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Moritz Schlick
Friedrich Albert Moritz Schlick (; ; 14 April 1882 – 22 June 1936) was a German philosopher, physicist, and the founding father of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Early life and works Schlick was born in Berlin to a wealthy Prussian family with deep nationalist and conservative traditions. His father was Ernst Albert Schlick and his mother was Agnes Arndt. At the age of sixteen, he started to read Descartes' ''Meditations'' and Schopenhauer's ''Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik''. Nietzsche's ''Also sprach Zarathustra'' especially impressed him. He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Lausanne, and, ultimately, the University of Berlin under Max Planck. Schlick explained this choice in his autobiography by saying that, despite his love for philosophy, he believed that only mathematical physics could help him obtain actual and exact knowledge. He felt deep distrust towards any metaphysical speculation. In 1904, he completed his PhD the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Philosophy
Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" grc, φιλεῖν , "to love" and σοφία '' sophía'', "wisdom"). History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the cause or first principle) of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethics
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: # Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, and how their truth values (if any) can be determined; # Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action; # Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated (or permitted) to do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Susan Stebbing
Lizzie Susan Stebbing (2 December 1885 – 11 September 1943) was a British philosopher. She belonged to the 1930s generation of analytic philosophy, and was a founder in 1933 of the journal ''Analysis.'' Stebbing was the first woman to hold a philosophy chair in the United Kingdom, as well as the first female President of Humanists UK. Biography Born in North Finchley, Middlesex, ''Susan'' Stebbing (as she preferred to be called), was the youngest of six children born to Alfred Charles Stebbing and Elizabeth (née Elstob), and was orphaned at an early age. Stebbing was educated at James Allen's Girls' School, Dulwich, until she went, in 1904, to Girton College, Cambridge, to read history (though Cambridge did not award degrees or full University membership to women at the time). Having come across F. H. Bradley's ''Appearance and Reality'' she became interested in philosophy and stayed on to take part I of the Moral Sciences tripos in 1908. This was followed by a University of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Blumberg
Albert E. Blumberg (August 10, 1906 – October 8, 1997) was an American philosopher and political activist. He was an official of the Communist Party for several years before joining the Democratic Party as a district leader. Early life Albert was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a middle-class Litvak family. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and then furthered his education by acquiring a master's degree from Yale, studying at the Sorbonne, and receiving a doctorate from the University of Vienna. While studying in Vienna he became attracted to the Vienna circle of Logical Positivists, founded by the German philosopher Moritz Schlick. Professional life Within philosophy Albert Blumberg was best known for having co-authored with Herbert Feigl a paper which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy entitled, "Logical Positivism: A New Movement In European Philosophy." For logical positivists the discipline of philosophy hinged on one task; to clarify the meanings of conc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herbert Feigl
Herbert Feigl (; ; December 14, 1902 – June 1, 1988) was an Austrian-American philosopher and an early member of the Vienna Circle. He coined the term "nomological danglers". Biography The son of a trained weaver who became a textile designer, Feigl was born in Reichenberg (Liberec), Bohemia, into a Jewish (though not religious) family. He matriculated at the University of Vienna in 1922 and studied physics and philosophy under Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Hans Thirring, and Karl Bühler. He became one of the members of the Vienna Circle in 1924 and would be one of the few Circle members (along with Schlick and Friedrich Waismann) to have extensive conversations with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Feigl received his doctorate at Vienna in 1927 for his dissertation ''Zufall und Gesetz: Versuch einer naturerkenntnistheoretischen Klarung des Wahrscheinlichkeits- und Induktionsproblems'' (''Chance and Law: An Epistemological Analysis of the Roles of Probability and Induction in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell,For instance, in their "Principia Mathematica' (''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' edition). Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege. Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are the two pillars of modern physics. His mass–energy equivalence formula , which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality resulted in "Einstein" becoming synonymous with "genius". In 1905, a year sometimes described as his ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology"."Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. In 1879, at the , Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alois Riehl
Alois Adolf Riehl (; 27 April 1844 – 21 November 1924) was an Austrian neo-Kantian philosopher. He was born in Bozen (Bolzano) in the Austrian Empire (now in Italy). He was the brother of . Biography Riehl studied at Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck and Graz. He earned his PhD from Innsbruck in 1868. He habilitated at Graz at 1870. He worked as a full professor of philosophy at Graz from 1878, then at Freiburg (from 1882 as a replacement for Wilhelm Windelband), Kiel and Halle, and finally at Berlin, where he commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design his house in Neubabelsberg. For Riehl, philosophy was not the teaching of ''Weltanschauung'', but principally a criticism of perception. He was the doctoral advisor of Paul Hensel and Oswald Spengler. Riehl died in Neubabelsberg, near Potsdam,Riehl, Alois (Aloys) at Deutsche Biographie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (, ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. In 1948, the German scientific institution Kaiser Wilhelm Society (of which Planck was twice president) was renamed Max Planck Society (MPG). The MPG now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions. Life and career Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor at the University of Kiel and Munich. One of his uncles was also a judge. Planck was born in 1858 in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Plan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Bertrand Russell" 1 May 2003. He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote ''Principia Mathematica'', a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psyc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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