Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848 - 1925) was a German mathematician, logician

and philosopher, who helped found both modern mathematical Logic and the
beginnings of the Analytic Philosophy movement.
Although his work was little known and poorly received during his lifetime, it has
exerted a fundamental and far-reaching influence on 20th Century philosophy. He
later abandoned his extensive work on Logicism, but he directly influenced the next
generation of logicians and philosophers, (particularly Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivism movement) and, after his death, his Predicate
Logic virtually wholly superseded traditional forms of Logic.

Life
Frege (pronounced FRAY-ga) was born on 8 November 1848 in Wismar in northern
Germany. His father, Karl Alexander Frege, was the founder of a girls' high school,
of which he was the headmaster until his death in 1866; his mother, Auguste
Wilhelmine Sophie (ne Bialloblotzky) was also a teacher at the school, and took it
over after her husband's death.
Frege studied at the local high school in Wismar from 1864 until 1869. Both his
teacher, Leo Sachse and his father (who wrote a textbook on the German
language for children aged 9-13, the first section of which dealt with the structure and
logic of language) played important roles in determining Freges future career.
He continue his studies in chemistry, philosophy and mathematics at the University of
Jena in 1869, where his most important teacher (and later friend, benefactor and
regular correspondent) was the physicist, mathematician and inventor Ernst
Abbe (1940 - 1905), as well as Karl Snell, Hermann Schffer and the
philosopher Kuno Fischer (1824 - 1907). From 1871 to 1873, Frege attended
the University of Gttingen, then the leading university in mathematics in Germanspeaking territories, where he was lectured by Alfred Clebsch, Ernst
Schering, Wilhelm Weber, Eduard Riecke and the philosopher Rudolf Hermann
Lotze(1817 - 1881).
After receiving his doctorate in mathematics (geometry) at Gttingen in 1873,
Frege returned to the University of Jena to take up a lectureship (on the
recommendation of Ernst Abbe). He remained at Jena until his retirement in 1918,
accumulating the qualifications and positions (many of them unpaid) of Habilitation in
1874, Professor Extraordinarius in 1879, andOrdenlicher Honorarprofessor in
1896.
Though his education and early work were mainly mathematical, and
especially geometrical (and his employment continued to be as a mathematician),
Frege's thought soon turned to Logic and the Philosophy of Language. His initial
intention was to show that mathematics grew out of Logic (known as Logicism), and his

early 1879 work "Begriffsschrift" ("Concept Script") broke new ground and marked
a turning point in the history of Logic, with its rigorous treatment of the ideas
of functions andvariables.
Some time after the publication of "Begriffsschrift", Frege was married to Margaret
Lieseburg, and they were to have at leasttwo children, both of whom died young.
Years later, they adopted a son, Alfred. However, little else is known about Frege's
family life.
His published work was generally unfavourably reviewed by his contemporaries, and
he was even forced to arrange some publications at his own expense. Due to a
combination of this, the death of his wife in 1905 and his frustration with his failure to
find an adequate solution to Russell's Paradox (see below), Frege seems to have lost
his intellectual steam around 1906, although he continued to publish articles, and to
influence the next generation of logicians and philosophers, (particularlyBertrand
Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivist Rudolf Carnap (who was one of
Frege's students from 1910 to 1913).
In the last decades of his life, he became increasingly paranoid, and wrote a
succession of rabid treatises attacking parliamentary democracy, labour unions and
foreigners (particularly Jews). After his retirement in 1918, Frege moved to Bad
Kleinen, not far from his birthplace in Wismar. He died on 26 July 1925 in Bad
Kleinen at the age of 76.

