Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza

Ideas – There can be only one infinite, dovone substance, comprising all of reality. – Infinite substance must have an infinity of attributes. – God and nature (understood as substance) are identical inasmuch as God is infinite. – Substance is self-caused and depends on nothing other than itself, whether for its existence or for

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Benedetto Croce

Ideas – A work of art is an intuition, an image expressive of and unified by feelings. – Art is lyrical in that it is expressive of life and feeling; it has aesthetic universally that stems from its origin in intuition. – Art is independent of all other expressions of human reason. – Philosophy

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ideas – The natural world is coursed through with the immanent flow of a deity – a ‘world-soul’ – both in and above the world. – The divine spirit can be approached in the immediacies if experiential existence. – The principle of immanence reveals that there is a democracy of spiritual possibility, that personal

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Ralph Cudworth

Ideas – There is an ancient wisdom (prisca theology), known to all peoples. – We can have only limited knowledge of God. – All people, even atheists, have an idea of God. – The political explanation of religion is not adequate to explain Christianity. – A survey of religious knowledge, pagan and Judeo-Christian, shows

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Ralph Barton Perry (1876-1957)

American realist philosopher, born in Poultney, Vermont. He got hos BA from Princeton (1896) and Ph.D. from Harvard (1899). He taught at Harvard from 1902, becoming professor of philosophy in 1913 and professor emeritus in 1946. He revised (1925) Alfred Weber’s History of Philosophy. Editor of the works of William James, he won the 1936

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Pythagoras of Samos

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, Greece in 569 BC. He was a Greek religious leader and a philosopher who made developments in astronomy, mathematics, and music theories. He moved to Croton (a city in southern Italy) and started a religious and philosophical school there. He had many followers called the Pythagoreans.

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Ptolemy

Major Ideas – The position of the celestial bodies can be determined with the help of a kinematic model: These bodies move on eccentric and epicyclic circles with uniform velocities, even though their velocities are not uniform when viewed from the earth; these circles lie inside the sphere of the fixed stars; carefully made

Protagoras of Abdera

Major Ideas – Educated persons are skilled in the art of rhetoric, which enables them to articulate thought with clarty and superior argumentation. – What enables one to lead others can be taught. – No one is absolutely self-sufficient, for human survival depends on mutual cooperation in society – hence the importance of values,

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Plotinus

Ideas – The soul is more important and real than the body or any other material object. – In its pure state, the World-Soul is the same as the Intellect (or Mind). – The Intellect is a system of Platonic ideas that exists simultaneously in all individual souls. – Above the Intellect is the

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Plato

Ideas – The goal of intellectual inquiry is to discover the eternal immutable forms of ‘ideas’, which serve as the essence and ideal of all things; in this way a true philosopher seeks wisdom. – These eternal truths, already in the mind, can be recalled by the imaterial and immortal intellect; they cannot be

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Ideas – Evolution, cosmogenesis, has a direction. – Evolution ascends toward a final point, or Omega, which exerts an attraction on the process although it stands outside of it. – Evolution has a within as well as a without, taking place on both the physical and psychic levels. – Tangential energy moves evolution on

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Pierre-Maurice Duhem

French physicist and philosopher and historian of science. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure he taught at Lille (1887–1893), Rennes (1893–1894), and Bordeaux (1894–1916). His extension and application of the thermodynamic potential to topics in chemistry ranks him among the founders of modern physical chemistry. His Traité d’énergétique générale (2 vol., 1911) aimed

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Pierre Gassendi

Ideas – Aristotelianism is useless as a philosophy or basis for science. – Skepticism, in a mitigated form, allows for a limited knowledge. – Epicurean atomism is the best hypothesis for explaining the natural world. – Epicureanism can be modified so that it is compatible with Christian beliefs. Biography Pierre Gassendi was a French

Pierre Bayle

Ideas – All theories – philosophical, theological, and even scientific – can be challenged by arguments that show they are contradictory and/or unbelievable. – Since no beliefs can be proved to be true or false, all should be tolerated. – Morality is completely separate from religious belief; a society of atheists could be more

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Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

Ideas – True happiness is found in pursuit of the highest good, which is God. – Temporal possessions, honor, fame, pleasure and power are inadequate and disappointing goals; only the happiness that comes from loving God cannot be taken away by misfortune. – Even though God foresees the free acts of the human will,

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Carl Friedrich Gauss

Ideas – Mathematics requires a new rigor in which Greek standards of precision are applied to the subject matter of contemporary mathematics. – The goal of science is the pursuit of truth ‘for its own sake’. – Due to its intrinsic independence from the material and the practical, ‘mathematics is the queen of the

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Carl Gustav Hempel

Carl Gustav Hempel, a leading member of logical positivism, was born in Orianenburg, Germany, in 1905. Carl G. Hempel studied at the Realgymnasium at Berlin and, in 1923, he was admitted at the University of Gottingen where he studied mathematics with David Hilbert and Edmund Landau and symbolic logic with Heinrich Behmann. Hempel was very

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Carl Gustav Jung

Ideas – There are particular personality types characterized by extraversion or introversion, and four personality functions: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. – Within each individual is found a personal unconscious, which is composed of one’s personal history, and a collective unconscious, which is composed of images or archetypes common to all people; these images

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Ideas – What we expect from our forms of inference is that they give us true conclusions from true premises – if not all the time, then at least most of the time. – Beliefs are established habits of action. – Consider all the possible effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive

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Marcus Tullius Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero, an orator and statesman of Rome, was born on January 3, 106 BC. His life coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and he was an important actor in many of the significant political events of his time, and his writings are now a valuable source of information

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