John Bordley Rawls (21 Feb 1921 - 24 Nov 2002), a Harvard University professor, was a leading American figure in Moral Philosophy. Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) is considered a primary text in political and ethical reasoning, and he earned a Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy, and a National Humanities Medal presented by U.S. President Bill Clinton in...

Charles Sanders Peirce (10 Sep 1839 - 19 Apr 1914, and pronounced: “Purce”) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and developer of Semiotics, for which he is largely appreciated today. Peirce considered himself a logician first and foremost, and made major contributions to the development of Formal Logic, while he is still read in...

Mark Ray Martin Parrott is an American philosopher, writer, musician, photographer, designer, and programmer, known for his early adoption of independent, small press publishing, and as developer and editor of GetWiki, a Wiki website focusing on Philosophy and other subjects. M.R.M. Parrott's books include the Timeless (M.R.M...

Baruch Benedict de Spinoza (24 Nov 1632 - 21 Feb 1677) was a Dutch philosopher from a Portuguese Jewish family, whose controversial metaphysical ideas led to cherem (or removal) against him from Jewish Society, and his works were banned by the Vatican. Despite his considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work...

John Locke (29 Aug 1632 - 28 Oct 1704) was an English physician and philosopher, and a key Enlightenment influence. After Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, Locke developed “Empiricism” as a strong response to the “Dualism” and “Rationalism” of René Descartes, and a new Contract Theory in response to the...

David Hume (7 May 1711 - 25 Aug 1776, and pronounced: “Hyoom”) was a Scottish philosopher, a key essayist in the Enlightenment, and most known for his subtle argument against “Causality” using “Induction”. Hume's six-volume History of England (1754 - 1762) was very popular well into the Nineteenth Century. Influenced by the “Empiricism”...

George Berkeley (12 Mar 1685 - 14 Jan 1753, and pronounced: “Barkly”) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who advanced a theory of “Immaterialism”, seen as a powerful “Subjective Idealism”, Berkeley argued we can directly know only our own Sensation and Idea of an Object. The notion of “Matter”, for example, is an Idea dependent upon being Perceived by the...

René Descartes (31 Mar 1596 - 11 Feb 1650, and pronounced: “Deycart”), also known as Renatus Cartesius and dubbed “Father of Modern Philosophy”, was a French philosopher crucial to Western Philosophy in the fields of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind, and he was a key figure, with Francis Bacon and others, in the Scientific...

Plato (428-27 - 348-47 BC) was a major Greek thinker in Ancient Philosophy, a student of Socrates, founder of the first Academy, and with his student Aristotle and the most important modern philosopher Kant, is still considered one of the singularly important philosophers of all time. Some thirty-five “Socratic” dialogues...

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a major Greek thinker in Ancient Philosophy, a student of Plato (who was student of Socrates) and a teacher of Alexander the Great. Aristotle was the first to treat many of the subjects we know separately, from Metaphysics, Logic and Physics to Ethics, Poetics, Politics and more. Alongside Plato and...

Thomas Hobbes (5 Apr 1588 - 4 Dec 1679) was an English political philosopher, most famous for his book Leviathan (1651) and his view of a “State of Nature” to avoid as a life which would be “brutish, nasty and short”. His view of the necessity of a powerful central Government, where some may be stronger or more intelligent than others, but none are beyond fear...

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1 Jul 1646 - 14 Nov 1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French, with works widely distributed in journals and tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts. Leibniz, independently of Isaac Newton, invented Calculus, and he also invented the Binary Number...

Immanuel Kant (22 Apr 1724 - 12 Feb 1804, and pronounced: “Kaunt”) was a Prussian (German) philosopher, generally regarded as the most major figure in Modern Philosophy, put alongside Plato and Aristotle from Ancient Philosophy. This makes Kant one of history's most influential thinkers. Known for his highly articulated...

Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 - 4 November 1995, and pronounced: “Deluzz”) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on Philosophy, Literature, Film, and Fine Art. Two of his most popular works were the volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980),...