1.
University of Paris
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The University of Paris, metonymically known as the Sorbonne, was a university in Paris, France. Emerging around 1150 as an associated with the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris. Vast numbers of popes, royalties, scientists and intellectuals were educated at the University of Paris, following the turbulence of the French Revolution, education was suspended in 1793 whereafter its faculties were partly reorganised by Napoleon as the University of France. In 1896, it was renamed again to the University of Paris, in 1970, following the May 1968 events, the university was divided into 13 autonomous universities. Others, like Panthéon-Sorbonne University, chose to be multidisciplinary, in 1150, the future University of Paris was a student-teacher corporation operating as an annex of the Notre-Dame cathedral school. The university had four faculties, Arts, Medicine, Law, the Faculty of Arts was the lowest in rank, but also the largest, as students had to graduate there in order to be admitted to one of the higher faculties. The students were divided into four nationes according to language or regional origin, France, Normandy, Picardy, the last came to be known as the Alemannian nation. Recruitment to each nation was wider than the names might imply, the faculty and nation system of the University of Paris became the model for all later medieval universities. Under the governance of the Church, students wore robes and shaved the tops of their heads in tonsure, students followed the rules and laws of the Church and were not subject to the kings laws or courts. This presented problems for the city of Paris, as students ran wild, students were often very young, entering the school at age 13 or 14 and staying for 6 to 12 years. Three schools were especially famous in Paris, the palatine or palace school, the school of Notre-Dame, the decline of royalty brought about the decline of the first. The other two were ancient but did not have much visibility in the early centuries, the glory of the palatine school doubtless eclipsed theirs, until it completely gave way to them. These two centres were much frequented and many of their masters were esteemed for their learning, the first renowned professor at the school of Ste-Geneviève was Hubold, who lived in the tenth century. Not content with the courses at Liège, he continued his studies at Paris, entered or allied himself with the chapter of Ste-Geneviève, and attracted many pupils via his teaching. Distinguished professors from the school of Notre-Dame in the century include Lambert, disciple of Fulbert of Chartres, Drogo of Paris, Manegold of Germany. Three other men who added prestige to the schools of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève were William of Champeaux, Abélard, humanistic instruction comprised grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. To the higher instruction belonged dogmatic and moral theology, whose source was the Scriptures and it was completed by the study of Canon law. The School of Saint-Victor arose to rival those of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève and it was founded by William of Champeaux when he withdrew to the Abbey of Saint-Victor
2.
20th-century philosophy
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20th-century philosophy saw the development of a number of new philosophical schools— including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and poststructuralism. In terms of the eras of philosophy, it is labelled as contemporary philosophy. However, there have been disputes regarding both the terminology and the reasons behind the divide, as well as philosophers who see themselves as bridging the divide, in addition, philosophy in the twentieth century became increasingly technical and harder for lay people to read. Analytic philosophy is a term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, epistemology in the Anglo-American tradition was radically shaken up by the publication of Edmund Gettiers 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge. This paper provided counter-examples to the formulation of knowledge going back to Plato. Neopragmatism, sometimes called linguistic pragmatism is a recent philosophical term for philosophy that reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism. V. O and it repudiates the notion of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and the notion of epistemic objectivity. It is a nominalist approach that denies that natural kinds and linguistic entities have substantive ontological implications and this approach typically involves eschewing philosophical theories in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday, ordinary language. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein is ordinary language philosophys most celebrated proponent outside the Oxford circle, second generation figures include Stanley Cavell and John Searle. Continental philosophy, in usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the half of the 20th century. Existentialism is generally considered a philosophical and cultural movement that holds that the point of philosophical thinking must be the individual. Common themes are the primacy of experience, Angst, the absurd, while György Lukácss History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korschs Marxism and Philosophy, first published in 1923, are often seen as the works that inaugurated this current. Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the phrase Western Marxism much later, phenomenology is the study of the phenomena of experience. It is a philosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, in Husserls conception, is concerned with the systematic reflection on, and study of, the structures of consciousness. This phenomenological ontology can be differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis, which sees the world as objects, sets of objects. Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s
3.
