&q=%22a%20normal%20Anglican%20upbringing%22%20dawkins.
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- ^ a b "Sean Faircloth joins RDFRS (US) as Director of Strategy and Policy". The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. http://richarddawkins.net/articles/643044-sean-faircloth-joins-rdfrs-us-as-director-of-strategy-and-policy. Retrieved 2011-10-01.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (1998). Unweaving The Rainbow. United Kingdom: Penguin. pp. 4–7. ISBN 0-618-05673-4.
- ^ Diamond, John (2001). Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations. United Kingdom: Vintage. ISBN 0-09-942833-4.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (2003). A Devil's Chaplain. United States: Houghton Mifflin. p. 58. ISBN 0-618-33540-4.
- ^ "The Selfish Green". RichardDawkins.net. 2 April 2007. Archived from the original on 1 May 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080501094048/http://richarddawkins.net/article,829,The-Selfish-Green,Jonathan-Dimbleby-David-Attenborough-Richard-Dawkins-Jane-Goodall-Richard-Leakey. Retrieved 2008-04-22.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene (2nd ed.). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. p. 213. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.
- ^ edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer.; Paola Cavalieri, Peter Singer (1993). The Great Ape Project. United Kingdom: Fourth Estate. ISBN 0-312-11818-X.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (22 March 2003). "Bin Laden's victory". London: The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/22/iraq.usa. Retrieved 2008-03-15.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (18 November 2003). "While we have your attention, Mr President...". London: The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/18/usa.politics1. Retrieved 2008-03-16.
- ^ "Our supporters". Republic. 24 April 2010. http://www.republic.org.uk/Who%20we%20are/Our%20Supporters%20Include/index.php. Retrieved 2010-04-29.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (1989). "Endnotes. Chapter 1. Why are people?". The Selfish Gene (1st extra chapter) (2nd ed.). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.
- ^ "Richard Dawkins: Keep Libel Laws OUT of Science". youtube.com. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqVm-WmFzyU. Retrieved 2009-12-12. [dead link]
- ^ "Show your support – vote for the Liberal Democrats on May 6th. libdems.org.uk. Monday, 03 May 2010". Libdems.org.uk. http://libdems.org.uk/latest_news_detail.aspx?title=Show_your_support_-_vote_for_the_Liberal_Democrats_on_May_6th&pPK=9dd43be1-d11a-40b1-8ede-3acab3666d48. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
- ^ "The Enemies of Reason". Channel 4. August 2007. http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/E/enemies_of_reason/. Retrieved 2008-04-13.
- ^ "C4 lines up Genius science series". Broadcast. 2009. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/2009/01/dawkins_to_front_c4_science_series.html. Retrieved 2009-01-31.
- ^ "Faith School Menace? – Faith School Menace?". Channel 4. 18 August 2010. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/faith-school-menace/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1. Retrieved 2010-09-17.
- ^ Sutcliffe, Tom (19 August 2010). "Last Night's TV: Faith Schools Menace?/More 4 – Reviews, TV & Radio". London: The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-tv-faith-schools-menacemore-4-2056104.html. Retrieved 2010-09-17.
- ^ a b Dawkins, Richard. "Postmodernism Disrobed". http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html. Retrieved 2010-09-24.
- ^ New university to rival Oxbridge will charge £18,000 a year Sunday Telegraph 5-Jun-2011
- ^ "Durham salutes science, Shakespeare and social inclusion". Durham News & Events Service. 26 August 2005. http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/allnews/?itemno=3972. Retrieved 2006-04-11.
- ^ "Æresdoktorer i 2011 - Universitetet i Oslo" (in (Norwegian)). Uio.no. http://www.uio.no/om/tall-og-fakta/aresdoktorer/eresdoktorer-2011.html. Retrieved 2011-10-22. [dead link]
- ^ Best-selling biologist and outspoken atheist among those honoured by University, University of Aberdeen.
- ^ "Richard Dawkins, doctor 'honoris causa' per la Universitat de València". 31 March 2009. http://www.uv.es/~webuv/noticies/noticia.php?idnoticia=7165. Retrieved 2009-04-02.
- ^ Scripps Institution of Oceanography (7 April 2009). "Scripps Institution of Oceanography Honors Evolutionary Biologist, Richard Dawkins, in Public Ceremony and Lecture". Scripps Institution of Oceanography. http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=967. Retrieved 2009-04-07.
- ^ "Q&A: Richard Dawkins". BBC News. 29 July 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3935757.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-09.
- ^ Herman, David (2004). "Public Intellectuals Poll". Prospect magazine. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2004/08/publicintellectualspoll/. Retrieved 2008-03-09.
- ^ "The Top 100 Public Intellectuals". Prospect magazine. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4262. Retrieved 2008-04-22.
- ^ "Galaxy British Book Awards — Winners & Shortlists 2007". Publishing News. 2007. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070927130727/http://www.britishbookawards.co.uk/pnbb_winners2007.asp?#3. Retrieved 2007-04-21.
- ^ Behe, Michael (3 May 2007). "Time Top 100". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595329_1616137,00.html. Retrieved 2008-03-02.
- ^ "Top 100 living geniuses". The Daily Telegraph. 28 October 2007. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1567544/Top-100-living-geniuses.html. Retrieved 2010-10-04.
- ^ Giordano Bruno Stiftung (28 May 2007). "Deschner-Preis an Richard Dawkins". Humanistischer Pressedienst. http://hpd-online.de/node/2010. Retrieved 2008-04-04.
- ^ Slack, Gordy (30 April 2005). "The atheist". Salon. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/index.html. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
- ^ "Honorary FFRF Board Announced". http://ffrf.org/news/releases/honorary-ffrf-board-announced/. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
- ^ ""The Magic of Reality - new book by Richard Dawkins this Fall" 10 May 2011". Richarddawkins.net. 10 May 2011. http://richarddawkins.net/articles/625578. Retrieved 2011-06-28.
- ^ Staff. "BBC Educational and Documentary: Blind Watchmaker". BBC. http://www.bbcactive.com/BroadCastLearning/asp/catalogue/productdetail.asp?productcode=207. Retrieved 2 December 2008. [dead link]
- ^ Dawkins, Richard (3 October 2000). "Obituary by Richard Dawkins". The Independent. Archived from the original on 18 March 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080318185801/http://www.unifr.ch/biol/ecology/hamilton/hamilton.html#Dawkins. Retrieved 2008-03-22.
- ^ Critical-Historical Perspective on the Argument about Evolution and Creation, John Durant, in "From Evolution to Creation: A European Perspective (Eds. Sven Anderson, Arthus Peacocke), Aarhus Univ. Press, Aarhus, Denmark
- ^ "1986 Oxford Union Debate: Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith". RichardDawkins.net. Archived from the original on 13 October 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071013161954/http://richarddawkins.net/article,721,1986-Oxford-Union-Debate,Richard-Dawkins-John-Maynard-Smith. Retrieved 2007-05-10. Debate downloadable as MP3 files.
