Philosophers

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

1848-1925 Frege, Gottlob German mathematician and logician, who founded modern mathematical logic, in which he developed an analysis of quantified statements and formalized the notion of a ‘proof’ in terms that are still accepted today.

1859-1938 Husserl, Edmund Viewed as the “father” of the philosophical movement known as phenomenology, which can be roughly described as the sustained attempt to describe experiences (and the “things themselves”) without metaphysical and theoretical speculations.

 1872-1970 Russell, Bertrand British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established him as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. To the general public, however,

1879-1955 Einstein, Albert German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which was important in the development of quantum mechanics.