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Frege's early intention was to show that mathematics grew out of Logic with no need
of non-logical axioms (a view known asLogicism), but in so doing he devised
techniques that took him far
beyond traditional Aristotelian syllogistic Logic and Stoicpropositional Logic.
Starting with his ground-breaking 1879 "Begriffsschrift" ("Concept Script") he
invented Predicate Logic in large part thanks to his invention of quantified variables,
which eventually became ubiquitous in both mathematics and Logic, and solved
theproblem of multiple generality (a failure in traditional logic to describe
certain intuitively valid inferences). Later, he attempted to derive all of the laws of
arithmetic, by use of his symbolism, from axioms he asserted as logical, resulting
in"Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik" ("The Foundations of Arithmetic") of 1884 and
his magnum opus "Grundgesetze der Arithmetik" ("Basic Laws of Arithmetic") of
1893.
Just as Volume 2 of the "Basic Laws" was about to go to press in 1903, Bertrand
Russell wrote to Frege, pointing out what has become known as Russell's
Paradox (the set of things, x, that are such that x is not a member of x), which
he never resolvedto his own satisfaction. Later, his frustration over this caused Frege
to completely abandon his Logicism, and in his golden years he started to develop a

completely new theory of the nature of arithmetic based on Kantian pure intuitions of
space.
Frege's work in Logic was little recognized in his day, partly due to his unique and
peculiar diagrammatic notation, but theanalysis of logical concepts and the
machinery of formalization that is essential to Bertrand Russell and Alfred North
Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica", as well as Kurt Gdel's incompleteness
theorems and Alfred Tarski's theory of truth, is ultimately due to Frege. He did not live
to see his brand of Logic (paradoxically, largely due to the championship of Russell)
virtually wholly supersede earlier forms.
But, in addition to his work on Logic, Frege is also one of the founders of Analytic
Philosophy, mainly because of his contributions to the Philosophy of Language. In fact,
the challenge of developing new and interesting theories on the nature of language,
functions, concepts and philosophical logic, so exercised him that he broke off his work
on mathematical logic for several years.
He is particularly noted for his 1892 paper "ber Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On Sense
and Reference"), in which he distinguished the two different aspects of
the significance of an expression. In distinguishing between sense (the meaning of a
word or object, which can vary widely between different people) and reference (the
actual object indicated, which remains constant), Frege realized that the meaning of a
given sentence must be derived from the meaning of its parts, and that therefore a
word only has a definite meaning in the context of a whole sentence. Other important
articles in a similar vein include "Funktion und Begriff" ("Function and Concept",
1891) and "ber Begriff und Gegenstand" ("On Concept and Object", 1892).

john Dewey (1859 - 1952) was a 20th Century American philosopher, psychologist
and educational reformer. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, he is
recognized as one of the founders of the largely American philosophical school
ofPragmatism and his own doctrine of Instrumentalism. He was also one of the fathers
ofFunctionalism (or Functional Psychology), and a leading representative of
theprogressive movement in American education during the first half of the 20th
Century.
He developed a broad body of work encompassing virtually all of the main areas of
philosophy, and wrote extensively on social issues in popular publications, gaining a
reputation as a leading social commentator of his time.

Life

Dewey was born on 20 October 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, the third of four sons
born to Archibald Sprague Dewey (who owned a grocery store) and Lucina
Artemesia (ne Rich) (a devoutly religious woman), of modest family origins. He
attended the University of Vermont in Burlington, and graduated in 1879. During this
time, he was exposed to evolutionary theory, and the theory of natural
selectioncontinued to have a life-long impact upon Dewey's thought. Although the
philosophy teaching at Vermont was somewhat limited, his teacher, H. A. P. Torrey, a
learned scholar with broad philosophical interests and sympathies, was decisive in
Dewey's philosophical development.
After graduating in 1879, he worked for two years as a high school teacher in Oil City,
Pennsylvania, but then borrowed money from his aunt in order to enter graduate
school in philosophy at the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore. Two teachers in particular had a lasting influence on him: the Germantrained Hegelian philosopher, George Sylvester Morris (1840 - 1899), and the
experimental psychologist, Granville Stanley Hall (1844 - 1924). He received his Ph.D.
in 1884, and left to take up a faculty position at the University of Michigan, which he
kept for ten years, and during which time he wrote his first books. He married his first
wife, Alice Chipman in 1886, and the couple had six children (with only four surviving
into adulthood) before Alice died in 1927.
In 1894, Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago where his
early Idealism gave way to an empirically-based theory of knowledge, and he started
to align his ideals with the emerging Pragmatic school of thought. While at Chicago, he
produced a collection of essays entitled "Thought and its Subject-Matter", and his
first major work on education, "The School and Society in 1899. This work was based
on the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (also known as the "Dewey
School") which he founded in 1896, which taught according to his progressive principles
of hands-on learning and exploration. In 1899, he was elected president of
the American Psychological Association, and in 1905 he became president of
theAmerican Philosophical Association.
Having resigned from the University of Chicago over disagreements with
the administration in 1904, he took up a position as professor of philosophy
at Columbia University in New York, and he taught there until his retirement in 1930.
He developed close contacts with many philosophers working from divergent points of
view in the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of the north-eastern universities,
which served to nurture and enrich his thought. He published two important
books, "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in
Contemporary Thought" (1910) and "Essays in Experimental Logic" (1916). During
this time, he travelled the world as a philosopher, social and political theorist and
educational consultant, including trips to Japan, China, Turkey, USSR and Mexico.
His interest in educational theory also continued during these years, fostered by his
work at the Teachers College at Columbia, leading to the publication of "How We
Think" in 1910 and, his most important work in the field, "Democracy and