External links[link]
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Book: Richard Dawkins |
| Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print. | |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Dawkins |
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Richard Dawkins |
General
- Official website
- The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
- Richard Dawkins at the Internet Movie Database
- Works by or about Richard Dawkins in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Richard Dawkins collected news and commentary at The Guardian
- Richard Dawkins collected news and commentary at The New York Times
Video
- National Geographic Interviews – A series of video interviews with National Geographic Channel with Richard Dawkins on Darwin, Evolution and God.
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Richard Dawkins on Charlie Rose
- Richard Dawkins at TED Conferences
- Video interview with Riz Khan for Al Jazeera English
- Video interview at Big Think
Selected writings
- Viruses of the Mind (1993) – Religion as a mental virus.
- The Real Romance in the Stars (1995) – A critical view of astrology.
- The Emptiness of Theology at RDFRS.(1998) – A critical view of theology.
- Snake Oil and Holy Water (1999) – suggests that there is no convergence occurring between science and theism.
- What Use is Religion? (2004) – suggests that religion may have no survival value other than to itself.
- Race and Creation (2004) – On race, its usage and a theory of how it evolved.
- The giant tortoise's tale, The turtle's tale and The lava lizard's tale (2005) – A series of three articles written after a visit to the Galápagos Islands.
- Dawkins' Huffington Post articles
Audio
- 2011 Interview on io9's Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast
- Richard Dawkins on RadioLIVE's Weekend Variety Wireless – Richard Dawkins appears live on New Zealand's Radio Live, taking calls from the audience.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Dawkins, Richard |
| Alternative names | Dawkins, Clinton Richard |
| Short description | British evolutionary biologist, ethologist, atheist, humanist and sceptic |
| Date of birth | 26 March 1941 |
| Place of birth | Nairobi, Kenya |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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| Christopher Hitchens | |
|---|---|
 Hitchens speaking in 2007 |
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| Born | Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-04-13)13 April 1949 Portsmouth, England |
| Died | 15 December 2011(2011-12-15) (aged 62) Houston, Texas |
| Occupation | Writer, journalist, public speaker |
| Nationality | English American |
| Citizenship | British and American |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Subjects | Politics, religion, history, biography, literature |
| Spouse(s) | Eleni Meleagrou (m. 1981-1989; divorced) Carol Blue (m. 1989-2011; his death) |
| Relative(s) | Peter Hitchens (brother) |
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Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American[6][7] author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades.[8] Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch",[9] was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.
Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.[10][11]
A noted critic of religion and a self described "antitheist", he said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion."[12] According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. His 2007 book, God Is Not Great, sold over 500,000 copies.
On 15 December 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, a complication of his cancer, in the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. A popular figure, his death prompted tributes and eulogies from a range of public figures, including Tony Blair, Richard Dawkins, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Nick Clegg, Stephen Fry and Bill Maher.
Contents |
Life and career[link]
Early life and education[link]
His mother, Yvonne Jean (née Hickman), and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II.[13] Yvonne was at the time a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service),[14] and Eric a "purse-lipped and silent" commander, whose ship HMS Jamaica helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape.[3] His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including in Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.
Hitchens's mother having argued that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,"[15] he was sent off to Mount House School in Tavistock in Devon at the age of eight, followed by the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and then at Balliol College in Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell.[14] In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge.[16]
Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22.[17] These experiences continued in his college years, when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of the Thatcher government.[18]
In the 1960s Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.[19]
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organization was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam".[20][clarification needed] Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism.[14] Shortly after he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect".[21]
Journalistic career (1970–1981)[link]
Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,[22] published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".
Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree.[23] In 1971 he went to work at the Times Higher Education Supplement where he served as a social science correspondent.[24] Hitchens admitted that he hated the position, and was later fired; he recalled, "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it."[25] He then went on to become a researcher for ITV's Weekend World.[26] In 1973 he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with the authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, among others.[26] At the New Statesman he acquired a reputation as a fierce left-winger, aggressively attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.
In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a suicide pact with her lover, a former clergyman named Timothy Bryan.[14] They overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover his mother's body. Hitchens said he thought his mother was pressured into suicide by fear that her husband would learn of her infidelity, as their marriage had been strained and unhappy. Both her children were then independent adults. While in Greece, Hitchens reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta. It became his first leading article for the New Statesman.[27]
In 1977, unhappy at the New Statesman, Hitchens defected to the Daily Express where he became a foreign correspondent.[26] He returned to the New Statesman in 1979 where he became foreign editor.[26]
American career (1981–2011)[link]
After moving to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation, where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.[28][29][30][31][32][33][34] He became a contributing editor of Vanity Fair in 1992,[35] writing ten columns a year. In 2002 Asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named after him.[36] He left The Nation in 2002 after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,[30] but others — including Hitchens (or he indicated as such while alive) — believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.[37][38] In 1987, his father died from cancer of the esophagus.[39] He became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008.[40]
Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus.[41] Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda[42] and the Darfur region of Sudan.[43] His work took him to over 60 countries.[44] In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.[45]
Before Hitchens' political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir".[46][47][48] In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco," calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories.[49][50] Also, on the back of his book Hitch-22, among the praise from notable writers and figures, a Vidal quote endorsing Hitchens as his successor is crossed out with a red 'X' and a message saying "NO C.H." His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.[51] An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.[52]
In 2007 Hitchens' work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary".[53] He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.[54] He won the National Magazine Award for Columns about Cancer in 2011.[55][56] Hitchens also served on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offered advice to Coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.[57]
Literature reviews[link]
Hitchens wrote a monthly essay on books in The Atlantic[58] and contributed occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In Why Orwell Matters, he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.
During a three-hour interview by Book TV,[3] he named authors who have had influence on his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien.
Political views[link]
Main article: Christopher Hitchens's political views
| My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, anyplace, anytime. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass. |
| – Christopher Hitchens[59] |
The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto".[60] In 2009, Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media".[61] However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism. Hitchens' political perspective can be found in his wide ranging writings which include many of the political dialogues he published.
Socialism[link]
Hitchens became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." In 2001, he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist." Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist", but added, "I don't think that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system, are by any means all resolved." He stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies."[62]
In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating, "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".[63] In a June 2010 interview with The New York Times, he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist".[64] In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was.[65] Hitchens was an admirer of Che Guevara, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs."[66] However, in an essay written in 1997, he distanced himself from Che, and referred to the mythos surrounding him as a "cult".[67]
He continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men,[68][69] and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia.[21][30] In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discrediting of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".[21]
Iraq War and the war on terror[link]
In the years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, Hitchens became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican-right that promoted pro-liberalism intervention, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz.[70] Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.[71] In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues.[72] Hitchens had also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".[73]
Following the September 11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation.[74][75] Chomsky responded[76] and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky[77] to which Chomsky again responded.[78] Approximately a year after the September 11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden,[79] and that they were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues.
Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and he held numerous public debates on the topic with George Galloway[80] and Scott Ritter.[81]
Criticism of George W. Bush[link]
Prior to September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He also criticized Bush's support of intelligent design[82] and capital punishment.[83][83]
Although Hitchens defended Bush's post-September 11 foreign policy, he criticized the actions of U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and the U.S. government's use of waterboarding, which he unhesitatingly deemed as torture after being invited by Vanity Fair to voluntarily undergo it.[84][85] In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.[86][87][88]
Presidential endorsements[link]
Hitchens would elaborate on his political views and ideological shift in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv. In this discussion Hitchens revealed himself to be a supporter of Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, who was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore.[89]
Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".[90]
In the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens in an article for Slate stated, "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity." He was critical of both main party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hitchens went on to support Obama, calling McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace".[91]
Blumenthal–Hitchens feud[link]
Hitchens and Carol Blue chose to submit an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the trial of impeachment of Bill Clinton. In the affidavit, Blue and Hitchens swore that their then-friend, Sidney Blumenthal, had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial,[92] and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts.[92][93]
Israel–Palestine[link]
Hitchens had said of himself, "I am an Anti-Zionist. I'm one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians."[94]
A review of his autobiography Hitch-22 in the Jewish Daily Forward refers to Hitchens as "a prominent anti-Zionist" and says that he views Zionism "as an injustice against the Palestinians".[95] Others have commented on his anti-Zionism as well[96] suggesting that his memoir was "marred by the occasional eruption of [his] anti-Zionism".[97] The Jewish Daily Forward quoted him saying of Israel's prospects for the future, "I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable."[95]
In Slate, Hitchens pondered the notion that, instead of curing antisemitism through the creation of a Jewish state, "Zionism has only replaced and repositioned"[98] it, saying: "there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews." Hitchens argued that instead of supporting Zionism, Jews should help "secularize and reform their own societies", believing that unless one is religious, "what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place?" Indeed, Hitchens goes so far as to claim that the only justification for Zionism given by Jews is a religious one.[99]
During a town hall function in Pennsylvania with Martin Amis, Hitchens stated that "one must not insult or degrade or humiliate people"[100] and that he "would be opposed to this maltreatment of the Palestinians if it took place on a remote island with no geopolitical implications". Hitchens described Zionism as "an ethno-nationalist quasi-religious ideology" and stated his desire that if possible, he would "re-wind the tape [to] stop Hertzl from telling the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land".
He continued to say that Zionism "nonetheless has founded a sort of democratic state which isn't any worse in its practice than many others with equally dubious origins." He stated that settlement in order to achieve security for Israel is "doomed to fail in the worst possible way", and the cessation of this "appallingly racist and messianic delusion" would "confront the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews". However, Hitchens contended that the "solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists" and wondered "What did they imagine would be the response of the followers of the Prophet [Muhammad]?" Hitchens bemoaned the transference into religious terrorism of Arab secularism as a means of democratization: "the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad".[98] He maintained that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a "trivial squabble" that has become "so dangerous to all of us" because of "the faith-based element."[100]
Hitchens collaborated on this issue with prominent Palestinian advocate Edward Said, in 1988 publishing Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.
Domestic policy[link]
Hitchens actively supported drug policy reform and called for the abolition of the "War on Drugs" which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley.[19] He supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as "sadistic".[101] On the issue of abortion, Hitchens prioritized in affirming that he believed a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and supported the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believed in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights as "the only thing that is known to cure poverty", and in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether.[102][103]
Other[link]
Other issues Hitchens wrote on the subjects of included his support for the reunification of Ireland,[104][105] abolition of the British monarchy,[106] and his condemnation of the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević[107] and Franjo Tuđman[108] in Yugoslavia, and the Bosnian War.[109]
Critiques of specific individuals[link]
Hitchens was known for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also wrote book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters), and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography).
However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques took the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell,[110][111] George Galloway,[112] Mel Gibson,[113] Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama,[114] Michael Moore,[115] Daniel Pipes,[116] Ronald Reagan,[117] Jesse Helms,[118] and Cindy Sheehan.[21][119]When comedian Bob Hope died in 2003, Hitchens wrote an attack piece on him, calling Hope "a fool and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian" and "Quick, then—what is your favorite Bob Hope gag? It wouldn't take you long if I challenged you on Milton Berle, or Woody Allen, or John Cleese, or even Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl. By this time tomorrow, I bet you haven't come up with a real joke for which Hope could take credit." Critics however argued that Hitchens focused solely on Hope's declining years and ignored his heyday in the 1940s.[120]
Views on religion[link]
See also: God Is Not Great
Hitchens often spoke out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he called "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). He said: "The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam".[cite this quote] In his book, God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in The New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums"[121] to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in the Financial Times.[122] God Is Not Great was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007.[123][124]
Hitchens contended that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world",[125] "[v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In God Is Not Great, Hitchens contends that:
[A]bove all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.[126]
His book rendered him one of the major advocates of the "New Atheism" movement, and he also was made an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.[127] Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. He also served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America,[128] a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. In 2007, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in Christianity Today magazine.[129] This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on 27 October 2009.