Western philosophy
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Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. The word philosophy itself originated from the Hellenic, philosophia, literally, the scope of philosophy in the ancient understanding, and the writings of the ancient philosophers, were all intellectual endeavors. Western Philosophy is generally said to begin in the Greek cities of western Asia Minor with Thales of Miletus and his most noted students were respectively Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus. Pythagoras, from the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia, pythagoreans hold that all is number, giving formal accounts in contrast to the previous material of the Ionians. They also believe in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation, Socrates The key figure in Greek philosophy is Socrates. Socrates studied under several Sophists but transformed Greek philosophy into a unified, Socrates used a critical approach called the elenchus or Socratic method to examine peoples views. He aimed to study human things, the life, justice, beauty. Although Socrates wrote nothing himself, some of his many disciples wrote down his conversations and he was tried for corrupting the youth and impiety by the Greek democracy. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, he chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles. His execution consisting in drinking the poison hemlock and he died in 399 B. C, Plato Socrates most important student was Plato. Plato founded the Academy of Athens and wrote a number of dialogues, some central ideas of Platos dialogues are the immortality of the soul, the benefits of being just, that evil is ignorance, and the Theory of Forms. Forms are universal properties that constitute reality and contrast with the changeable material things he called becoming. Aristotle Platos most outstanding student was Aristotle, Aristotle was perhaps the first truly systematic philosopher and scientist. He wrote books on physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics, Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. Aristotelian philosophy exercised considerable influence on almost all western philosophers, including Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, the Neoplatonic and Christian philosophers of Late Antiquity. Early medieval philosophy was influenced by the likes of Stoicism, neo-Platonism, but, above all, the prominent figure of this period was St. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers up until the 13th century. The foundations of many northern European universities were built in the Middle Ages by waves of Irish, Scottish & English monks from the Celtic Church begun by Columba, see Celtic Christianity. Erigena is said to have been stabbed to death by his students with their pens and his theology would today be called pantheistic, in keeping with Celtic resolutions of pagan and Christian philosophy
4.
Continental philosophy
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Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the half of the 20th century. It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements, the term continental philosophy, like analytic philosophy, lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally more pejorative than descriptive, nonetheless, Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy. First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that the sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition, but is central in existentialism and post-structuralism. A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy, in the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy. In some cases, this manifests as a renovation of the view that philosophy is the first, foundational. In other cases, it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical, and some continental philosophers doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as analytic philosophy, became dominant in Britain, russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati. Continental philosophy is defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions. The history of philosophy is usually thought to begin with German idealism. As the institutional roots of continental philosophy in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology, nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition. J. G. Merquior wrote, the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path, one might say it all began with Henri Bergson. Carnaps paper argues that Heideggers lecture What Is Metaphysics, violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements. Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were not merely false, but devoid of any meaning
5.
Post-structuralism
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Existential phenomenology is a significant influence, Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists. Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, Structuralism rejected the phenomenological idea that knowledge could be centred on the human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge. In phenomenology, this foundation is experience itself, in structuralism, knowledge is founded on the structures that make possible, concepts. By contrast, post-structuralism argues that founding knowledge either on experience or systematic structures is impossible. This impossibility was not meant as a failure or loss, a major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, the only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce multiplicity, the illusion of singular meaning. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results, post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralist premises. It argues that history and culture condition the study of underlying structures. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object, it is necessary to both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object. Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they classify structuralism as descriptive and this terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussures distinction between the views of historical and descriptive reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts, by studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucaults Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness, the uncertain distance between structuralism and post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Foucault, some observers from outside the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle argued in 1990 that The spread of poststructuralist literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly, similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized the postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy. Has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale, one can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism, merquior a love–hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. In a 1966 lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life, Derrida interpreted this event as a decentering of the former intellectual cosmos
6.
Paris 8 University
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The University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis is a public university in Paris. Once part of the federal University of Paris system, it is now a public institution and is part of the Université Paris Lumières. Most undergraduate degrees are taught in French and it is one of the thirteen inheritors of the worlds second oldest academic institution, the University of Paris, shortly before the latter officially ceased to exist on December 31,1970. It was founded as a response to events of May 1968. Founded in 1969, the new institution was named Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes in Vincennes. In 1971, it gained university status, thus allowing it to award its own degrees. Since moving to Saint-Denis in 1980, the university has become a major teaching, as soon as it opened, Vincennes became the venue for a continuation of 1968, being occupied almost immediately by student radicals, and being the scene of violent confrontations with the police. The department had its accreditation withdrawn after it was revealed that Miller had handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus. Since the turmoil in the late 1960s, the University has endorsed a far more mainstream academic life and has brought in new departments, new professors, in 1980, the University was relocated to the suburb of Saint-Denis. The university offers over a hundred undergraduate, graduate and diploma courses and it is particularly well known for its Political Sciences programme as it is the only public university in France to offer this subject at undergraduate level. The University of Paris VIII also offers some distance-learning opportunities for a number of subjects such as Law. Paris-VIII is exceptionally well-connected and enjoys over 250 partnerships with universities around the world, alternatively, students also have the possibility to teach French in a high school abroad or to complete an internship
7.
