Listed in birth year order. Click on name (title) to access links to comments and internet.
1885-1962 Bohr, Niels Danish physicist who is regarded as one of the foremost physicists of the 20th century. He was the first to apply the quantum concept of discrete values, to the problem of atomic and molecular structure. For that work he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.
1889-1951 Wittgenstein, Ludwig When a small child, who does not yet speak, falls and bumps his little head, there is no doubt as to what the cries and tears mean. That is natural language. It is only later that little one, now a rambunctious little boy comes in from playing, possibly with those familiar tears
Ludwig Wittgenstein Read More »
1889-1976 Heidegger, Martin German philosopher counted among the main exponents of existentialism. His 1927 Being and Time determined the course of 20th-century philosophy on the European continent and exerted an enormous influence on virtually every other humanistic discipline, including literary criticism, hermeneutics, psychology, and theology. He later turned away from his earlier work toward view
1902-1994 Popper, Karl Austrian-born British philosopher of natural and social science who subscribed to anti-determinist metaphysics, believing that knowledge evolves from experience of the mind. Popper’s rejected the inductive method in the empirical sciences and argued instead that hypotheses are deductively validated by what he called the “falsifiability criterion.”
1903-1969 Adorno, Theodor W. German philosopher and social commentator, who along with Henry Marcuse and Max Horkheimer developed Critical Theory, a broad-based Marxist-oriented approach to the study of society. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the celebration of reason by thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment had led to the development of
1905-1997 Hempel, Carl German writer and philosopher. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. He is especially well known for his articulation of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation.
1906-1978 GÖdel, Kurt Austrian-born mathematician, logician, and philosopher whose famous incompleteness theorem states that within any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system; thus, such a system cannot be simultaneously complete and consistent.
1908-2000 Quine, Willard van Orman American logician and philosopher produced highly original and important work in several areas of philosophy, including logic, ontology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.
1912-1954 Turing, Alan British mathematician and logician, who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
1922-1996 Kuhn, Thomas American historian and philosopher of science noted for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), in which he argued that scientific research is defined by “paradigms,” that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling