John Langshaw Austin

British philosopher. A graduate of Oxford, he was a fellow of All Souls (1933–35) and Magdalen (1935–52) colleges before he became White’s professor of moral philosophy (1952–60), also at Oxford. He strongly influenced analytic philosophy, urging that the use of words be closely examined and holding that the distinctions of ordinary language are more

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Jonathan Edwards

Ideas – The world was created out of and is maintained only by the abundance, grace, and love of the sovereign and radically trancendent God, who foreordains all of life according to his provodentoal but hidden will. – Although themselves endowed with will and reason, both of which operate solely within God’s providential and

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Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Ideas – Human beings and their circumstances exist in a dynamic interplay. – ‘I am I and my circumstance’ is the phrase that conveys this dynamic interplay. – The individual can influence his circumstance but he cannot disregard it. – How the individual influences his circumstance is his ‘quehacer vital’, or his creative action.

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Jules Henri Poincare

Poincare was born on April 29,1854 in Nancy. Poincare’s family was influential. His cousin Raymond was the President and the Prime Minister of France, and his father Leon was a professor of medicine at the University of Nancy. His sister Aline married the spiritualist philosopher Emile Boutroux. Poincare studied mining engineering, mathematics and physics

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Karl Jaspers

Karl Jaspers (pronounced “Yaspers”) was born 23 February 1883 in Oldenburg to Carl William and Henriette Jaspers, a respected family within the community. Carl was a lawyer, the local sheriff for a time, and a bank director. Jaspers did well in secondary school, which he atttended from 1892–1901. At graduation he had been accepted

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Karl Raimund Popper

Born in Vienna (then Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins, Karl Popper was educated at the University of Vienna. He took a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, and taught in secondary school from 1930 to 1936. In 1937, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss led Popper to

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Karl Rahner

Ideas – In acts of knowledge and volition, a person experiences the inexhaustable depth and richness of the totality of being; this experience is an unthematic, nonconceptional preapprehension of God as the end of all dynamic acts of the human spirit. – The triune God reveals his inner essence throughout the history of salvation

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Leucippus (5TH CENTURY BC)

Leucippus was the founder of atomism. We know almost nothing about his life, and his book appears to have been incorporated in the collected works of Democritus. No writer subsequent to Theophrastos seems to have been able to distinguish his teaching from that of his more famous disciple. Indeed his very existence has been denied, though

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Titus Lucretius Carus

Lucretius was a Roman poet and the author of the philosophical epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe), a comprehensive exposition of the Epicurean world-view. Very little is known of the poet’s life, though a sense of his character and personality emerges vividly from his poem. The stress and tumult of

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ideas – Language and the world share a common logical form. – Sentences are logical pictures of the world: The logical relations between the elements of a sentence reflect the relations between the elements in the world. – Sentences can show their form but they cannot say it; sentences that attempt to say what

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Marcus Aurelius

Major Ideas – The Universe is governed by reason, which is God. – In a rational universe, everything that happens is not only necessitated but good. – Human happiness consists in a life lived in accordance with nature and reason. – Though his actions are necessitated, an individual becomes free by acting rationally. –

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Marie-Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet

Ideas – There is limited certainty in all branches of human knowledge. – Probability theory can be applied to natural and social sciences. – Mankind is infinitely perfectible. – There can be continuous progress and improvement in human affairs. – Mathematics can be applied to the social sciences and to human problems. – Human

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Martin Buber

Ideas – The I-Thou approach to relationships is the only way people can be fully authentic; only a part of our being is expressed in the I-It relationship. – Scripture and biblical commentary are of great importance but are not infallible. – Religious law is not immutable but applicable to the times of its

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Martin Heidegger

Ideas – Although the maning of being is the basic issue for philosophy, its true nature has been forgotten and concealed. – Human beings are uniquely open to being but must be understood in terms of existential categories rather than traditional, objectifying categories. – Being must be understood in terms of temporality. – Being

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Martin Luther

Ideas – Human nature is corrupt, weak, self-centered, and in a state of rebellion from God; the fruit of the fall from grace is death. – God’s laws show sinners their distance from God and arouse a desire for redemption. – Although God in his justice could condemn humanity, he chooses out of love

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Mary Wollstonecraft

Ideas – Unwilling submission to any person, institution, or custom is limiting, degrading, and destructive. – Reason, infallible and God-given, should control all human thought and action. – Women must have the freedom to cultivate reason, the key to self-improvement and social change. – Environment and education shape character and morality. – Education is

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Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

Ideas – The energy of electromagnetic radiation (such as light, X-rays, and ratio waves) is found only in discrete packets of fine size: quanta. – The amount of such energy must be a whole-number multiple of h (Planck’s constant: 6.55 x 10-27 erg-seconds). Biography Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, on

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Meister Eckhart

Ideas – Beyond ‘God’ lies the Godhead; that is, ‘God’ as Father, Son and Spirit is merely representation of the true God, or Godhead. – The ground of God and the ground of the human soul are the same; thus God, or union with God, is to be sought within oneself: Here occurs ‘the

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Melissus of Samos (5TH CENTURY BC)

Melissus of Samos, a Greek philosopher of the Eleatic School, was born probably not later than 470 B.C. According to Diogenes Lartius, he was not only a thinker, but also a political leader in his native town, and was in command of the fleet which defeated the Athenians in 442. The same authority says

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Michael A. E. Dummett

Michael Dummett was born in 1925. He attended Sandroyd School and Winchester College, and served in the armed forces from 1943 to 1947. Although he was educated within the traditions of the Anglican Church at Winchester, by the age of 13 he regarded himself as an atheist. In 1944 however, he was received into

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