Aesthetics
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Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgements of sentiment. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as critical reflection on art, in modern English, the term aesthetic can also refer to a set of principles underlying the works of a particular art movement or theory, one speaks, for example, of the Cubist aesthetic. The word aesthetic is derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός, which in turn was derived from αἰσθάνομαι, for some, aesthetics is considered a synonym for the philosophy of art since Hegel, while others insist that there is a significant distinction between these closely related fields. In practice, aesthetic judgement refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object, philosophical aesthetics has not only to speak about art and to produce judgments about art works, but has also to give a definition of what art is. Art is an entity for philosophy, because art deals with the senses. Hence, there are two different conceptions of art in aesthetics, art as knowledge or art as action, any aesthetic doctrines that guided the production and interpretation of prehistoric art are mostly unknown. Western aesthetics usually refers to Greek philosophers as the earliest source of aesthetic considerations. Plato believed in beauty as a form in which beautiful objects partake and he felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the elements of beauty were order, symmetry. From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at absolute beauty. For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten aesthetics is the science of the experiences, a younger sister of logic. For Immanuel Kant the aesthetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but similar human truth, however, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of features. For Friedrich Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature, for Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the philosophy of art is the organon of philosophy concerning the relation between man and nature. So aesthetics began now to be the name for the philosophy of art, Friedrich von Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also gave lectures on aesthetics as philosophy of art after 1800. For Hegel, all culture is a matter of absolute spirit coming to be manifest to itself, stage by stage, Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immediately to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective revelation of beauty. It is thus for Schopenhauer one way to fight the suffering, the British were largely divided into intuitionist and analytic camps
8.
Body without organs
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The body without organs is a concept used by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It usually refers to the reality underlying some well-formed whole constructed from fully functioning parts. At the same time, it may describe a relationship to ones literal body. Deleuze began using the term in The Logic of Sense, while discussing the experiences of playwright Antonin Artaud, Body without Organs later became a major part of the vocabulary for Capitalism and Schizophrenia, two volumes written collaboratively with Félix Guattari. In these works, the took on an expanded meaning, referring variously to literal bodies. The terms overloaded meaning is provocative, perhaps intentionally, Deleuze first mentions the phrase in a chapter of The Logic of Sense called The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl, which contrasts two distinct and peripheral ways of encountering the world. The Little Girl, explores a world of surfaces, the realm of social appearances. The Schizophrenic is by contrast an explorer of depths, one who rejects the surface entirely, for the Schizophrenic, words collapse, not into nonsense, but into the bodies that produce and hear them. Deleuze refers to a new dimension of the body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation. This body is described as howling, speaking a language without articulation that has more to do with the primal act of making sound than it does with communicating specific words. In Deleuze and Guattaris collaboration, the describes a undifferentiated. It relates to the proto-world described in the mythology of different cultures. Deleuze and Guattari often use the example of the Dogon egg, the egg metaphor helps to suggest the gestation of a formation yet to come, and the potential formation of many actualities from a single origin. For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a set of traits, habits, movements, affects. But every actual body also has a dimension, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements. This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO, unlike other social machines such as the Body of the Earth, the Body of the Despot or the Body of Capital, the full body without organs cannot inscribe other bodies. The body without organs is not an original primordial entity nor what is remains of a lost totality but is the residuum of a deterritorialized socius. To make oneself a body without organs, then, is to experiment with oneself to draw out
9.
Univocity of being
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Univocity of being is the idea that words describing the properties of God mean the same thing as when they apply to people or things, even if God is vastly different in kind. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many theologians and philosophers held that one says that God is good. John Duns Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that God is good, the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says Jane is good. That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of one is talking about God. Gilles Deleuze borrowed the doctrine of ontological univocity from Scotus and he claimed that being is univocal, i. e. that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, with univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be, it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not, it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being. Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance and he claims that it is the organizing principle of the Dutchmans philosophy, despite the absence of the term from any of Spinozas works. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, Deleuze and Guattari summarize this ontology in the paradoxical formula pluralism = monism. Fundamental ontology Henology Law of noncontradiction
10.
Gregory Bateson
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Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences and he spent the last decade of his life developing a meta-science of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in different fields of science. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind, angels Fear was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson. Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England, on 9 May 1904 and he was the third and youngest son of Beatrice Durham and the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. He was named Gregory after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who founded the science of genetics. The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained a Bachelor of Arts in biology at St. Johns College, Cambridge, in 1925, Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1928. From 1931 to 1937 he was a Fellow of St. Johns College, Cambridge, spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea, during 1936–1950 he was married to Margaret Mead. At that time he applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States, in Palo Alto, California, Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland developed the double-bind theory. Batesons interest in theory and cybernetics forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics, and the later set on Group Processes. Bateson was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology and his association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped to widen his influence. From the 1970s until his last years, an audience of university students. In 1956 he became a citizen of the United States. Bateson was a member of William Irwin Thompsons Lindisfarne Association, in the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco, and in 1972 joined the faculty of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts, in 1976, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Bateson to the Board of Regents of the University of California, in which position he served until his death. He died on Independence Day,1980, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center, Batesons life, according to Lipset, was greatly affected by the death of his two brothers. After this event, which transformed a private family tragedy into public scandal, all William and Beatrices ambitious expectations fell on Gregory, Batesons first marriage, in 1936, was to American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Bateson and Mead had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who became an anthropologist
11.