On 26 November 2010 Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Canada at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it. Preliminary results on the Munk website said 56 per cent of the votes backed the proposition (Hitchens' position) before hearing the debate, with 22 per cent against (Blair's position), and 21 per cent undecided, with the undecided voters leaning toward Hitchens, giving him a 68 per cent to 32 per cent victory over Blair, after the debate.[130][131]
In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.[132]
Hitchens was accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded "when religion is attacked in this country [...] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share".[133] Hitchens had also been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in The American Conservative, and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge.[134][135] In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."[136] When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile".[137] Piatak claimed that "A straightforward description of all Hitchens's anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine", noting particularly Hitchens' assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts should not be confirmed because of his faith.[135]
Hitchens was raised nominally Christian, and went to Christian boarding schools but from an early age declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was of partially Jewish ancestry. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, who was then in her 90s, she said of his fiancée, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." Hitchens found out that his maternal grandmother, Dorothy Levin, was raised Jewish (Dorothy's father and maternal grandfather had both been born Jewish, and Dorothy's maternal grandmother – Hitchens' matrilineal great-great-grandmother – was a convert to Judaism). Hitchens' maternal grandfather converted to Judaism before marrying Dorothy Levin.[138] Hitchens' Jewish-born ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland).[139][140] In an article in the The Guardian on 14 April 2002, Hitchens stated that he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal.[139] In a 2010 interview at New York Public Library, Hitchens stated that he was against circumcision, a Jewish tradition, and that he believed "if anyone wants to saw off bits of their genitalia they should do when they're grown up and have made the decision for themselves".[141]
In February 2010, he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.[142]
Personal life[link]
Marriages and children[link]
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Hitchens married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in a Greek Orthodox church[18] in 1981; the couple had a son, Alexander and a daughter, Sophia. In 1989 Hitchens left Meleagrou for Carol Blue, an American writer.[29] The couple married in New York, at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation. They have a daughter, Antonia.[29]
Parents[link]
Hitchens' father, Eric Hitchens, was a Commander in the British Royal Navy. Hitchens often referred to his father as simply the 'Commander'. On 26th December, 1943, Hitchens's father was deployed onboard HMS Jamaica when it sank the German warship, the Scharnhorst. Christopher Hitchens would refer to his father's contribution to the war: 'Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done.' He also stated that 'the remark that most summed him [his father] up was the flat statement that the war of 1939 to 1945 had been "the only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing."' [143]
Hitchens's mother, Yvonne, died in Athens 1973 when, despite first reports in The Times that she had been murdered, it was later concluded that her death had been the result of an apparent suicide pact with her boyfriend, Reverend Timothy Bryan. Hitchens travelled to Athens to identify his mother's body. On the subject Hitchens later said: 'She probably thought things were getting sordid - he [Bryan] wasn't able to hold a job down, she couldn't go back, she was probably about the age I am now and perhaps there was that - she'd been very pretty - and things were never going to get any better, so why go through with it? She might not have been that hard to persuade, but I know that she did try to save herself because I have the photographs still. So that was sort of the end of family life really.' [144]
In reference to writing about his mother in his memoir, Hitch-22, he said, 'It was painful to write about my mother, but not very because long ago I internally managed all that. 'I even went back to Greece and I went to the graveyard while I was writing the book and decided not to write about it. I thought that would be sentimental.' [145]
Relationship with his younger brother[link]
Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian and socially conservative journalist in London, although, like his brother, he had been a Trotskyist in the 1970s. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London).[146] Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew (born in 1999); shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said that their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on 21 June 2007 edition of the BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University,[147] and at the Pew Forum on 12 October 2010.[148]
Smoking and drinking[link]
The Sunday Times described Hitchens as "Usually armed with a glass of Scotch and an untipped Rothmans cigarette."[149] In late 2007 he briefly gave up smoking, although resumed during the writing of his memoir and continued until his cancer diagnosis.[150] Hitchens admitted to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", arguing that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."[151] He argued, "The plain fact is that [drinking] makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring."[152]
George Galloway notably accused Hitchens of being a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay",[153] to which Hitchens replied, "only some of which is true".[154] Hitchens later elaborated: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."[155] Hitchens' wife Carol Blue described him as "obviously an alcoholic, he functions at a really high level and he doesn’t act like a drunk, so the only reason it’s a bad thing is it’s taking out his liver, presumably. It would be a drag for Henry Kissinger to live to a hundred and Christopher to keel over next year.” [156] His New Yorker profile described him as drinking "like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect."[156]
Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"[157]
In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' — most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there."[158]
Reflecting on the lifestyle that supported his career as a writer he said:
I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle ... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored — it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I'm going to wager on this bit ... In a strange way I don't regret it. It's just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did.[159]
Esophageal cancer and death[link]
In June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for Hitch-22 to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer.[160] He announced that he was undergoing treatment in a Vanity Fair piece entitled "Topic of Cancer".[39] Hitchens said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years".[161] In November 2010, Hitchens canceled[162] a scheduled appearance in New York, where he was to debate religion writers David Hazony and Stephen Prothero on the subject of the Ten Commandments. Earlier that year, he published a piece in Vanity Fair on the subject,[163] and was working on a book about the Ten Commandments as well.[164]
During his illness, Hitchens was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins' new cancer treatment which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.[165][166]
In April 2011, Hitchens was forced to cancel an appearance at the American Atheist Convention, and instead sent a letter that stated, "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death." He closed with "And don't keep the faith."[167] The letter also dismissed the notion of a possible deathbed conversion, in which he claimed that "redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before."[167] In June 2011, he spoke to a University of Waterloo audience via a home video link.[168]
In October 2011, Hitchens made a public appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, TX. Atheist Alliance of America was also a participant in the joint convention.[169]
In November 2011, George Eaton wrote in the New Statesman:
The tragedy of Hitchens' illness is that it came at a time when he enjoyed a larger audience than ever. Of his tight circle of friends – Amis, Fenton, McEwan, Rushdie – Hitchens was the last to gain international renown, yet he is now read more widely than any of them." Eaton revealed that Hitchens would like to be remembered as a man who fought totalitarianism in all its forms although many remember him as a "lefty who turned right", and his support of the Iraq War and not his support of the War in Bosnia on the side of the Moslems. Eaton concluded, "The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but, as he is increasingly aware, perhaps not as he would like."[170]
Hitchens died on 15 December 2011 at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.[171]
In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research.[172]
Reactions to death[link]
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, and unique character. He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment, and brilliance. He was an extraordinary, compelling and colourful human being whom it was a privilege to know."[173]
Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and a friend of Hitchens, said, "I think he was one of the greatest orators of all time. He was a polymath, a wit, immensely knowledgeable, and a valiant fighter against all tyrants including imaginary supernatural ones."[173]
