Blanchot, Maurice

Maurice Blanchot was born in France in 1907. He is considered one of the key figures of postwar European thought; he has radically transformed the understanding of the relations between philosophy and literature. His strikingly original fiction and his penetrating critical studies of other writers, such as Kafka, Beckett and Mallarme, have long been recongized as influential. His oeuvre as a whole, with its connections to the thought of Hegel and Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Bataille and Foucult, places him at the forefront of contemporary debates on philosophical and literary culture.

Arendt, Hannah

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, in Wilhelmine Germany. After graduating from high school in Koenigsberg in 1924, Arendt began to study theology that fall at the University of Marburg, where she met the young philosopher Martin Heidegger. Her...

Barthes, Roland

Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France on November 12, 1915. His father was a naval lieutenant and died in a sea battle one year after Barthes was born. In 1924, the family moved to Paris, where Barthes received his most of his education. From 1962 until his...

Bergson, Henri Louis

Bergson, Henri (1859-1941) is a French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner of literature.Bergson was born in Paris, October 18, 1859, and received his education at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. He taught in various secondary schools from...

Binswanger, Ludwig

Ludwig Binswanger was born April 13, 1881, in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, into a family already well established in a medical and psychiatric tradition. He received his M.D. degree from the University of Zurich in 1907. In 1911, Binswanger became the chief medical...

Bollnow, Otto Friedrich

Otto Friedrich Bollnow first began his career as doctor of physics in 1925 but soon turned his interest toward philosophy and pedagogy. Professor Bollnow is the author of 38 books and over 400 articles and reviews in the area of education and philosophy. He has been...

Buytendijk, F.J.J.

The psychologist Buytendijk completed his medical studies in 1909 and was promoted in 1918 on a dissertation entitled Proeven over Gewoontevorming in Dieren (Experiments of Habit Formation in Animals). In 1991, he assumed the Chair in Physiology at the University of...

De Beauvoir, Simone

Simone de Beauvoir was born on Boulevard Raspail, Paris, in 1908. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a strict Catholic from a bourgeois family. It is said that de Beauvoir was inspired to become an intellectual because she was caught between her father’s pagan...

Derrida, Jacques

Derrida, Jacques (1930-). Algerian born French philosopher of deconstruction, Derrida founded the International College of Philosophy in Paris and the International Group for Research into the Teaching of Philosophy in 1975. He is currently attached to the Etudes des...

Descartes, Rene

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), French mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist, developed first systematic account of the mind/body relationship. Descartes was born in Touraine, in the small town of La Haye and educated from the age of eight at the Jesuit college of...

Dewey, John

John Dewey (1859-1952), born in Burlington, VT, was a well-known American philosopher of pragmaticism, educator and psychologist. Dewey was Professor at Minnesota (1888-89), Michigan (1889-94), Chicago (1894-1904) and Columbia (from 1904). With C. S. Peirce and...

Dilthey, Wilhelm

Dilthey, Wilhelm(1833-1911) is a German philosopher of history and culture, whose theories have especially influenced theology and sociology. Born in Biebrich on the Rhine, he studied at Heidelberg and Berlin. As professor of philosophy at the universities of Basle,...

Diogenes

Dogenes was born around 413 B.C in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea. He was once caught in counterfeiting the currency with his father and was banished from the city. So, he went to Athens, where he sought Antisthenes, the founder of cynicism, as his mentor....

Foucault, Michel Paul

Foucault, Michel Paul, (1926-1984), French philosopher and sexologist. Professor of the history of systems of thought, College de France (from 1970); a leading French intellectual. Works included Madness and Civilization (1961), a study of madness and its treatment in...

Freud, Sigmund

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today Czech Republic). He studied in Vienna under Ernst Brucke, and then in Paris under Charcot; between 1882 and 1885 he worked in the Vienna General Hospital; Later he was worked as professor...

Gadamer, Hans-Georg

Hans-Georg Gadamer, born Feb. 11, 1900 in Marburg, Germany, is best known for his important contribution to hermeneutics through his major work, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method). His system of philosophical hermeneutics is a response, through an exploration of...

Garfinkel, Harold

Harold Garfinkel is a well known contemporary scholar in the United States on the studies of ethnomethodology. He invented the term ethnomethodology and was considered the cofounder of this school of thought. Ethnomethodology looks at how individuals communicate while...

Habermas, Jürgen

Jürgen Habermas is widely considered as the most influential thinker in Germany over the past decade (1970-80). As a philosopher and sociologist he has mastered and creatively articulated an extraordinary range of specialized literature in the social sciences, social...

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1770. He studied theology at the University of Tubingen. After serving as a tutor at Bern and Frankfurt, he was a lecturer and then a professor at the University of Jena (1801-06), headmaster of a school in...

Heidegger, Martin

Martin Heidegger was born in the German village of Messkirch in a Roman Catholic family. His father worked part time as a sexton at the Sankt Martin and he wished for Martin to enter theology. After completing a Jesuit Grammar School, Heidegger enrolls at the...

Husserl, Edmund

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was born in a Jewish family on April 8, 1859, in Prostejov, a small town in Tsjechoslovakia between Prague and Vienna. His favorite subject was mathematics but he also studied literature, theology, law, philosophy and astronomy. As a student...

