Bessarion (born Jan. 2, 1403, Trebizond, Trebizond empire [now Trabzon, Turkey]—died Nov. 18, 1472, Ravenna [Italy]) was a Byzantine humanist and theologian, later a Roman cardinal, and a major contributor to the revival of letters in the 15th century. He was educated at Constantinople (Istanbul) and adopted the name Bessarion upon becoming a monk in […]
Friedrich von Hügel (born May 5, 1852, Florence [Italy]—died January 27, 1925, London, England) was a Roman Catholic philosopher and author who was the forerunner of the realist revival in philosophy and the theological study of religious feeling. Of Austrian descent, von Hügel inherited his father’s baronial title in 1870 but lived most of his
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Erwin Schrödinger (born August 12, 1887, Vienna, Austria—died January 4, 1961, Vienna) was an Austrian theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with British physicist P.A.M. Dirac. Schrödinger entered the University of Vienna in 1906 and obtained
Karl Popper (born July 28, 1902, Vienna, Austria—died September 17, 1994, Croydon, Greater London, England) was an Austrian-born British philosopher of natural and social science who subscribed to anti-determinist metaphysics, believing that knowledge evolves from experience of the mind. Although his first book, Logik der Forschung (1934; The Logic of Scientific Discovery), was published by
Otto Neurath (born Dec. 10, 1882, Vienna, Austria—died Dec. 22, 1945, Oxford, Eng.) was an Austrian philosopher and sociologist noted for interpreting logical-positivist thought as a basis for behaviourist social and economic theory. After imprisonment for being associated with the short-lived Bavarian Communist republic in 1919, Neurath went to Vienna (1920) to encourage political and
Alexius Meinong (born July 17, 1853, Lemberg, Galicia, Austrian Empire [now Lviv, Ukraine]—died Nov. 27, 1920, Graz, Austria) was an Austrian philosopher and psychologist remembered for his contributions to axiology, or theory of values, and for his Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of objects. After studying under the philosophical psychologist Franz Brentano from 1875 to 1878 in
Ernst Mach (born February 18, 1838, Chirlitz-Turas, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Brno-Chrlice, Czech Republic]—died February 19, 1916, Haar, Germany) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher who established important principles of optics, mechanics, and wave dynamics and who supported the view that all knowledge is a conceptual organization of the data of sensory experience (or observation).
Theodor Gomperz (born March 29, 1832, Brünn, Moravia—died Aug. 29, 1912, Baden bei Wien, Austria) was a philosopher and classical scholar, remembered chiefly for his Griechische Denker: eine Geschichte der antiken Philosophie, 2 vol. (1893–1902; Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy, 4 vol., 1901–12). He was professor of classical philology at Vienna (1873–1901) and
Also known as: Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq aṣ-Ṣabāḥ al-Kindī al-Kindī (died c. 870) was the first outstanding Islamic philosopher, known as “the philosopher of the Arabs.” Al-Kindī was born of noble Arabic descent and flourished in Iraq under the Abbasid caliphs al-Maʾmūn (813–833) and al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842). He concerned himself not only with those philosophical questions that
Also known as: Al-Sheikh al-Akbar, Muḥyī al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-ʿArabī al-Ḥātimī aṭ-Ṭāʾī Ibn al-ʿArabī, ash-Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn al-ʿArabī (born July 28, 1165, Murcia, Valencia—died November 16, 1240, Damascus) was a celebrated Muslim mystic-philosopher who gave the esoteric, mystical dimension of Islamic thought its first full-fledged philosophic expression. His