Sam Harris, American writer and neuroscientist, wrote, "I have been privileged to witness the gratitude that so many people feel for Hitch’s life and work — for, wherever I speak, I meet his fans. On my last book tour, those who attended my lectures could not contain their delight at the mere mention of his name — and many of them came up to get their books signed primarily to request that I pass along their best wishes to him. It was wonderful to see how much Hitch was loved and admired — and to be able to share this with him before the end. I will miss you, brother."[174]
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project who helped treat Hitchens' illness, wrote, "I will miss Christopher. I will miss the brilliant turn of phrase, the good-natured banter, the wry sideways smile when he was about to make a remark that would make me laugh out loud. No doubt he now knows the answer to the question of whether there is more to the spirit than just atoms and molecules. I hope he was surprised by the answer. I hope to hear him tell about it someday. He will tell it really well."[175]
British columnist and author Peter Hitchens, who had a tumultuous relationship with his older brother Christopher, wrote that he and Christopher "got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens," and praised his brother as "courageous."[176]
Irish-American political journalist Alexander Cockburn, founder of the left-wing[177][178][179] political magazine CounterPunch wrote an obituary critical of Hitchens, criticizing his support for the Iraq War, criticisms of Mother Teresa, and criticisms of their mutual friend Edward Said and concluded, "I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol."[180]
Tributes followed from the philosopher Daniel Dennett,[181] the physicist Lawrence Krauss,[182] the actor Stephen Fry,[183] the writer Ian McEwan,[184] the philosopher A.C. Grayling;[185] and Vanity Fair, in which he was remembered as an "incomparable critic and masterful rhetorician".[186]
Assessment[link]
Anthony Gottlieb argued in The New Yorker that Hitchens "thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it."[187]
Jason Cowley argued in the Financial Times:
- He is not a philosopher and has made no original contribution to intellectual thought. As an atheist, his anti-religious tract, God Is Not Great, is elegant but derivative. His polemical denunciations and pamphlets on powerful individuals, such as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, feel already dated, stranded in place and time, good journalism but not literature. Ultimately, I suspect, he will be remembered more for his prodigious output and for his swaggering, rhetorical style – as well as for his lifestyle: the louche cosmopolitan and gadfly, the itinerant man of letters and indefatigable raconteur.[188]
Film and television appearances[link]
As referenced from the Internet Movie Database, Hitchens Web or Charlie Rose.[189][190][191]
| Year | Film and/or Television |
|---|---|
| 1984 | Opinions: "Greece to their Rome" |
| 1988 | Frontiers (TV series) |
| 1993 | Everything You Need to Know |
| 1994 | Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher |
| 1994 | Hell's Angel |
| 1996 | Where's Elvis This Week? |
| 1996–2010 | Charlie Rose (talk show) (13 episodes) |
| 1998 | Princess Diana: The Mourning After |
| 1999–2002 | Dennis Miller Live (TV show) (4 episodes) |
| 2002 | The Trials of Henry Kissinger |
| 2003 | Hidden in Plain Sight |
| 2003–2009 | Real Time with Bill Maher (TV show) (6 episodes) |
| 2004 | Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon |
| 2004–2006 | Newsnight (TV show) (3 episodes) |
| 2004–2010 | The Daily Show (TV show) (4 episodes) |
| 2005 | Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (TV show)(1 episode, s03e05) |
| 2005 | The Al Franken Show (TV show)(1 episode) |
| 2005 | Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope |
| 2005 | Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism |
| 2005–2008 | Hardball with Chris Matthews (TV show)(3 episodes) |
| 2006 | American Zeitgeist |
| 2006 | Blog Wars |
| 2007 | Manufacturing Dissent |
| 2007 | Question Time (TV series) (1 episode) |
| 2007 | Your Mommy Kills Animals |
| 2007 | Personal Che |
| 2007 | Heckler |
| 2007 | In Pot We Trust |
| 2008 | Discussions with Richard Dawkins: Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen" |
| 2008 | Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed |
| 2009 | Holy Hell |
| 2009 | Presidency |
| 2009 | Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" |
| 2010 | Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune |
Selected publications[link]
Main article: Christopher Hitchens bibliography
- 1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso)
- 1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said) Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4 Reissued, 2001
- 1990 The Monarchy, Chatto & Windus Ltd
- 1990 Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)(June 1990)
- 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Verso
- 1997 The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, Verso
- 1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family, Verso
- 2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Verso
- 2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
- 2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books
- 2002 Why Orwell Matters also Orwell's Victory, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-03050-5
- 2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
- 2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
- 2007 "Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography ", Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0-87113-955-3
- 2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, [Editor] Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6
- 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
- 2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press
- 2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? — A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson), Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2
- 2010 Hitch-22: A Memoir, Twelve, ISBN 978-0-446-54033-9 OCLC 464590644
- 2011 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, Twelve. UK edition as Arguably: Selected Prose, Atlantic, ISBN 1-4555-0277-4 / ISBN 978-1-4555-0277-6
References[link]
- ^ "Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell". NetCharles.com. 24 June 2002. http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/col-hitchens.htm. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
- ^ Christopher Hitchens and his Critics, p. 264.
- ^ a b c "Christopher Hitchens In Depth". 2 September 2007. Book TV. http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ID=8532&SN=In%20Depth. — List of writers can be seen @ 1:13:10
- ^ Kennard, Matt (17 April 2011). "Johann Hari on Chomsky, Hitchens, Iraq, and anarchism". Thecommentfactory.com. http://www.thecommentfactory.com/johann-hari-on-chomsky-hitchens-iraq-and-anarchism-3160/. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Alexandra Alter (11 May 2010). "A Friendship for the Pages". The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704250104575238560552578150.html.
- ^ Hitchens, C (2011). Hitch-22: A Memoir. Random House Digital. p. 228. ISBN 0-7710-4115-2.
- ^ Hitchens, C (2011). Hitch-22: A Memoir. Random House Digital. p. 204. ISBN 0-7710-4115-2.
- ^ ‘HITCHENS, Christopher Eric’, Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012 ; online edn, Jan 2012 accessed 5 May 2012
- ^ Wintour, Anna (16 December 2011). "The Ruined Table". Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/12/christopher_hitchens_death_anna_wintour_on_what_her_old_friend_hitchens_loved_most_.html. "Christopher Hitchens — or Hitch, as he was known to me and just about everyone else"
- ^ Eaton, George. The New Statesman Interview: Christopher Hitchens www.newstatesman.com, 12 July 2010. Retrieved 7 November 2010. Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu. I gave it the partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: it was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought."
- ^ 14:45
- ^ Andre Mayer (14 May 2007). "Nothing sacred — Journalist and provocateur Christopher Hitchens picks a fight with God". CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/nothing_sacred.html. Retrieved 29 June 2008.
- ^ Yglesias, Matthew (20 October 2003). "The Commander: My Father, Eric Hitchens". Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2255781/entry/2255782. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ a b c d Walsh, John. The Independent. "Hitch-22: A memoir by Christopher Hitchens" Retrieved 28 May 2010
- ^ Lynn Barber "Look who's talking", The Observer, 14 April 2002
- ^ Blake Morrison I contain multitudes, The Guardian, 29 May 2010
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher, Hitch-22 (Allen & Unwin, 2010) p. 76 ff.
- ^ a b Levy, Geoffery, "So Who Were the Two Tory Ministers Who Had Gay Flings with Christopher Hitchens at Oxford?", Daily Mail, 6 March 2010, accessed 30 May 2010
- ^ a b Hoover Institution. Web.archive.org (15 September 2007). Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ Long Live Labor — Why I'm for Tony Blair Slate, 25 April 2005
- ^ a b c d Heaven on Earth — Interview with Christopher Hitchens PBS, 2005
- ^ International Socialism: Christopher Hitchens "Workers' Self Management in Algeria" (1st series), No.51, April–June 1972, p.33, Encyclopedia of Trotskyism, 25 October 2005
- ^ Alexander Linklater (May 2008). "Christopher Hitchins". Prospect. http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10157. Retrieved 17 February 2009. [dead link]
- ^ ‘HITCHENS, Christopher Eric’, Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012 ; online edn, Jan 2012 accessed 5 May 2012
- ^ "Christopher Hitchens Explains Why You Should Quit Your Job". YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NegtQIkhz6g. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ a b c d New Statesman - Christopher Hitchens: the New Statesman years
- ^ Barber, Lynn (13 April 2002). "Look who's talking". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/apr/14/politics. Retrieved 1 April 2010.