Irigaray, Luce

Luce Irigaray was born in Belgium in 1930. She received a Master’s Degree from the University of Louvain in 1955. Soon after that, she taught high school in Brussels. In the early 1960s, Irigaray moved to France and received a Master’s Degree in psychology and a...

James, William

William James (1842-1910) was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. His father, Henry James was a Swedenborgian theologian. William James received very good education when he was young and travelled a lot. After graduating from school, he worked at Harvard...

Jaspers, Karl

Karl Jaspers was born 23 February 1883 in Oldenberg in Germany and began his career first as a medical doctor. From 1921 to 1937 he was professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, but was removed by the Nazis, and although reinstated in 1945, he eventually settled in...

Kant, Immanuel

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), German philosopher, considered by many the most influential thinker of modern times. Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), April 22, 1724, Kant received his education at the Collegium Fredericianum and the University of Königsberg....

Kierkegaard, Soren

Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and religious thinker who wrote literary and philosophical essays that reacted against Hegelian philosophy and the state church in Denmark, setting the stage for modern existentialism. Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, the...

Kristeva, Julia

Julia Kristeva’s name is widely recognised in Europe and America. In France, where Kristeva is a practising psychoanalyst and a professor in linguistics, she is regarded as an outstanding critic who has popular appeal as well, and her latest book which is an extensive...

Lacan, Jacques-Marie Emile

Lacan, Jacques-Marie Emile, (1901-1981), French psychoanalyst. Lacan qualified as a Doctor of Medicine before studying psychiatry under Henri Claude and Gatian de Clerambaut and worked at a special clinic attached to the Prefecture of Police. Lacan was not made a full...

Langeveld, Jan Martinus

Martinus J. Langeveld obtained his doctorate with a dissertation entitled Taal en Denken in 12 tot 14 Jarige Leerlingen (Language and Thinking in 12 to 14 Year Old Students) (1934). In 1939, he received the Chair in Pedagogy at the University of Utrecht. Until World...

Levinas, Emmanuel

Levinas, Emmanuel (1905-), French existentialist philosopher. Levinas was born in Lithuania, studied in Strasbourg and then Freiburg, where he was taught by both Husserl and Heidegger in 1928. After the war, Levinas was Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne until...

Marcel, Gabriel

Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was born in Paris, France. He is a world renown French existentialist dramatist, philosopher and drama critic. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland 1951-1952, and at Harvard University in the United States...

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. As with many of his generation, Merleau-Ponty lost his father to the war. Merleau-Ponty first studies philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and then becomes a high school philosophy...

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, was born on Oct. 15, 1844, and died on Aug. 25, 1900. He was a German philosopher who, together with Soren Kierkegaard, shares the distinction of being a precursor of Existentialism. He studied classics at the universities of Bonn and...

Plato

Plato was born to an aristocratic family in Athens. His father, Ariston, was believed to have descended from the early kings of Athens. Perictione, his mother, was distantly related to the 6th-century B.C. lawmaker Solon. When Plato was a child, his father died, and...

Ricoeur, Paul

Paul Ricoeur (1913-)was born and raised in the west of France. He has occupied the position of professor of philosophy at the Universities of Strasbourg and Paris (the Sorbonne, Nanterre) and has been a visiting professor at numerous other universities, the University...

Rorty, Richard

Rorty, Richard, post-analytic philosophy. Rorty has been professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia and professor at Princeton. His books include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), The Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency Irony and...

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980) is a French existentialist philosopher and author. Taught (1931-1945) in Le Havre, Laon, and Paris lycees, Satre was a served in the resistance and continued to fight injustice through his life – most notably campaigning for a free...

Scheler, Max

Max Scheler was born in Munich on August 22, 1874; and brought up in the Jewish faith by his mother. However, at age 11 Max Scheler turns catholic by doing communion in the Roman Catholic church. As a young man he studies philosophy and natural science at several...

Schleiermacher, Friedrich E.D.

Schleiermacher is born on November 21, 1768, in Breslau, Lower Silesia. His father is a Prussian army chaplain. Friedrich Schleiermacher attends Moravian boarding schools and later becomes a student at the University of Halle from 1787-1790, until he passes...

Schutz, Alfred

Schutz, Alfred (1899-1959) was born in Vienna. Alfred Schutz studied law and social science under Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises. He published Phenomenology of the Social World in 1932 which combined Weber’s sociology with Husserl’s phenomenological method. Schutz...

Spiegelberg, Herbert

Related: Arendt, Hannah Barthes, Roland Bergson, Henri Louis Binswanger, Ludwig Blanchot, Maurice Bollnow, Otto Friedrich Buytendijk, F.J.J. De Beauvoir, Simone Derrida, Jacques Descartes, Rene Dewey, John Dilthey, Wilhelm Diogenes Foucault, Michel Paul Freud, Sigmund...

Strasser, Stephan

Stephan Strasser escaped with his wife from Austria to Belgium after the Anschluss in 1938 by the Nazis. Even in Belgium he had to go into hiding during the war. Van Breda offered him work at the Husserl Archives, where, in the space of 25 months, Stephan Strasser,...

Straus, E.W.

van den Berg, J.H.

After completing a primary and secondary teacher education program, Jan Hendrik van den Berg entered medical school. In 1946, he completed his doctoral work with a dissertation on schizophrenic psychosis. Van den Berg studied in France and Switzerland and received a...

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889-1951), Austrian-British philosopher, who was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, particularly noted for his contribution to the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein was raised...