Education" in 1916. Along with fellow Columbia professors Charles Beard (1874 1948), Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929) andJames Harvey Robinson (1863 - 1936), he
founded the New School for Social Research in 1919 as a modern, progressive, free
school.
Dewey retired from active teaching in 1930, occasionally teaching as professor
emeritus until 1939. However, his activities as apublic figure and productive
philosopher continued unabated, including frequent contributions to popular
magazines such as "The New Republic" and "Nation", and participation in several
prestigious lecture series. He was involved in a variety ofpolitical causes,
including women's suffrage, the unionization of teachers and the founding of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he was
involved in the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky at
the Moscow Trial.
In 1946, almost two decades after his first wife died, he married Roberta Lowitz
Grant, and the couple adopted two Belgian orphans. Dewey continued to
work vigorously throughout his retirement, including works
on Logic, Aesthetics, Epistemologyand Politics. He died of pneumonia in his New York
home on 1 June 1952, aged 92.

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Dewey's output was prodigious: 40 books and approximately 700 articles in over 140
journals. Many of his most renowned works were published after he was sixty years
old. Some of his best known publications include "Democracy and
Education"(1916), "Human Nature and Conduct" (1922), "Experience and
Nature" (1925) and "The Quest for Certainty" (1929).
Dewey is considered one of the three central figures in American Pragmatism, along
with Charles Sanders Peirce (who coinedthe term) and William
James (who popularized it). However, Dewey did not identify himself as
a Pragmatist per se, but instead referred to his philosophy as Instrumentalism, a similar
but separate concept.
Simply put, the doctrine of Pragmatism holds that the meaning of any concept can be
equated with its conceivable operational or practical consequences, and that practical
consequences or real effects are vital components of both meaning and truth. Even
more simply, something is true only insofar as it works.
Instrumentalism, on the other hand, is the methodological view that concepts and
theories are merely useful instruments, and their worth is measured not by whether
the concepts and theories are true or false (Instrumentalism denies that theories
are truth-evaluable) or whether they correctly depict reality, but by how effective they
are in explaining and predictingphenomena. An important aspect of Dewey's
philosophy is that it starts from the point of view of Fallibilism, that absolute

certainty about knowledge is impossible, and all claims to knowledge could, at least in
principle, be mistaken. Another important aspect is his belief that humanity should be
considered not just as a spectator in the world, but as an agent.
Dewey's overall ethical stance can be described as "meliorism": the belief that this life
is neither perfectly good nor bad, and it can be improved only through human effort.
He believed that philosophy's motive for existing is to make life better, and this should
be approached from a practical "bottom-up" starting point, rather than the
theoretical "top-down" approach of most traditional philosophy. He was a
confirmed atheist, rejecting belief in any static ideal, such as a theistic God, (although
he nevertheless honoured the important rle that
religious institutions and practices played in human life), and believed that
onlyscientific method could reliably further human good.
Dewey has made arguably the most significant contribution to the development
of educational thinking and the Philosophy of Education in the 20th Century. His
philosophical Pragmatism, his concern with interaction, reflection and experience,
and his interest in community and democracy, all came together to form a highly
suggestive educative form. Consistent with his view that human thought should be
understood as practical problem-solving, which proceeds by testing rival
hypotheses againstexperience, he advocated an educational system with
continued experimentation and vocational training to equip students to
solve practical problems. He also emphasized "learning-by-doing" and the
incorporation of the student's past experiences into the classroom. In his "Democracy
and Education" of 1916, he describes in detail how an ability to respond creatively to
continual changes in the natural order vitally provides for individual and community
life.
He was also a primary originator of Functional Psychology (or Functionalism), which
refers to a general psychological approach that views mental life and behaviour in terms
of active adaptation to the person's environment. As such, it is notreadily testable
in controlled experiments or trained introspection (as the prevailing structuralist
psychology approach of the end of the 19th Century suggested).