- ^ For the Sake of Argument by Christopher Hitchens Interview with Brian Lamb for the show Booknotes, an author interview series on C-SPAN (some biographical information) 17 October 1993
- ^ a b c The Boy Can't Help It In-depth interview and profile] in New York, 19 April 1999
- ^ a b c "Free Radical", interview in Reason by Rhys Southan, November 2001
- ^ Christopher Hitchens The Atlantic, 2003
- ^ Guy Raz, Christopher Hitchens, Literary Agent Provocateur, National Public Radio, 21 June 2006
- ^ He Knew He Was Right The New Yorker, Profiles, 16 October 2006
- ^ Christopher Hitchens Notable Interviews — video interview 2007
- ^ Christopher Hitchens – Contributing Editor. Web.archive.org (28 February 2010). Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ Alan Chamberlin. "JPL Small-Body Database Browser". Ssd.jpl.nasa.gov. http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=hitchens. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ Timothy Noah, Meritocracy's lab rat Slate, 9 January 2002
- ^ Annabel's — the magazine Vogue UK, 15 July 2004
- ^ a b Hitchens, Christopher. "Topic of Cancer | Culture". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
- ^ "Christopher Hitchens on Sarah Palin: 'A Disgraceful Opportunist and Moral Coward'". PoliticalArticles.NET. 18 December 2009. http://www.politicalarticles.net/blog/2009/12/18/christopher-hitchens-on-sarah-palin-a-disgraceful-opportunist-and-moral-coward/. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ At the Rom: Three New Commandments She Does The City, 30 April 2009
- ^ "Childhood's End", Vanity Fair, September 2006
- ^ "Realism in Sudan", Slate, 7 November 2005
- ^ Christopher Hitchens Twelve Publishers
- ^ Detailed Biographical Information — Christopher Hitchens, Lannan Foundation. Retrieved 27 April 2010.
- ^ Andrew Werth (January/February 2004). "Hitchens on Books". The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/letters.htm. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
- ^ John Banville (3 March 2001). "Gore should be so lucky". The Irish Times. http://osdir.com/ml/politics.leftists.monkeyfist/2001-04/msg00016.html. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
- ^ Gore Vidal on Christopher Hitchens YouTube
- ^ Christopher Hitchens (February 2010). "Vidal Loco". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/hitchens-201002. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
- ^ Youde, Kate (7 February 2010). "Hitchens attacks Gore Vidal for being a 'crackpot'". The Independent (London). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/hitchens-attacks-gore-vidal-for-being-a-crackpot-1891753.html. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
- ^ Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Results Foreign Policy
- ^ The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Foreign Policy
- ^ 2007 National Magazine Award Winners Announced Press release, Magazine Publishers of America, 1 May 2007
- ^ National Magazine Awards Winners and Finalists Magazine Publishers of America
- ^ "Christopher Hitchens Wins National Magazine Award for Columns About Cancer". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/05/christopher-hitchens-wins-national-magazine-award-for-columns-about-cancer.html. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ "2011 National Magazine Awards Winners and Finalists". Magazine Publishers of America. 9 May 2011. http://www.magazine.org/asme/magazine_awards/nma_winners/index.aspx.
- ^ "Secular Coalition for America Advisory Board Biography". Secular.org. http://www.secular.org/bios/Christopher_Hitchens.html. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
- ^ Authors — Christopher Hitchens The Atlantic
- ^ The Immortal Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens (videotape). Vanity Fair. 16 December 2011. 2:40 minutes in. http://www.vanityfair.com/video/2011/12/1329955421001. Retrieved 25 February 2012.
- ^ FIVE QUESTIONS FOR: Christopher Hitchens SF Gate
- ^ "The 25 Most Influential Liberals In The US Media". Forbes. 22 January 2009. http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/22/influential-media-obama-oped-cx_tv_ee_hra_0122liberal_slide_13.html?thisSpeed=30000. Retrieved 23 November 2009.
- ^ Rhys Southan from the November 2001 issue. "Free Radical — Reason Magazine". Reason.com. http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/01/free-radical. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Martin Amis Christopher Hitchens a conversation about Antisemitism and Saul bellow Part 3 YouTube
- ^ Solomon, Deborah (2 June 2010). "The Contrarian". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
- ^ Christopher Hitchens. "The Revenge of Karl Marx" The Atlantic, April 2009
- ^ Just a Pretty Face? The Guardian, 11 July 2004
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher (1997), "Goodbye to All That", The New York Review of Books, 17 July 1997
- ^ Amis, Martin (2002). Koba the Dread. Miramax. p. 25. ISBN 0-7868-6876-7.
- ^ "Great Lives — Leon Trotsky", BBC Radio 4, 8 August 2006
- ^ "That Bleeding Heart Wolfowitz", Slate, 22 March 2005
- ^ "Ahmad and Me", Slate, 27 May 2004
- ^ Johann Hari, "In Enemy Territory: An Interview with Christopher Hitchens", The Independent, 23 September 2004.
- ^ Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Fukuyama", Slate, 1 March 2006
- ^ Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism The Nation, 8 October 2001
- ^ Blaming bin Laden First The Nation, 22 October 2001
- ^ Chomsky Replies to Hitchens The Nation, 15 October 2001
- ^ A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky The Nation, 15 October 2001
- ^ Reply to Hitchens's Rejoinder The Nation, 15 October 2001
- ^ Taking Sides The Nation, 26 September 2002
- ^ "George Galloway vs Christopher Hitchens (1 of 12)". YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZnUIeKOIgc. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ "Christopher Hitchens versus Ritter — Iraq War debate part 1". YouTube. 30 April 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU45ioYvx4k. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Belz, Mindy. "According to Hitch", World Magazine, 3 April 2006
- ^ a b "A War To Be Proud Of" Weekly Standard, 5 September 2005
- ^ "Believe Me, It's Torture", Vanity Fair, August 2008
- ^ On the Waterboard[dead link] Vanity Fair, 2 July 2008
- ^ Lichtblau, Eric. "Two Groups Planning to Sue Over Federal Eavesdropping" The New York Times, 17 January 2006; Retrieved 5 November 2009
- ^ "Statement — Christopher Hitchens, NSA Lawsuit Client". Aclu.org. 16 January 2006. http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23485res20060116.html. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher (7 August 1999). "Gov. Death". Salon.com. http://www.truthinjustice.org/govdeath.htm. Retrieved 10 May 2009.
- ^ On Whether Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong Bloggingheads.tv, 14 October 2008
- ^ My Endorsement and Osama's Video: The news in Bin Laden's comments had nothing to do with our election Slate, 1 November 2004]
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher "Vote for Obama" Slate, 13 October 2008; Retrieved 5 November 2009
- ^ a b "Salon Newsreal | Stalking Sidney Blumenthal". Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/news/1999/02/09newsa.html. Retrieved 26 April 2011. [dead link]
- ^ Christopher Hitchens (July/August 2003). "Thinking Like an Apparatchik". The Atlantic Monthly 292 (1): 129–42. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2003/07/hitchens.htm. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Hölbling, Walter; Rieser-Wohlfarter, Klaus (2004). What is American?: new identities in U.S. culture. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 351–. ISBN 978-3-8258-7734-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=_Tn7LqhWI7IC&pg=PA351. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
- ^ a b Goldstein, Evan R. (June 2010). "Born Grumpy, with a Talent for It: Christopher Hitchens's Memoir is Too Happy by Far". Jewish Daily Forward. http://www.forward.com/articles/128323/.
