• Pierre Gassendi
    • ndi (1/22/1592- 10/24/1655) Pierre Gassendi attended school at Digne from 1599 to 1606 then continued his education at home supervised by his uncle. Then, in 1608, he entered the University of Aix where he studied ph...
    • Charles-Louis de Secondat,
    • t,  Baron de Montesquieu (1/18/1689- 2/10/1755) Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, was born on January 19th, 1689 at La Brède, near Bordeaux, to a noble and prosperous family. He ...
    • Giambattista Vico
    • ico (6/23/1668- 1/23/1744) Although considered by many contemporaries as a man with ideas that were far ahead of his own time, Giambattista Vico was not at all that well known until recently. This lack of populari...
    • Franz Brentano
    • ano (1/16/1838-3/17/1917) German philosopher generally regarded as the founder ofAct Psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns itself with theacts of the mind rather than with the states of mind or the imp...
    • Francis Bacon
    • con (1/22/1561- 4/9/1626) Francis Bacon was the son of Nicolas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Seal of Elisabeth I. He entered Trinity College Cambridge at age 12. Bacon later described his tutors as "Men of shar...
    • Edgar Allan Poe
    • oe ( January 19 , 1809 - October 7 , 1849 ) Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his poems and short fiction. Moreover, he was the father of the modern mystery. Additionally, Poe has had a worldwide influence on litera...
    • August Comte
    • te ( 1/19/1798- 9/5/1857) Auguste Comte -- full name Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte -- ( February 17 (recorded February 19), 1798 , Montpellier - September 5 , 1857 , Paris) was a founder of the dis...
    • Wolfgang K
    • ng Köhler ( January 21 , 1887 - June 11 , 1967 ) Wolfgang Köhler was born January 21, 1887, in Reval, Estonia.  He received his PhD in 1908 from the University of Berlin.  He then became an assist...
    • Anne Brontë
    • të  ( January 17 , 1820- May 28 , 1849) Anne Bronte (1820-1849), English writer, sister of Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë. Anne Brontë is best known for her novelsAgnes Grey(1847) andThe Tenant of Wildfell ...
    • William James
    • es (1/11/1842- 8/26/1910) William James ( January 11 , 1842 , New York - August 26 , 1910 Chocorua , New Hampshire ), philosopher and elder brother of the writer Henry James , was born in New ...
    • Venerable Master Lin Chi
    • Chi Died 867 (January 10 ) Lin-chi I-hsuan was born in the early years of the ninth century in present-day Shantung province. Although the details of his early life are sketchy, it seems that from an early age his ...
    • Isaac Newton
    • on (1/4/1643- 3/31/1727) The English scientist and mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), was born at Woolsthorpe,Lincolnshire, near Grantham. A rather dour man whose relationship with his own family was at b...
    • George Berkeley
    • ley (3/12/1685-1/14/1753) George Berkeley studied divinity and later lectured at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1734 he was appointed bishop at Cloyne, in which office he devoted himself to the social and economic ...
    • Life of Thomas Warton, the Younger
    • ger (9 January 1728-20 May 1790) Judy Niessner Thomas Warton was born onJanuary 9, 1728, and was baptized sixteen days later. He was the younger son of Thomas Warton, the elder, who was the vicar of Basingstroke. His m...
    • Kenichi Fukui
    • kui (October 4, 1918- January, 9 1998)  ( Autobiography) I was born the eldest of three sons of Ryokichi Fukui, a foreign trade merchant and factory manager, and Chie Fukui, inNara, Japan, onOctober 4, 1918....
    • Gabriel Cramer
    • mer ( 31 July 1704 in Geneva, Switzerland-4 Jan 1752 in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France) Gabriel Cramer 's father was Jean Isaac Cramer, who was a medical doctor in Geneva, while his mother was Anne Mallet. Jean and Anne had...
    • David Fabricius
    • ius ( March 9 , 1564 - May 7 , 1617 ) David Fabricius was a Frisian astronomer who was responsible for two major discoveries in the early days of telescopic astronomy . Born in Esens, Frisia , as an adult D...
    • Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
    • ugo  (1864-Dec. 31,1936) Spanish author and philosopher, predecessor of Existentialist philosophy with Søren Kierkegaard , educator, whose essays had great influence in early 20th-century Spain. Unamuno ...
    • Biography of Andrei Tarkovsky
    • sky (April 4, 1932-Dec. 28 1968) By: Matthew Sanford Czar of Cinematic Spirituality Andrei Tarkovsky was born onApril 4, 1932, the son of famed poet and translator Arsiniy Tarkovsky and talented actress Maria Ivanov...
    • THOMAS GRAHAM
    • HAM ( December 21, 1805 - September 16, 1869 ) Thomas Graham was born inGlasgow, Scotland, on December 21, 1805. His father was a prosperous manufacturer who wanted his son to become a minister of the Church of Scot...
    • Louis Eugene Felix Neel
    • el (22 Dec.1904 - 2000) French physicist, corecipient, with the Swedish astrophysicist Hannes Alfven, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his pioneering studies of the magnetic properties of solids. His contrib...
    • Jan Lukasiewicz
    • cz (12/21/1878- 2/13/1956) Jan Lukasiewicz's father, Luke Lukasiewicz, was a captain in the Austrian army. Perhaps before proceeding we should explain why the father in this Polish speaking family, living inLvov w...
    • Gabriel Marcel
    • rcel (12/7/1889- 10/8/1973 ) Gabriel Marcel, generally regarded as the first French existential philosopher, was born in Paris in 1889 and died there in 1973. An only child in an upper-middle class family, Marcel e...