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859 - 1938) was a MoravianGermanphilosopher and mathematician (usually considered German as most of
his adult lifewas spent in Germany), best known as the father of the 20th
Century Phenomenologymovement.
His work broke with the dominant Positivism of his day, giving weight to subjective
experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Along
withGeorg Hegel and his own student Martin Heidegger, he was a major influence on
the whole of 20th Century Continental Philosophy.

Life
Husserl was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia (present-day Prostejov in
theCzech Republic, but then part of the Austrian Empire). His father was a Jewish
clothing merchant, and the language of the Husserl home was
probably Yiddishalthough it was not an orthodox household.
His father had the means and the inclination to send Edmund away to Vienna at the
age of 10 to begin his German classical education (and he was lucky that the
recentliberalization of the laws governing Prossnitz's Jews allowed this), atlhough just
a year later, in 1870, he moved back closer to home to the Staatsgymnasium in Olmtz.
He was remembered there as a mediocre student who nevertheless loved
mathematics and science. He graduated in 1876 and went to Leipzig for university
studies, where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy.
He moved to the University of Berlin in 1878 for further studies in mathematics, and
then to Vienna (under the supervision of Leo Knigsberger), where he completed his
doctorate in 1883, at the age of 24, with a dissertation on the theory of the calculus of
variations. He briefly held an academic post in Berlin, before returning again
to Vienna in 1884 in order to attend the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano (1838 1917), which had a great impact on Husserl and was instrumental in Husserl's decision
todedicate his life to philosophy.
In 1886, Husserl went to the University of Halle to study psychology and to obtain his
habilitation under Carl Stumpf (1848 - 1936), a former student of Brentano. There he
also converted to Christianity (Evangelical Lutheran) and was baptized. He
marriedMalvine Charlotte Steinschneider, a woman from the Prossnitz Jewish
community, who was also baptized before the wedding, and the couple were to
have three children. He remained at Halle teaching as an associate professor until
1901, and wrote his important early books, including the "Philosophie der
Arithmetik" ("Philosophy of Arithmetic") of 1891 and the "Logische
Untersuchungen" ("Logical Investigations") of 1901.
In 1901, Husserl joined the faculty at the University of Gttingen, where he taught for
16 years, and where he worked out thedefinitive formulations of his theory
of Phenomenology, which he presented in his 1913 "Ideen zu einer reinen
Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie" ("Ideas Pertaining to a
Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy"). From about 1905,
Husserl's students formed themselves into a group with a common style of life and
work, referring to Husserl as "the master". The onset of World War I disrupted the circle
of Husserl's younger colleagues, and when his son, Wolfgang, died at Verdun in 1916,
Husserl observed a year of mourning and kept silence professionally during that time.
In 1916, Husserl accepted an appointment to a professorship at Freiburg im Breisgau,
a position he retained until he retiredfrom teaching in 1928. Among his students at
Freiburg were Martin Heidegger, (who Husserl always looked on as his legitimate heir,

although their relationship cooled as Heidegger's path took him more in the direction
of Existentialism) and Rudolf Carnap(1891 - 1970), a leading figure in the Vienna
Circle and a prominent advocate of Logical Positivism.
During this time, he continued to work on manuscripts that would be published after
his death as volumes two and three of the"Ideen", and to refine his Phenomenology, as
well as on many other projects. After his retirement, he continued to make use of the
Freiburg library until denied by the anti-Jewish legislation passed by the National
Socialists (Nazis) in April 1933. The rise of the Nazis in Germany also caused Husserl
to definitively break with Heidegger.
Husserl died of pleurisy on 28 April 1938 (Good Friday) near Freiburg, Germany.