Henri Bergson
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Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century and after WWII in continental philosophy. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas, in 1930 France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion dhonneur. Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier in 1859 and his father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background. His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry and his mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent, Henri Bergsons great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795. Henri Bergsons family lived in London for a few years after his birth, before he was nine, his parents settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized French citizen. Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergsons sister, Mina Bergson, married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and he then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers, Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education, between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. While at the lycée Bergson won a prize for his work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen. His solution was published the year in Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work, after some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers. When he was nineteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, during this period, he read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the degree of licence ès lettres, and this was followed by that of agrégation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris, the same year he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, while teaching and lecturing in this part of his country, Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle, the work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan
12.
Samuel Beckett
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Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century, Becketts work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and he was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, the family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuels father, William. Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday,13 April 1906, to William Frank Beckett, a quantity surveyor and descendant of the Huguenots, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse, Beckett had one older brother, Frank Edward Beckett. At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, in 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman, later, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first class cricket, Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926, Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of lecteur danglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy and this meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake, in 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled Dante. Becketts close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, Becketts first short story, Assumption, was published in Jolass periodical transition. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer, in November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme. It was a parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be at odds with all that is clear. Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience, when Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, two years later, following his fathers death, he began two years treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Becketts later works, such as Watt, in 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it
13.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo KBE was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Borges works have contributed to literature and the fantasy genre. However, some critics consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist and his late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914, Borges family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève, the family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and he also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and he became completely blind by the age of 55, as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination, in 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize and his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages and he dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him, He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, Borgess mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo origin. Her family had been involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence. His 1929 book, Cuaderno San Martín, includes the poem Isidoro Acevedo, commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, de Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borgess own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam was a lawyer, Borges Haslam was born in Entre Rios of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home, the family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suarez and was father of the painter Norah Borges. At age nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wildes The Happy Prince into Spanish and it was published in a local journal, but his friends thought the real author was his father
14.
William S. Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer. Burroughs was a figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians and he was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He was born into a family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence, but did not begin publicizing his writing until his thirties and he left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. With Brion Gysin, he popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy. In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, J. G. Burroughs had one child, William S. Burroughs, Jr. with his second wife Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering an attack in 1997. Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs and Laura Hammon Lee. His was a prominent family of English ancestry in St. Louis and his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughss mother was the daughter of a minister whose family claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee and his maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens, first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, as a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Ave. in St. Louiss Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis where his first published essay and he then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a school for the wealthy, where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens. Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy, according to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content. He became a well-known homosexual writer after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, some say that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily, Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932, left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House
15.
David Hume
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David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Humes empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, Francis Bacon, beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Humes compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom, Kant himself credited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. Arthur Schopenhauer once declared there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart. Hume is thus regarded as a pivotal figure in the history of philosophical thought. David Hume was the second of two born to Joseph Home of Ninewells, an advocate, and his wife The Hon. Katherine. He was born on 26 April 1711 in a tenement on the side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. Humes father died when Hume was a child, just after his birthday, and he was raised by his mother. He changed the spelling of his name in 1734, because of the fact that his surname Home, throughout his life Hume, who never married, spent time occasionally at his family home at Ninewells in Berwickshire, which had belonged to his family since the sixteenth century. His finances as a man were very slender. His family was not rich and, as a younger son and he was therefore forced to make a living somehow. Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at the early age of twelve at a time when fourteen was normal. He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books. Aged around 18, he made a discovery that opened up to him a new Scene of Thought. He did not recount what this scene was, and commentators have offered a variety of speculations, due to this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. He soon came to the verge of a breakdown, suffering from what a doctor diagnosed as the Disease of the Learned. Hume wrote that it started with a coldness, which he attributed to a Laziness of Temper, later, some scurvy spots broke out on his fingers. This was what persuaded Humes physician to make his diagnosis, Hume wrote that he went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills, taken along with a pint of claret every day
16.