- ^ Rodden, John (2006). Every intellectual's big brother: George Orwell's literary siblings. University of Texas Press. pp. 95–. ISBN 978-0-292-71308-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=UlnwITCGcw8C&pg=PA95. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
- ^ Richman, Rick (11 2010). "Bellow, Hitchens, and COMMENTARY". Commentary Magazine. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2010/11/08/bellow-hitchens-and-commentary/.
- ^ a b "Slate: Can Israel Survive for Another 60 Years?". Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2191193/. Retrieved 8 July 2011.
- ^ Kerstein, Benjamin. "Christopher Hitchens's Jewish Problem". Jewish Ideas Daily. http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/12/13/main-feature/1/christopher-hitchenss-jewish-problem. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
- ^ a b "Frontpage Interview: Christopher Hitchens Part II". FrontPage Magazine. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11253. Retrieved 8 July 2011.
- ^ Just a Pretty Face? by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 11 July 2004
- ^ Question and answers on Mother Teresa's opposition to women's rights Poverty linked to reproductive rights, 2006
- ^ Lisa Miller (2008-11-28). "Belief Watch: Pro-life Atheists". Newsweek.com. http://www.newsweek.com/id/171240. Retrieved 2012-01-24.
- ^ Galloway vs. Hitchens: The Transcript endusmilitarism, 16 September 2005
- ^ These Men Are "Peacemakers"? Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams make me want to spew Slate, 2 April 2007
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher (6 December 2000). "End of the line". The Guardian (UK). http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/dec/06/monarchy.features11.
- ^ "In Defense of WWII: Chapter 5 of 5". Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB9uqI62ikA. Retrieved 7 September 2008.
- ^ "Shed No Tears for Milosevic". FrontPage Magazine. 14 March 2006. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C83A870D-93BE-4ACD-B8E0-E082B1D313C0. Retrieved 7 September 2008.
- ^ Bodansky, Yossef (1996). Some Call It Peace: Waiting for the War In the Balkans. International Media Corp. Ltd. ISBN 0-9520070-5-3.
- ^ Video: Christopher Hitchens (15 May 2007) appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 YouTube
- ^ Video: Christopher Hitchens (16 May 2007) appearance on Hannity & Colmes about Rev. Falwell's Death YouTube
- ^ Unmitigated Galloway Weekly Standard, 30 May 2005
- ^ Mel Gibson's Meltdown Slate, 31 July 2006
- ^ His material highness Salon.com article by Christopher Hitchens
- ^ Unfairenheit 9/11 Slate, 21 June 2004
- ^ Christopher Hitchens "Daniel Pipes is not a man of peace", Slate, 11 August 2003
- ^ "The stupidity of Ronald Reagan". Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2101842/. Retrieved 9 May 2007.
- ^ Christopher Hitchens (7 July 2008). "Farewell to a Provincial Redneck". Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2194921/.
- ^ Christopher Hitchens, Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle, Slate, 15 August 2005
- ^ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/08/hopeless.html
- ^ Michael Kinsley "In God, Distrust" The New York Times Book Review, 13 May 2007
- ^ Here's the hitch by Michael Skapinker in The Financial Times
- ^ Associated Press. Web.archive.org (13 October 2007). Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ Hardcover Nonfiction The New York Times Best Seller list, 3 June 2007
- ^ Free Speech onegoodmove, March 2007
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher (May 2007). God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books. p. 283.
- ^ Honorary Associate: Christopher Hitchens National Secular Society
- ^ Biography — Christopher Hitchens Secular Coalition for America Advisory Board
- ^ "Is Christianity Good for the World?" Christianity Today, 8 May 2007
- ^ "Hitchens apparent winner in religion debate. CBC News. Retrieved 27 November 2010". News.ca.msn.com. 27 November 2010. http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/cbc-article.aspx?cp-documentid=26520521. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ "Munk Debates Website". Munkdebates.com. http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Pareene, Alex (4 February 2006). "Instant Team Party Crash: Legoland Uber Alles". Wonkette. http://wonkette.com/156915/instant-team-party-crash-legoland-uber-alles. Retrieved 9 Dec 2010.
- ^ Look Who's Hammering Mel[dead link] 1 August 2006
- ^ "Hood, John Hollowed Be Thy Name". Miami Sun Post Web.archive.org (21 May 2007). Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ a b Tom Piatak, The Purest Neocon: Christopher Hitchens, an unreconstructed Bolshevik, finds his natural home on the pro-war Right, The American Conservative, 10 October 2005
- ^ "Godless Provocateur Christopher Hitchens Pledges Allegiance to America". Holidaydmitri.com. 1 May 2007. http://www.holidaydmitri.com/hitch.html. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
- ^ Scarborough County Transcripts for 12 March 2004
- ^ Hitch-22
- ^ a b Look who's talking The Observer, 14 April 2002
- ^ Hitch-22, page 352.
- ^ Christopher Hitchens at NYPL w. Paul Holdengräber (4-Jun-10)(2–9)(THE INTERVIEW series). YouTube (18 September 2010). Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ "Honorary FFRF Board Announced". http://ffrf.org/news/releases/honorary-ffrf-board-announced/. Retrieved 20 August 2008.
- ^ Hichens, Christopher (2010-06-2). "The Commander: My Father, Eric Hitchens". Slate.com. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/features/2010/hitch22/the_commander_my_father_eric_hitchens.html. Retrieved 2012-04-14.
- ^ Lynn Barber (2002-04-13). "Lynn Barber meets Christopher Hitchens". Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/apr/14/politics. Retrieved 2012-04-14.
- ^ Hitch-22: A Memoir, Huffington post
- ^ Christopher Hitchens (16 May 2005). "O Brother, Why Art Thou?". Vanity Fair. Condé Nast Publications. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/06/hitchens200506. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
- ^ "Hitchens v. Hitchens: Faith, Politics & War". Grand Valley State University. http://www.gvsu.edu/hauenstein/index.cfm?id=3425B4C3-DA0C-48A1-FDE23503A04A3318. Retrieved 29 March 2008.
- ^ "Can Civilization Survive Without God?". http://pewforum.org/Belief-in-God/Can-Civilization-Survive-Without-God-.aspx.
- ^ The Sunday Times (London) December 18, 2011 Sunday Edition 1; Northern Ireland Christopher Hitchens; OBITUARIES ; Polemicist who lived a life of dissolution and contrariness SECTION: NEWS REVIEW;FEATURES; OBITUARIES; Pg. 8
- ^ Edward Luce, Lunch with the Financial Times, 11 January 2008
- ^ Christopher Hitchens, Living Proof, Vanity Fair, March 2003
- ^ Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, by Kingsley Amis (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008), x.
- ^ Unmitigated Galloway , The Weekly Standard, 30 May 2005
- ^ "There's only one popinjay here, George", Evening Standard, 19 May 2005
- ^ George Galloway Is Gruesome, Not Gorgeous, Slate, 13 September 2005
- ^ a b Ian Parker (OCTOBER 16, 2006). "He Knew He Was Right". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker?currentPage=all.