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Husserl developed his own individual style of working: all of his thoughts were
conceived in writing, and during his life he produced more than 40,000 pages.
Under the supervision of Carl Stumpf (1848 - 1936), a former student of Franz
Brentano (1838 - 1917), Husserl wrote "ber den Begriff der Zahl" ("On the
concept of Number") in 1887, which would serve as the base for his first major work,
the"Philosophie der Arithmetik" ("Philosophy of Arithmetic") of 1891. In these early
works, he tried to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy, his main goal
being to provide a sound foundation for mathematics.
He published his major philosophical works while at the University of Gttingen:
the "Logische Untersuchungen" ("Logical Investigations") in 1901 (produced after
an intensive study of the British Empiricists), and the first volume of the "Ideen zu einer
reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie" ("Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy") in
1913. It was in these works, particularly in the "Ideen", that he introduced the major
themes of his theory of Phenomenology, and Husserl himself believed that his work
represented the culmination of the whole of philosophy from Plato on, because, as
he saw it, he had discovered a description of reality which could not be denied.
Similar to Descartes, more than two centuries earlier, Husserl started from the
standpoint that, for each of us, there is only one thing which is indubitably certain,
namely our own conscious awareness. That, he concluded, must be the place to start
to build our knowledge of the world around us. However, our awareness and
consciousness must be awareness and consiousnessof something, and we cannot
distinguish from experience alone between states of consciousness and objects of
consciousness. Husserl agreed with Skeptics down the ages who have asserted that
we can never know whether objects of consciouness have an independent
existence separate from us, but he insisted that they do indubitably exist as objects of
consciousness for us and so can be investigated as such without making
any unwarranted assumptions about their independent existence. It was this general

idea of Husserl's that launched the influential school of philosophy known

asPhenomenology.
His fundamental methodological principle was what he called "phenomenological
reduction", essentially a kind of reflection on intellectual content. He asserted that
he could justifiably bracket the data of consciousness by suspending all
preconceptions about it, including (and especially) those drawn from what he called
the naturalistic standpoint. Thus, it really did not matter, in his philosophy, whether
an object under discussion really existed or not so long as he could at least conceive of
the object, and objects of pure imagination could be examined with the same
seriousness as data taken from theobjective world.
Husserl concluded, then, that consciousness has no life apart from
the objects or phenomena it considers. He called this
characteristic intentionality (or object-directedness), following Brentano, and it
embodied the idea that the human mind is the only thing is the whole universe that is
able to direct itself toward other things outside of itself. Husserl described a concept
he called intentional content, something in the mind which was sort of like a builtin mental description of external reality, and which allowed us to perceive and
remember aspects of objects in the real world outside.
Husserl continued to refine his Phenomenology throughout his life. His last three major
books were "Vorlesungen zur Phnomenologie des inneren
Zeitbewusstseins" ("Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner TimeConsciousness") published in 1928, "Formale und transzendentale
Logik" ("Formal and Transcendental Logic") published in 1929, and"Mditations
cartsiennes" ("Cartesian Meditations") published in 1931. Two more volumes of
his "Ideen", which he had written during his time at Freiburg im Breisgau were
published after his death, in 1952.
In his later work, Husserl moved further towards a kind of Idealism, a position which he
had initially had tried to overcome oravoid, declaring that mental and spiritual reality
possessed their own reality independent of any physical basis. At first, he espoused
a kind of Transcendental Idealism, similar to that of Kant and the German Idealists,
which asserted that ourexperience of things is about how they appear to
us (representations), and not about those things as they are in and of themselves, and
his view generally fell short of asserting that an objective world external to us does not
exist. However, as he continued to gradually refine his thought, he ultimately arrived at
an even more radical Idealist position, which essentially deniedthat external objects
existed at all outside of our consciousness.

Alfred North Whitehead (AKA A. N. Whitehead) (1861 - 1947) was

a Britishmathematician, logician and philosopher.

He is considered one of the founding figures of Analytic Philosophy, and he

contributed significantly to 20th Century Logic, especially the new symbolic type
ofLogic he developed in the epochal "Principia Mathematica", along with coauthorBertrand Russell.
He also developed a fresh approach to Metaphysics, which he originally
calledPhilosophy of Organism (or Organic Realism) and which has come to be
known as Process Philosophy.
In addition he made contributions to algebra, the foundations of
mathematics,physics, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Education. He
managed to combine a staggering complexity of thought with a literary but very
readablequality of writing.