Baruch Spinoza
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Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin. Spinozas magnum opus, Ethics, was published posthumously in 1677, the work opposed René Descartes philosophy on mind–body dualism, and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophys most important thinkers. In the Ethics, Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, hegel said, You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all. His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him the prince of philosophers, Spinozas given name, which means Blessed, varies among different languages. In Hebrew, it is written ברוך שפינוזה, in Portuguese, hes called Benedito Bento de Espinosa and in Latin, Benedictus de Spinoza. Spinoza was raised in a Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam and he developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. Jewish religious authorities issued a herem against him, causing him to be shunned by Jewish society at age 23. His books were later put on the Catholic Churchs Index of Forbidden Books. Spinoza lived a simple life as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honours throughout his life. He died at the age of 44 allegedly of a lung illness and he is buried in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague. The Spinoza family probably had its origins in Espinosa de los Monteros, near Burgos, or in Espinosa de Cerrato, near Palencia, the family was expelled from Spain in 1492 and fled to Portugal. Portugal compelled them to convert to Catholicism in 1498, attracted by the Decree of Toleration issued in 1579 by the Union of Utrecht, Portuguese conversos first sailed to Amsterdam in 1593 and promptly reconverted to Judaism. In 1598 permission was granted to build a synagogue, and in 1615 an ordinance for the admission, as a community of exiles, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were highly proud of their identity. Spinozas father was born roughly a century after this conversion in the small Portuguese city of Vidigueira. When Spinozas father was still a child, Spinozas grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza and they were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinozas father, Miguel, and his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they resumed the practice of Judaism, Miguel was a successful merchant and became a warden of the synagogue and of the Amsterdam Jewish school. He buried three wives and three of his six children died before reaching adulthood, Amsterdam and Rotterdam operated as important cosmopolitan centres where merchant ships from many parts of the world brought people of various customs and beliefs. This flourishing commercial activity encouraged a relatively tolerant of the play of new ideas
17.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and he lived his remaining years in the care of his mother, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900. Nietzsches body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner. His writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism, born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned forty-nine on the day of Nietzsches birth, Nietzsches parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler, married in 1843, the year before their sons birth. They had two children, a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph. Nietzsches father died from an ailment in 1849, Ludwig Joseph died six months later. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsches maternal grandmother, after the death of Nietzsches grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study centre. Nietzsche attended a school and then, later, a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug, Rudolf Wagner. In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg, because his father had worked for the state the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta. He transferred and studied there from 1858 to 1864, becoming friends with Paul Deussen and he also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. Nietzsche led Germania, a music and literature club, during his summers in Naumburg. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German, a 2a in Greek and Latin, a 2b in French, History, and Physics, while at Pforta, Nietzsche had a penchant for pursuing subjects that were considered unbecoming. The teacher who corrected the essay gave it a mark but commented that Nietzsche should concern himself in the future with healthier, more lucid. After graduation in September 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology, for a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester, he stopped his studies and lost his faith. In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his sister Elisabeth, who was deeply religious, a letter regarding his loss of faith
18.
Duns Scotus
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John Duns, commonly called Duns Scotus, is generally considered to be one of the three most important philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages. Scotus has had influence on both Catholic and secular thought. Scotus also developed an argument for the existence of God. Duns Scotus was given the scholastic accolade Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993. Little is known of Duns Scotus apart from his work and his date of birth is thought to have been between 23 December 1265 and 17 March 1266, born into a leading family of the region. Duns Scotus received the habit of the Friars Minor at Dumfries. Duns Scotuss age is based on the first certain date for his life, the minimum canonical age for receiving holy orders is 25 and it is generally assumed that he would have been ordained as soon as it was permitted. At that time there would have been about 270 persons living there and he took part in a disputation under the regent master, Philip of Bridlington. He began lecturing on Peter Lombards Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris towards the end of 1302. Later in that year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with King Philip IV of France over the taxation of church property. Duns Scotus was back in Paris before the end of 1304 and he continued lecturing there until, for reasons that are still mysterious, he was dispatched to the Franciscan studium at Cologne, probably in October 1307. According to the 15th-century writer William Vorilong, his departure was sudden, Duns Scotus died unexpectedly in Cologne in November 1308, the date of his death is traditionally given as 8 November. He is buried in the Church of the Friars Minor there and his sarcophagus bears the Latin inscription, The story about Duns Scotus being buried alive, in the absence of his servant who alone knew of his susceptibility to coma, is probably a myth. It was reported by Francis Bacon in his Historia vitae et mortis. The colophon of Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford says that Scotus was also at Cambridge, but we do not know for certain if this is true, or, if it was and his commentary exists in several versions. The standard version is the Ordinatio, a version of lectures he gave as a bachelor at Oxford. It was still incomplete when Scotus left for Paris in 1302, the original lectures were also transcribed and recently published as the Lectura. A reportatio is a student report or transcription of the lecture of a master
19.