- ^ Oliver Burkeman, War of words, The Guardian, 28 October 2006
- ^ A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain, Slate, 6 June 2010
- ^ "Q & A". Q-and-a.org. http://www.q-and-a.org/Program/?ProgramID=1322. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ "Reliable Source – Christopher Hitchens diagnosed with cancer, cuts short his book tour". Voices.washingtonpost.com. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/06/rs-_hitchens.html. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ Goldberg, Jeffrey (6 August 2010). "Hitchens Talks to Goldblog About Cancer and God". The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/08/hitchens-talks-to-goldblog-about-cancer-and-god/61072/. Retrieved 17 September 2010.
- ^ "Hitchens cancels NYC Jewish Center Ten Commandments panel". Daily Hitchens. 4 November 2010. http://www.dailyhitchens.com/2010/11/hitchens-cancels-nyc-jewish-center-ten.html. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher (1 August 2011). "The New Commandments | Culture". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/04/hitchens-201004. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
- ^ Eaton, George. "Interview: Christopher Hitchens". New Statesman. UK. http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/07/conservative-course-presidency. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ Neville, Simon (26 March 2011). "Atheist Christopher Hitchens turns to evangelical Christian doctor in his fight against cancer". Daily Mail (UK). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370145/Atheist-Christopher-Hitchens-turns-evangelical-Christian-doctor-fight-cancer.html. Retrieved 16 December 2011. "Dr Francis Collins, the former director of the National Human Genome Research Project was one part of the team which developed techniques to map out the entire human DNA make-up is using Hitchens as a guinea pig for a new treatment. Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has had his genome mapped out in its entirety by taking DNA from healthy tissue and from his cancerous tumour."
- ^ "Atheist Hitchens Credits Evangelical Francis Collins for Cancer Hope". The Christian Post. http://www.christianpost.com/news/atheist-hitchens-credits-evangelical-francis-collins-for-cancer-hope-49615/. Retrieved 16 December 2011. "In an interview with U.K. Telegraph Magazine, Hitchens said that Collins, who was formerly the director of the National Center for Human Genome Research and now serves as director of the National Institutes of Health, is partially responsible for developing a new cancer treatment that maps out the patient's entire genetic make-up and targets damaged DNA."
- ^ a b Scienceblogs.com article: "Hitchens' address to American Atheists."
- ^ Liz Monteiro (6 June 2011). "Hitchens feted with standing ovation at UW video link debate". Waterloo Region Record. http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/543148--hitchens-feted-with-standing-ovation-at-u-of-w-video-link-debate.
- ^ Charles McGrath (9 October 2011). "A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/books/christopher-hitchens-on-writing-mortality-and-cancer.html.
- ^ George Eaton (24 November 2011). "Hitch's Rolls-Royce mind is still purring". New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/11/hitchens-remembered-polemicist. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ Arnold, Laurence (16 December 2011). "Christopher Hitchens, Who Wrote of War, God, Cancer Battle, Dies Aged 62". Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-16/christopher-hitchens-who-wrote-of-war-god-cancer-battle-dies-aged-62.html. Retrieved 16 December 2011.
- ^ "Memorial Gatherings". dailyhitchens.com. 24 December 2011. http://www.dailyhitchens.com/2011/12/memorial-gatherings.html.
- ^ a b The Associated Press: Quotes on the death of pundit Christopher Hitchens. Google.com. Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ The Blog : Hitch. Sam Harris (18 December 2011). Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ Collins, Francis S.. (18 December 2011) In remembrance of my friend Hitch – Guest Voices. The Washington Post. Retrieved on 23 December 2011.
- ^ Hitchens, Peter. (16 December 2011) In Memoriam, my courageous brother Christopher, 1949–2011. Mail Online. Retrieved on 24 December 2011.
- ^ Ralph Blumenthal (12 May 2006). "Army Acts to Curb Abuses of Injured Recruits". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12training.html?pagewanted=2. Retrieved 14 June 2011.
- ^ "The Devil You Know". new Republic. http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-devil-you-know.
- ^ "Olbermann, Assange, and the Holocaust Denier When you want to believe, you'll believe anything.". Reason. http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/olbermann-assange-and-the-holo.
- ^ Cockburn, Alexander. (16 December 2011) Farewell to CH. Counterpunch. Retrieved on 24 December 2011.
- ^ Dennett, Daniel. (19 December 2011) [1]. Washington Post
- ^ Kraus, Lawrence. (23 December 2011) [2]. richarddawkins.net
- ^ Fry, Stephen. (16 December 2011) [3]. thedailybeast.com
- ^ McEwan, Ian. (16 December 2011) [4]. theguradian.co.uk
- ^ Grayling, A.C. (16 December 2011) [5]. barnesandnoble.com
- ^ Vanity, Fair. (15 December 2011) [6]. Vanity Fair
- ^ Gottlieb, Anthony (2007-05-21). "Atheists with Attitude". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/21/070521crbo_books_gottlieb. Retrieved 2012-04-14.
- ^ September 23, 2011 10:05 pm The war on error By Jason Cowley
- ^ "Christopher Hitchens". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0386899/. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
- ^ "Hitchens Web". http://www.hitchensweb.com/. Retrieved 7 April 2010.
- ^ "Charlie Rose". http://www.charlierose.com/. Retrieved 17 August 2010.
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- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Christopher Hitchens at the Internet Movie Database
- Christopher Hitchens on Charlie Rose
- Daily Hitchens, an archive of material on or by Hitchens
- Christopher Hitchens on National Public Radio in 2010
- Drexel Interview (One-hour video interview) with Paula Marantz Cohen, June 2010
- Works by or about Christopher Hitchens in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Christopher Hitchens collected news and commentary at The Guardian
- Christopher Hitchens collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Christopher Hitchens collected news and commentary at The Boston Globe
- "Journalist Christopher Hitchens fully embraces the Bush war camp" from the World Socialist Website, October 2002
- "Christopher Hitchens[dead link]" feature story in Prospect magazine, May 2008
- "Incendiary Author Spares No Targets" feature story in The New Zealand Herald, May 2008
- "Such, Such are His Joys" David Brooks assessment in The New York Times, 1 July 2010
- Hitchens on Dying with Cancer, video interview with The Atlantic, August 2010
- "Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'" The Guardian, 13 November 2010
- "Christopher Hitchens's Jewish Problem" feature article on Jewish Ideas Daily, 13 December 2010
- A debate between Hitchens and Berlinski 2010
- Outspoken and outrageous: Christopher Hitchens a 60 Minutes profile aired 6 March 2011
- Articles by Hitchens
- Contributor page at Vanity Fair
- Column archive at The Atlantic
- Article archive at The Guardian
- Hitchens articles at Slate
- Article archive at Journalisted
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Hitchens, Christopher Eric |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | English author, journalist and literary critic |
| Date of birth | 13 April 1949 |
| Place of birth | Portsmouth, England |
| Date of death | 15 December 2011 |
| Place of death | Houston, Texas, United States |
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Wiki Summary
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.
