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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Michel de Montaigne

Ideas – An acceptance of the duality of the human condition (man’s spiritual aspirations counterbalanced by the physical limitations of the body) enables man to pursue the masterpiece of living well. – A life committed to moderation is superior to one that has allowed excesses and extremes. – The senses through which man knows

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Miguel de Unamuno Y Jugo

Ideas – History is the immediate historic moment that is happening, while intrahistory is an eternal, historical present. – The intrahistory of Spain is its soul, that which is genuinely pure and vital. – The landspace, language, and art of Castile express the soul of Spain. – To find the soul of Spain is

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F. A. Moritz Schlick

Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle, was born on April 14, 1882 in Berlin. After studying in both Heidelberg and Lausanne, he returned to Berlin to complete his doctorate in physics under the direction of Max Planck. Schlick then held teaching positions at the universities of Rostock and Kiel before taking the position

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Moses Maimonides

Ideas – The study of philosophy and traditional Jewish law can be brought into harmony. – The existence of God is subject to rational demonstration. – Unity, incorporeality, and priority are qualities of God. – Prophecy is a degree of mental and moral perfection to which all may aspire. – The entire Torah is

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Nelson Goodman

American philosopher, born in Somerville, Massachusetts. Received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1941. He taught at Tufts (1945-46), the University of Pennsylvania (1946–64), and Brandeis University (1964–67) before becoming professor of philosophy at Harvard (1967). A proponent of nominalism, he has worked with theories of inductive logic and helped to identify strategic problems in

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Nicholas Copernicus

Ideas – Motion is relative. – The earth is not at the center of the universe. – The sun, the planets, and the stars do not revolve around the earth; rather, the earth is one of the planets, and it revolves around the sun, as do the other planets. – The apparent loops that

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Nicolas Malebranche

Ideas – We see all things in God. – The world of intelligible extension exists only in God is coeternal with God. – To be is to be conceived. – All that we are aware of are ideas and feelings. – We have no direct or indirect knowledge of an external physical world. –

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Niels Bohr

Ideas – The electrons that surround the nucleus of an atom can only occupy certain dscrete states – those states being defined by Planck’s constant, h. ‘In-between’ states are not permissible. – The configuration of electrons in an atom is the primary factor that determines the chemical properties of an element. – Quantum mechanical

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Origen

Ideas – God as the Ground of Being (the First God) is unknowable except to the Logos-Son and Spirit eternally generated by God. – God, however, has communicated throught the Logos-Son (Christ: Wisdom, Power) not only in the incarnation in Jesus but in Moses and the prophets and, in a qualified way, in Greek

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Parmenides of Elea

Major Ideas – A contrast must be made by philosophy between ‘the way of truth’, concerning the oneness and changelessness of being, and ‘the way of seeming’, concerning our perception of change. – Being or ‘it is’ is the fullness of all that exists; non-being, or ‘it is not’ cannot exist. – Being cannot

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Paul Tillich

Ideas – Human beings are ultimately concerned with the fundamentals of being and meaning. – The nominalist dichotomy of subject and object leads both to naturalism and supernaturalism; naturalism fails to appreciate the dynamic power and purpose of all being. while supernaturalism fails to appreciate the interpenetration of the sacred and the secular. –

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Peter Abelard

Ideas – Universals, while not real in and of themselves, have a linguistic and intellectual reality that derives from their participation in particulars. – Authority, while essential, is by itself insufficient to an understanding of dogma; reason must understand dogma by analogies from the material world. – The classics of pre-Christian philosophy are informed

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Peter Frederick Strawson

Peter Frederick Strawson, British philosopher, a graduate of Oxford, was born in 1919. An influential spokesman for so-called ordinary language philosophy, he began teaching at Oxford in 1947 and from 1968 to 1987 was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics. In an early article, “On Referring” (Mind, 1950), he disputed Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, drawing

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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

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Rene Descartes

Ideas – The method for the discovery of truth is analytic and consists of four rules: 1. Accept nothing as true except what can be clearly perceived to be so and nothing more than can be perceived so clearly and distinctly that one cannot have occasion to doubt it, 2. Divide up each problem

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Richard Avenarius

Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher, was born in Paris. He taught in Zurich, where he became a professor in 1877. He founded the epistemological theory of knowledge known as empiriocriticism, in many parts touching upon ERICH MACH’s views. According to empiriocriticism, the major task of philosophy is to develop a “natural concept of the world” based