Karl Marx
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Karl Marx was a Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a family, he later studied political economy. His work has influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. These economic critiques were set out in works such as the three volumes, published between 1867 and 1894, that comprise Das Kapital. According to Marx, states are run in the interests of the class but are nonetheless represented as being in favor of the common interest of all. He predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and his work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marxs work, Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology and social science. Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and he was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussias Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx was ancestrally Jewish, his grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Triers rabbis since 1723. Marx was also a cousin once removed of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, also born to a German Jewish family in the Rhineland. Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, a classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a property near the Porta Nigra. Her sister Sophie Pressburg, was Marxs aunt and was married to Lion Philips Marxs uncle through this marriage, Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London. Little is known of Karl Marxs childhood, the third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Young Karl was baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824 along with his siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie. Young Karl was privately educated, by Heinrich Marx, until 1830, by employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government
20.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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Leibnizs notation has been widely used ever since it was published. It was only in the 20th century that his Law of Continuity and he became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. He also refined the number system, which is the foundation of virtually all digital computers. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th-century advocates of rationalism and he wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibnizs contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters and he wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin, French, and German. There is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz in English, Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1,1646, toward the end of the Thirty Years War, in Leipzig, Saxony, to Friedrich Leibniz and Catharina Schmuck. Friedrich noted in his journal,21. Juny am Sontag 1646 Ist mein Sohn Gottfried Wilhelm, post sextam vespertinam 1/4 uff 7 uhr abents zur welt gebohren, in English, On Sunday 21 June 1646, my son Gottfried Wilhelm is born into the world a quarter after six in the evening, in Aquarius. Leibniz was baptized on July 3 of that year at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig and his father died when he was six and a half years old, and from that point on he was raised by his mother. Her teachings influenced Leibnizs philosophical thoughts in his later life, Leibnizs father had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and the boy later inherited his fathers personal library. He was given access to it from the age of seven. Access to his fathers library, largely written in Latin, also led to his proficiency in the Latin language and he also composed 300 hexameters of Latin verse, in a single morning, for a special event at school at the age of 13. In April 1661 he enrolled in his fathers former university at age 15 and he defended his Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui, which addressed the principle of individuation, on June 9,1663. Leibniz earned his masters degree in Philosophy on February 7,1664, after one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelors degree in Law on September 28,1665. His dissertation was titled De conditionibus, in early 1666, at age 19, Leibniz wrote his first book, De Arte Combinatoria, the first part of which was also his habilitation thesis in Philosophy, which he defended in March 1666. His next goal was to earn his license and Doctorate in Law, in 1666, the University of Leipzig turned down Leibnizs doctoral application and refused to grant him a Doctorate in Law, most likely due to his relative youth. Leibniz then enrolled in the University of Altdorf and quickly submitted a thesis, the title of his thesis was Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure. Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November 1666 and he next declined the offer of an academic appointment at Altdorf, saying that my thoughts were turned in an entirely different direction
21.
Marcel Proust
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He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Proust was born in Auteuil at the home of his great-uncle on 10 July 1871 and he was born during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Prousts father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and he wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Prousts mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace, literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of English was sufficient to help with her sons translations of John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his fathers Catholic faith and he was baptized and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith. He later became an atheist and was somewhat of a mystic, by the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers, in 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, but his education was disrupted by his illness. Despite this he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year, thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of self-discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his troubles with getting Swanns Way. It is through Mme Arman de Caillavet that he made the acquaintance of Anatole France, Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, after exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents apartment until after both were dead and his life and family circle changed markedly between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Prousts brother, Robert Proust, married and his father died in November of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Prousts beloved mother died in September 1905 and she left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate, Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and an abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age
22.
Immanuel Kant
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Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who is considered a central figure in modern philosophy. Kant took himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy and his beliefs continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. Politically, Kant was one of the earliest exponents of the idea that peace could be secured through universal democracy. He believed that this will be the outcome of universal history. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, Kant argued that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds. In his view, the shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level. Among other things, Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause, Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, which dealt with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter, was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German harness maker from Memel, Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children, baptized Emanuel, he changed his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student and he was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics, despite his religious upbringing and maintaining a belief in God, Kant was skeptical of religion in later life, various commentators have labelled him agnostic. Common myths about Kants personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwaits introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a strict and disciplined life. He never married, but seemed to have a social life — he was a popular teacher. He had a circle of friends whom he met, among them Joseph Green. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres from Königsberg his whole life, in fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor in Judtschen and in Groß-Arnsdorf
23.
