Giambattista Vico

Ideas – There is no fixed human nature that remains identical regardless of time, place, and circumstance; human nature develops in accordance with self-knowledge and with insight into the essences of things. – A Divine Providence gives human beings those nonrational creative capacities, operating on associative principles, that will produce false beliefs from which

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Gilbert Ryle

A graduate of Oxford, Gilbert Ryle became a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1945, he became Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy. From 1947 to 1971 he was editor of the philosophical journal ‘Mind’. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ryle was concerned with problems caused by the confusion of grammatical with logical distinctions. He pointed out the

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Ideas – There is an infinity of individual substances. – The irreducible, indivisible, indestructibele unit of substrance is the ‘monad’. – God is the ultimate, necessary being who is the sufficient reason for the existence of all other beings and who is the creator and orderer of all monads. – Each monad is different

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Gottlob Frege

Frege was born in Wismar. He started studying at the University of Jena in 1869 and moved to Göttingen after two years, where he received his Ph.D. in 1873. After returning to Jena two years later, he became lecturer of mathematics. In 1879, he was made associate professor and in 1896 became professor of

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Gregor Johann Mendel

Ideas – The inheritance of characteristics is governed by pairs of discrete elements derived from each parent. – These parental elements pass into the germ cells of the offspring without influencing each other; this is the law of segregation. – The inheritance of one element does not govern the inheritance of any other element;

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Hans-Georg Gadamer

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, as the son of a pharmaceutical chemist who later also served as the rector of the university there. Gadamer resisted his father’s urging to take up the natural sciences and grew more and more interested in the humanities. He grew up and studied in Breslau under Hönigswald, but

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Henri Louis Bergson

Ideas – There are two methods of intellectual inquiry: intuition and analysis. – Analysis understands reality in terms of stability, predictability, and spatial location; intuition, on the other hand, experiences growth, novelty, and temporal duration. – True donation is experienced only in the human person, and that duration is preserved in memory. – Memory,

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Henry David Thoreau

Ideas – The search for ultimate begins with simplification and the dispelling of the superfluities of life, and with the desire for clarity of vision and spiritual alertness. – There exists within each human being a moral sense and an intuitive capacity for the apprehension of spiritual turths. – Trancendental spiritual truths are revealed

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Henry More

Ideas – All knowledge is conditional on the validity of our faculties. – The world consists of active spirits and inert matter. – God’s existence can be proven. – The Platonic theory of the universe best fits with the findings of modern science. Biography Henry More was born at Grantham. Both his parents were

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Heraclitus of Ephesus

Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BC, lived in Ephesus, an important city on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, not far from Miletus, the birthplace of philosophy. We know nothing about his life other than what can be gleaned from his own statements, for all ancient biographies of him consist

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Hilary Putnam

Putnam taught at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and MIT, until he became Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic at Harvard University in 1976. Drawing on his expertise in the theory of recursive functions and Turing machines, Putnam formulated a philosophical position that he named ‘functionalism’ in the 1950s. Functionalism became

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Hippocrates

Major Ideas – Diseases have natural origins: They do not arise from divine action; the course of diseases and their critical days can be found observation and experience. – Good health results from a balance of fluids (humors) in the body; disease results from an imbalance. – The balance of fluids – hence the

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Immanuel Kant

Ideas – Although all knoqledge begins with experience, it does not all arise out of experience. – Knowledge of an orderly world is made possible through the complementary activities of the senses and the mind. – The matter of our experience is due to our senses and its form is contributed by the mind.

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Isaac Newton

Ideas – Invention of differential and integral calculus. – Clarification of concepts of inertia and force. – Formulation of three laws of motion, making possible the science of rational mechanics. – Proof of the composite nature of white light. – Construction of the first refleecting telescope. – Insistence on the experimental basis of true

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James Clerk Maxwell

Ideas – Electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single unified force of nature, best described as dynamical as dynamical fields. – Light consists of transverse electromagnetic waves, and is but one portion of a broad spectrum of such waves. – Thermodynamic laws and properties of gases may be derived from a statistical

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Jean Jacques Rousseau

Ideas – Man is by nature good; society is the cause of corruption and vice. – In a state of nature, the individual is characterized by healthy self-love; self-love is accompanied by a natural compassion. – In society, natural self-love becomes corrupted into a venal pride, which seeks only the good opinion of others

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Ideas – For human beings, ‘existence precedes essence’; we are defined by our choices and actions and not by a fixed ‘human nature’. – The direction a person’s life will take is always in question and a matter of contingency. – We exist in situations – typically these are interpersonal and social – and

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Johannes Kepler

Ideas – God did not create the universe haphazardly. A rational architecture underlies the structure of the solar system. – Three laws govern the motion of the planets: 1. Planets move in elliptical, not circular orbits, 2. The velocities of the planets are not uniform but vary at different points in their orbits; the

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John Calvin

Ideas – Though God’s essential nature is incomprehensible, partial knowledge of God is available through God’s self-revelation. – The Bible is the sole source of this adapted revelation. – The Bible reveals God as the triume crateor of everything, actively and universally ruling all aspects of the continuing creation. – The Bible reveals humanity

Cardinal John Henry Newman

Ideas – All things human develop and change in time, including the Church institution and doctrine. – It is a collective responsibility to see that ideas develop rightly and in a continuous fashion. – A university is a place of teaching universal knowledge to produce intelligent members of society by fostering cultivation of the

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