Voltaire (born November 21, 1694, Paris, France—died May 30, 1778, Paris) was one of the greatest of all French writers. Although only a few of his works are still read, he continues to be held in worldwide repute as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and cruelty. Through its critical capacity, wit, and satire, Voltaire’s […]
Haribhadra (flourished 8th century) was a noncanonical author of treatises on the Indian religion Jainism, known for his authoritative works in Sanskrit and Prakrit on Jain doctrine and ethics. Scholars are still uncertain of the extent to which he should be differentiated from a 6th-century Jain author of the same name. Haribhadra was born into
Han Feizi (born c. 280, China—died 233 bce, China) was the greatest of China’s Legalist philosophers. His essays on autocratic government so impressed Qin Shi Huang that the future emperor adopted their principles after seizing power in 221 bce. The Hanfeizi, the book named after him, comprises a synthesis of legal theories up to his
John Scott Haldane (born May 3, 1860, Edinburgh, Scot.—died March 14/15, 1936, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.) was a British physiologist and philosopher chiefly noted for his work on the physiology of respiration. Haldane developed several procedures for studying the physiology of breathing and the physiology of the blood and for the analysis of gases consumed or
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Pierre-Félix Guattari (born April 30, 1930, Colombe, France—died August 29, 1992, near Blois) was a French psychiatrist and philosopher and a leader of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which challenged established thought in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Guattari worked during the 1950s at La Borde, a clinic near
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Gu Yanwu (born July 15, 1613, Kunshan, Jiangsu province, China—died Feb. 15, 1682, Quwo, Shaanxi province) was one of the most famous of the Ming dynasty loyalists, whose rationalist critiques of the useless book learning and metaphysical speculations of neo-Confucian philosophy (which had been the underpinning of the Chinese empire for almost 1,000 years) started
Dong Zhongshu (born c. 179, Guangchuan, China—died c. 104 bce, China) was a scholar instrumental in establishing Confucianism in 136 bce as the state cult of China and as the basis of official political philosophy—a position it was to hold for 2,000 years. As a philosopher, Dong merged the Confucian and Yinyang schools of thought.
Robert Grosseteste (born c. 1175, Suffolk, Eng.—died Oct. 9, 1253, Buckden, Buckinghamshire) was an English bishop and scholar who introduced into the world of European Christendom Latin translations of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific writings. His philosophical thinking—a somewhat eclectic blend of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas—consistently searched for a rational scheme of things, both
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