Sigmund Freud
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Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg and he qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology, Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis and he died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. In creating psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, Freuds redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the analysis of symptom formation. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, in his later work Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture. Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, nonetheless, Freuds work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. In the words of W. H. Audens 1940 poetic tribute, by the time of Freuds death, Freud was born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia, in modern-day Ukraine and his father, Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp, by his first marriage. Jakobs family were Hasidic Jews, and although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition and he and Freuds mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a room, in a locksmiths house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as an omen for the boys future. In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg, Freuds half brothers emigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the inseparable playmate of his early childhood, Emanuels son, John. Jakob Freud took his wife and two children firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born, Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, Paula, in 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He proved an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors and he loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17, in 1876, Freud spent four weeks at Clauss zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs. He graduated with an MD in 1881, in 1882, Freud began his medical career at the Vienna General Hospital
24.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology and his work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his relationship with prominent feminist. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, Sartres introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism and Humanism, originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours, Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, when Sartre was two years old, his father died of a fever overseas. When he was twelve, Sartres mother remarried, and the moved to La Rochelle. As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergsons essay Time and Free Will and he attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris. It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartres philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojèves seminars, which continued for a number of years. From his first years in the École Normale, Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters, in 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson. Many newspapers, including Le Petit Parisien, announced the event on 25 May, thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing was a stunt involving a Lindbergh look-alike. The publics resultant outcry forced Lanson to resign, in 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous, the first time Sartre took the exam to become a college instructor, he failed. He took it a time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place in his class. Sartre was drafted into the French Army from 1929 to 1931 and he later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence. From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre, Laon, in 1932, Sartre discovered Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a remarkable influence on him. In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the Institut français dAllemagne in Berlin where he studied Edmund Husserls phenomenological philosophy, Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read Emmanuel Levinass Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a generation of French thinkers, including Sartre
25.
Jacques Lacan
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Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud. Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and his ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacans three children and his father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929, during the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings, of which he would later be highly critical, and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and became an atheist and he quarreled with his family over this issue. In 1920, after being rejected for service on the grounds that he was too thin. During that period, he was interested in the philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. In 1932, after a year at Saint Annes Clinique de Maladies Mentales et de lEncéphale. In 1932 he was awarded the Diplôme dÉtat de docteur en médecine for his thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality. It had a reception in the 1930s because it was not published until four decades later. This thesis is thought to mark Lacans entry into psychoanalysis and it shows Lacan’s dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Sigmund Freud on his works. ‘Paranoid Psychosis and its Relation to the Personality’ was based on observations of patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom Lacan called Aimee. It was published in the Revue française de psychanalyse, in Autumn of that same year, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Lowenstein, which was to last until 1938. Two years later Lacan was elected to the Société psychanalytique de Paris, in January 1934 he married Marie-Louise Blondin, and in January 1937 they had their first child, a daughter named Caroline. Their second child, a son named Thibaut, was born in August 1939, in 1936, Lacan presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the Mirror Phase. The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan was an active intellectual of the inter-war period—he was associated with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and he published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and attended the first public reading of James Joyces Ulysses
26.
Louis Althusser
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Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Althusser was a longtime member—although sometimes a strong critic—of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism, Althussers life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife by strangling her and he was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further work, dying in 1990. Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers and he was named after his paternal uncle who had been killed in the First World War. Althusser wrote later that his mother had intended to marry his uncle, Althusser later alleged that his mother treated him as a substitute for his deceased uncle, to which he attributed deep psychological damage. Following the death of his father, Althusser moved from Algiers with his mother and younger sister to Marseille and he joined the Roman Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne in 1937. Althusser was a brilliant student at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted by the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There, Althusser began the thinking that took him toward Communism and he was held in the camp for the rest of the war, under conditions that contributed to his lifelong bouts of mental instability. Returning from the war, he was in health, both mentally and physically. In 1947 he was hospitalized for the first time for manic-depressive psychosis, Althusser would from this point suffer from periodic mental illness for the rest of his life and was repeatedly hospitalized. In about 1950 he received narcotherapy and from 1964 to 1980 he was treated by the psychiatrist and psychonanalyst René Diatkine, after the war, Althusser was able to finally attend the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The school was sympathetic with his illness, allowing him to reside in his own room in the school infirmary, Althusser would live at the ENS in the Rue dUlm for decades, except for periods of hospitalization. His professional role within the structure was ill-defined, leading to his nickname amongst the students Althusserarien. In 1946, Althusser met Hélène Rytman, a revolutionary of Lithuanian Jewish origin, Hélène had been involved with the French resistance and had been a member of the French Communist Party, but the party expelled her. Althusser and Rytman began a life-long relationship, Althusser obtained his diplôme détudes supérieures in 1947 for a work directed by Gaston Bachelard and titled On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel. Formerly a devout if left-wing Catholic, Althusser joined the French Communist Party in 1948 and that same year, Althusser passed the agrégation in philosophy
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Michel Foucault
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Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and his thought has been highly influential both for academic and for activist groups, especially those working within contemporary sociology, cultural studies, and critical theory. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book and these first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called archaeology. In 1970 he was admitted to the Collège de France, membership of which he retained until his death and he also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in anti-racist campaigns, anti-human rights abuses movements, and the struggle for penal reform. He went on to publish The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, in these books he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role which power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France and he had been named after his father, Dr. His father was a local surgeon, having been born in Fontainebleau before moving to Poitiers. She was the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-laws medical practice, while his wife took charge of their large mid-19th-century house, Le Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou. Together the couple had three children, a girl named Francine and two boys, Paul-Michel and Denys, all of whom shared the same hair and bright blue eyes. The children were raised to be nominal Roman Catholics, attending mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, in later life, Foucault would reveal very little about his childhood. Describing himself as a delinquent, he claimed his father was a bully who would sternly punish him. In 1930, Foucault began his two years early at the local Lycée Henry-IV. Here he undertook two years of education before entering the main lycée, where he stayed until 1936. He then undertook his first four years of education at the same establishment, excelling in French, Greek, Latin and history but doing poorly at arithmetic. In 1939, the Second World War broke out and France was occupied by Nazi Germany until 1945, his parents opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime, in 1940, Foucaults mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the Jesuits. Lonely, he described his years there as the ordeal, but excelled academically, particularly in philosophy, history, in 1942, he entered his final year, the terminale, where he focused on the study of philosophy, earning his baccalauréat in 1943. Returning to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history and philosophy for a year, aided by a personal tutor and these ideas influenced Foucault, who adopted Hyppolites conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of history
28.
