Philosophy

1770-1831 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich German philosopher who developed a dialectical scheme that emphasized the progress of history and of ideas from thesis to antithesis to a synthesis. Hegel was the last of the great philosophical system builders. His work, following Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling, thus marks the pinnacle of classical […]

1809-1882 Darwin, Charles English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies.

1818-1883 Marx, Karl German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history.

1798-1857 Comte, Auguste French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject in a systematic fashion.

1806-1873 Mill, John Stuart One would think that John Stuart Mill, who is famous for developing the philosophy of Utilitarianism ( an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if the opposite ) would be well aligned with the Declaration of Independence, “… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

1831-1879 Maxwell, James Clerk Framed the kinetic theory of heat, arguing that matter was comprised of molecules and that heat was the motion of these molecules, and so thermodynamic properties like temperature and pressure could be explained mechanically. That led to statistical mechanics. Maxwell also showed that electricity and magnetism could be united into a

1838-1916 Mach, Ernst Austrian physicist and philosopher who established important principles of optics, mechanics, and wave dynamics and who supported the view that all knowledge is a conceptual organization of the data of sensory experience. His critique of Newtonian ideas of absolute space and time were an inspiration to the young Einstein, who credited Mach

1839-1914 Peirce, Charles Sanders American scientist, logician, and philosopher who is noted for his work on the logic of relations and on pragmatism as a method of research.

1842-1910 James, William American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the philosophical movement of pragmatism and a founder of the psychological movement of functionalism.

1844-1900 Nietzsche, Friedrich German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers, who deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. His view of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism was expressed in his observation that “God is dead”. Although he was