Mark Ray Martin Parrott (born 12 Oct 1966) is an American philosopher, writer, musician, photographer, designer, and programmer, known for his early adoption of independent, small press Publishing, and as developer of GetWiki, a wiki/blog website focusing on Philosophy and other subjects. M.R.M...

Immanuel Kant (22 Apr 1724 - 12 Feb 1804) 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...

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1 Jul 1646 - 14 Nov 1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician, writing primarily in Latin and French, who, independently of Newton, invented Calculus, invented the Binary_Number_System, and was a contributor to a vast array of subjects, including Philosophy, Physics, Technology,...

Baruch Benedict de Spinoza (24 Nov 1632 - 21 Feb 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of a Portuguese Jewish family, whose controversial metaphysical ideas led to cherem (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 was...

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 Cartesian Dualism and Rationalism, and a new Contract Theory in response to the...

David Hume (7 May 1711 - 25 Aug 1776) 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” of John Locke, the “material idealism” of George...

Max Weber (21 Apr 1864 - 14 Jun 1920) was a German thinker who developed a “Hermeneutic” tradition in Sociology and Economics. Weber based many of his economic studies on early twentieth-century Germany, and became well-known for his study of the “bureaucratization” of society. Life and Works - Born in Erfurt, Germany, and the eldest of seven children of Max Weber and Helene, young...

Charles Sanders Peirce (10 Sep 1839 - 19 Apr 1914, and pronounced: “Purse”) 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 still read in studies of...

George Berkeley (12 Mar 1685 - 14 Jan 1753, and pronounced: “Barkly”) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who advanced a theory of “Immaterialism” and was known as the good “Bishop Berkeley”. Seen as a poweful “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...

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 1999, recognizing...

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 thinkers of all...

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...

René Descartes (31 Mar 1596 - 11 Feb 1650), 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 Revolution. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1642) has...

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, a life “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 of another doing harm to them. ...