Jean Hyppolite
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Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of Frances most prominent post-war thinkers. Studies on Marx and Hegel is one of his major books and he was a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure at roughly the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre. After graduation he embarked on a study of Hegel, teaching himself German in order to read Phenomenology of Spirit in the original. In 1939 he came out with his own translation and his commentary would later form the basis of the book Genesis, after the Second World War, Hyppolite became a professor at the University of Strasbourg, before moving to the Sorbonne in 1949. In 1952, Hyppolite published Logique et existence, a work that may have had an effect on what was to become known as post-structuralism. This book tries to correlate Hegels Phenomenology to his Logics, in doing so, it raises the questions of language, being, and difference that were to become the hallmarks of new French philosophy at the end of the 20th century. One excellent hint at the importance and centrality of this book is found in Gilles Deleuzes review of it, the translators of the English language edition of the text were thoughtful enough to bundle Deleuzes review at the rear of the volume. In 1954, he became the director of the ENS and in 1955 produced a study of Karl Marxs earlier, more Hegelian period, in 1963 he was elected to the Collège de France and given a chair in The History of Philosophical Thought. While philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre were known for producing new works influenced by German philosophy, Hyppolite is remembered as an expositor, teacher and he influenced a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as Jacques Derrida, Gérard Granel and Étienne Balibar. Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit Logic and Existence Studies on Marx and Hegel Alexandre Kojève Jean Wahl
29.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS was an English mathematician and philosopher. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic and his most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science and he developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Today Whiteheads philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the texts of process philosophy. For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whiteheads thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization, cobb, Jr. Alfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England, in 1861. His father, Alfred Whitehead, was a minister and schoolmaster of Chatham House Academy, Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schoolmasters, but that his grandfather was the more extraordinary man. Whiteheads mother was Maria Sarah Whitehead, formerly Maria Sarah Buckmaster, Whitehead was apparently not particularly close with his mother, as he never mentioned her in any of his writings, and there is evidence that Whiteheads wife, Evelyn, had a low opinion of her. Whitehead was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, then considered one of the best public schools in the country and his childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports and mathematics and was head prefect of his class. In 1880, Whitehead began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, and his academic advisor was Edward John Routh. He earned his BA from Trinity in 1884, and graduated as fourth wrangler, in 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman raised in France, they had a daughter, Jessie Whitehead, and two sons, Thomas North Whitehead and Eric Whitehead. Eric Whitehead died in action serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I at the age of 19. In 1910, Whitehead resigned his Senior Lectureship in Mathematics at Trinity, toward the end of his time in England, Whitehead turned his attention to philosophy. Though he had no advanced training in philosophy, his work soon became highly regarded. After publishing The Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923, in 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited the 63-year-old Whitehead to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. During his time at Harvard, Whitehead produced his most important philosophical contributions, in 1925, he wrote Science and the Modern World, which was immediately hailed as an alternative to the Cartesian dualism that plagued popular science. A few years later, he published his seminal work Process and Reality, the Whiteheads spent the rest of their lives in the United States. Alfred North retired from Harvard in 1937 and remained in Cambridge, the two volume biography of Whitehead by Victor Lowe is the most definitive presentation of the life of Whitehead. However, many details of Whiteheads life remain obscure because he left no Nachlass, additionally, Whitehead was known for his almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy, and for writing very few personal letters of the kind that would help to gain insight on his life
