Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev

Ideas – Elements placed according to the value of their atomic weights present a clear periodicity of properties. Biography The youngest, of at least, fourteen children, Dimitri Ivanovitch Mendeleev was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, on 7th February, 1834. His father, Ivan, was the director of the local gymnasium, and his mother, Marya, came from

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Diogenes of Sinope

Diogenes was a Cynic philosopher of Sinope. His father, Icesias, a banker, was convicted of debasing the public coin, and was obliged to leave the country; or, according to another account, his father and himself were charged with this offense, and the former was thrown into prison, while the son escaped and went to

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Donald Herbert Davidson

Davidson studied at Harvard, under Alfred North Whitehead, among others, and wrote a dissertation on Plato’s Philebus. His interests at this time were mainly in the “history of ideas,” broadly construed, but under the influence of W. V. Quine, whom he often credits as his mentor, he began to gradually turn toward the more rigorous methods and

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Edmund Husserl

Ideas – The edifice of scientific knowledge must be built up by rigorously securing each step through direct direct intuitive insight, without presuppositions. – Phenomenology provides a founding ‘first philosophy’ for all knowledge by its method of describing the essence of ‘the things themselves’ as they are constituted in consciousness. – The ultimate foundation

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Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir was born in Lauenburg, Germany in 1884 to an orthodox Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States in 1889 and lived in New York City. He received his Bachelors Degree in 1904 and his Ph.D. in 1909 from Columbia University where he came under the influence of Franz Boas. He taught

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Empedocles

Empedocles was born in Acragas on the south coast of Sicily. The name Acragas is Greek, while the Latin name for the town was Agrigentum. Later the town was called Girgenti and more recently it became known by its present name of Agrigento. It was one of the most beautiful cities of the ancient

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Epictetus

Major Ideas – Only bodies exist, but bodies are combinations of two fundamental principles, logos, a rational principle, and physis, a creative principle. – God is nature: Logos, the rational principle, accounts for the order and unity of the universe; nature is thus intelligent and intelligible. – Because God is nature, the universe as

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Epicurus of Samos

Ideas – All sensation is true, sensation is the primary source of knowledge. – The two criteria of knowledge are a clear view and noncontradiction. – The universe is wholly material; it consists of material and void. – Nothing is created out of nothing, and nothing is destroyed: The universe is neither increasing nor

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Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm, an internationally renowned German psychologist and humanistic philosopher, was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany. His father was a business man and, according to Erich, rather moody. His mother was frequently depressed. In other words, like quite a few of the people we’ve looked at, his childhood wasn’t very happy. Like Jung,

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Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. Ernst Mach was born in Chrlice, Czech Republic. He was educated at home until the age of 14, then went briefly to gymnasium before entering the University of Vienna at 17. There he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy, and received a doctorate in physics in 1860.

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Erwin Schrodinger

Ideas – Partial differential equations representing wave phenomena best describe action on the atomic level. – Quantum physics can explain the persistence and the spontaneous mutation of genetic material. – The Hindu philosophy of Vedanta best matches the insights of modern physics. Biography Erwin Schrödinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, the

Euclid

Major Ideas – A rigorous, systematic treatment of mathematics requires the statement of all assumptions and the proof of all propositions by means of uniform methodology. – All mathematical quantities can be expressed by geometrical figures, either lines, areas, or solids. – Physical events can be modeled using mathematical expressions. – Space is infinite

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Francis Bacon

Ideas – The purpose of scientific knowledge is to make possible great works for the betterment of the human condition. – Experiments are essential to the testing of theories. – The human mind is prey to certain typical intellectual failures. – In the generation and testing of theories, the negative instance is fundamental. –

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Francis Herbert Bradley

He was born at Clapham, Surrey, England. He was the child of Charles Bradley, an Evangelical preacher, and his second wife, Emma Linton. In 1865, he entered University College, Oxford. He was a member of the movement known as British idealism and famous for his pluralistic approach to philosophy. His pluralistic outlook saw a

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Franz Clemens Brentano

Franz Brentano studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin (with Trendelenburg) and Münster. He had a special interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He wrote his dissertation in Tübingen On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle. Subsequently he began to study theology and entered the seminar in Munich and then Würzburg,

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Ideas – Self-deception is a particularly destructive characteristic of Western culture. – Life is the will to power; our natural desire is to dominate and to reshape the world to fit our own preferences and to assert our personal strength to the fullest degree possible. – Struggle, through which individuals achieve a degree of

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Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was a theologian and philosopher. The son of a Prussian army chaplain of the Reformed confession, he was born at Breslau. He was educated in a Moravian school at Niesky in upper Lusatia, and at Barby near Halle. Moravian theology soon ceased to satisfy him, and his doubts took shape.

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Gabriel Marcel

French philosopher, dramatist, and critic, b. Paris. A leading Christian existentialist, he became a Roman Catholic in 1929. He called himself a ‘concrete philosopher’, indicating a reaction to his early idealism. He saw philosophy not as formulation of a system but rather as a personal reflection on the human situation. He held that the

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Galileo Galilei

Ideas – Observation bears out the truth of the Copernican theory that the earth is not the center of the universe. – Aristotle’s claim that heavier bodies fall faster thab lighter ones can be disproved by observation. – Controlled experimentation and the use of quantitative methods of reporting observations yield better results than do

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George Berkeley

Ideas – To be is to be perceived. (A physical thing exists only when it is perceived through the use of the senses.) – Physical things are complexes of ideas (sensations). – Since no idea or sensation exists outside the mind, no physical thing exists outside the mind. – The primary qualities (solidity, extension,

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