    • Wolfgang Paul
    • aul (Autobiography) (August 10, 1913- December 1993) I was born on August 10, 1913 in Lorenzkirch a small village in Saxony, as the forth child of Theodor and Elisabeth Paul nee Ruppel. All in all we were six c...
    • Noam Chomsky
    • sky (12/7/1928) Noam Avram Chomsky was born inPhiladelphia,Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. He received his early education at Oak Lane Country Day School and Central High School, Philadelphia. He continued his ed...
    • Kristina Wasa, Queen of Sweden
    • den (12/8/1626- 4/19/1689) "...if we conceive the world in that vast extension you give it, it is impossible that man conserve himself therein in this honorable rank, on the contrary, he shall consider himsel...
    • Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz
    • cz ( 12/12/1890- 4/12/1963) Ajdukiewicz was one ofPoland's most distinguished philosophers and logicians in the present century and he was among the most active members of the Lvov-Warsaw School, founded in 1895 by...
    • John Milton
    • ton ( December 9 , 1608 - November 8 , 1674 ) John was an English poet , most famous for his blank verse epic Paradise Lost . He was the son of a scrivener of strong Puritan tendencies, and was edu...
    • Indira Gandhi
    • hi Indira Nehru Gandhi was born on November 19, 1917 and would be the only child of Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru. Being influenced and inspired by her parents, Indira Gandhi rose to power in India and eventually became ...
    • Fyodor Dostoevsky
    • sky Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky ( 1821 - 1881 ) was a Russian writer and is sometimes referred to as one of the founders of existentialism . Dostoevsky is widely regarded as one of the most important Russian lan...
    • Desiderius Erasmus
    • us Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (also Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam )  ( October 27 , probably 1466 - July 12 , 1536 ) was a Dutch humanist and theologian . He was born Geert Geertsen in Rotterdam , the ...
    • Sir Walter Scott
    • ott ( August 14 , 1771 - September 21 , 1832 ) "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below, and saints above; For love is heaven, and heaven is love." (From The Lay of the Last Minstrel,...
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • dge (1772-1834) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a leader of the British Romantic movement, was born onOctober 21, 1772, in Devonshire, England. His father, a vicar of a parish and master of a grammar school, married twice a...
    • John Dewey
    • ewey (1859-1952) John Dewey was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic and political activist. He was born in Burlington, Vermont, onOctober 20, 1852. Dewey graduated from the University...
    • Henri Bergson
    • son  (1859-1941) Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), French philosopher and Nobel laureate, who advanced a theory of evolution, based on the spiritual dimension of human life, which had widespread influence in a variety o...
    • Alfred Nobel
    • bel Alfred Bernhard Nobel was bornon October 21, 1833, inStockholm, Sweden. He was a Swedish chemist, inventor, engineer, and philanthropist. He was educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in the United States of America...
    • Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzi)
    • zi) "Raffaelo Sanzio was the youngest of the three giants of the High Renaissance. He was born in Urbino in 1483 and received his first instruction in the techniques of painting from his father, Giovanni Santi,...
    • Anatole France
    • nce AnatoleFrance, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924), was the son of a Paris book dealer. He received a thorough classical education at the Collège Stanislas, a boys' school in Paris, and for a whi...
    • Mohandas K. Gandhi
    • dhi (October 2, 1869-January 30, 1948)  AJAY SINGH BORN: Oct. 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India 1888: Starts to study law in England 1893: Goes to work in South Africa, where he fights for the rights of In...
    • Khalil Gibran
    • an (1883-1931) Gibran Khalil Gibran was born on January 6, 1883, to the Maronite family of Gibran in Bsharri, a mountainous area in Northern Lebanon [Lebanon was a Turkish province part of Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon, ...
    • Emile Zola
    • ola  (1840-1902) "I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation." (FromMy Hat...
    • David Herbert Lawrence
    • ce  (1885-1930) David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to a coal-mining father he could sometimes despise and a mother whom he revered. Later Lawrence wrote about his ...
    • Arnold Schönberg
    • ml;nberg (13 September 1874-13 July 1951) Austro-Hungarian composer, an American citizen from 1941.He began violin lessons when he was eight and almost immediately started composing, though he had no formal trainin...
    • François
    • is-René de Chateaubriand (4 September, 1768-4 July, 1848) French writer, Chateaubriand was a founder of romanticism in French literature. Of noble birth, he grew up in his family’s isolated castle of Combourg. In 1791...
    • Théophile Gautier
    • ier In October 1851, when he had just turned forty, Gautier agreed to a request for biographical information from Armand Baschet, who was planning an article on him.  While he is a bit coy at first, he quickly war...
    • Maurice Maeterlinck
    • nck  Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), born inGhent, Belgium, came from a well-to-do family. He was educated at a Jesuit college and read law, but a short practice as a lawyer in his home town convinced him that he...
    • Charles Baudelaire
    • ire Charles Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal; which was perhaps the most importantand influential poetry collectio...
    • Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich
    • ich (1828-1910) Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born August 28,1828 (old style) at his family's estate at Yasnaya Polyana. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by relatives. In 1844 Tolstoy started h...
    • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
    • gel ( 1770-1831 ) Born in Stuttgart and educated in Tübingen, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel devoted his life wholly to academic pursuits, teaching at Jena, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and Berlin. HisWissenschaft der ...
    • Friedrich Nietzsche
    • che (1844-1900) Born the son of a Lutheran pastor in Röcken, Saxony, Friedrich Nietzsche was raised by female relatives after his father's death in 1849. He quickly abandoned his initial pursuit of theology in or...