Life
Whitehead was born on 15 February 1861 in Ramsgate, Kent, England. His father,
also named Alfred Whitehead, was an Anglican clergyman; his mother was Maria
Sarah Buckmaster. He was the youngest of four siblings, with two older brothers and
an older sister. His family was firmly anchored in the Church of England (his father and
uncles were vicars, while his brother would become Bishop of Madras).
He was educated at home by his father until he was 14, because his over-protective
parents thought that he was too delicate to go to school (in fact his health was quite
robust). From 1875, he attended Sherborne Independent School in Dorset, then
considered one of the best public schools in the country, and where his oldest brother
was a teacher. The syllabus was heavy on the classics, but Whitehead excelled in
sports and mathematics in particular, and he was Head Boy andCaptain of Games in
his final year.
He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1880, where he studied
mathematics. He was elected a Fellow in Mathematics in 1884 and then took up
an assistant lectureship to teach applied mathematics. He had also developed a keen
interest in physics, and his fellowship dissertation examined James Clerk Maxwell's
views on electricity and magnetism. He was promoted to a full lectureship at Trinity
in 1888, and took up additional teaching duties by accepting a teaching position
atGirton College.
At the end of 1890, he married Evelyn Wade, an active and outgoing Catholic Irish
woman brought up in France. They were to have a daughter and two sons (one of the
sons died in action during World War I). He had become interested in pure
mathematics and he started work on the "Treatise on Universal Algebra" in 1891,
with Evelyn's encouragement, just weeks after his marriage (the work would take him
seven years to complete, and was finally published in 1898).

Although his father was an Anglican vicar and he had been brought up as an Anglican,
he began to move towards the Roman Catholic Church (perhaps due to his wife's
influence), although in the end he chose neither and embraced Agnosticism around the
mid-1890s (partly in view of the rapid developments in science during that time).
Bertrand Russell had entered Cambridge in 1890 and, as examiner for the entrance
examinations, Whitehead had immediately spotted Russell's brilliance, and took him on
as his student and proteg. Near the end of 1900, after learning about the work done
on the foundations of mathematics by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe
Peano (1858 - 1932) at the 1900International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris,
Whitehead and Russell began to collaborate. They worked throughout the 1900s on
what was to become their groundbreaking "Principia Mathematica". Whitehead
even abandoned the second volume of his own work on algebra in order to
concentrate on the collaboration project, with Russell supplying most of the
philosophical expertise and Whitehead largely supplying the mathematics.
During the ten years or so that Russell and Whitehead spent on the "Principia", draft
after draft was begun and abandoned asRussell constantly re-thought his basic
premises. Eventually, Whitehead insisted on publication of the work, even if it was not
(and might never be) complete, although they were forced to publish it at their own
expense as no commercial publishers would touch it. The first volume of "Principia
Mathematica" was published in 1910, the second in 1912, and the third in 1913.
In 1903, he had been promoted to the new position of Senior Lecturer at Cambridge,
but he resigned his teaching position at Trinity College in 1910, partly to protest
the unfair dismissal of a colleague but also partly because of the slim prospects of his
ever attaining a professorship in mathematics there. He moved to London in the
summer of 1910 with no job to go to and, after four years without a proper position, he
became Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and
Technology in London in 1914.
During World War I, Russell spent a significant spell in prison for his pacifist
activities and, although Whitehead visited him in prison, he did not take
his pacifism seriously, and after the war the two seldom interacted, and Whitehead
contributed nothing to the 1925 second edition of "Principia Mathematica".
As the "Principia Mathematica" project neared completion, and exasperated
with Russell's constant re-thinking of his most basic principles, Whitehead turned his
attention to physics, the Philosophy of Science and the Philosophy of Education. He
articulated a rival doctrine to Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (which he
later published later as "The Principle of Relativity" in 1922), although his theory of
gravitation is now discredited. Likewise, his "Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Natural Knowledge" of 1919, while a more lasting work and a pioneering attempt to
synthesize the philosophical underpinnings of physics, has little influenced the
course of modern physics. His address "The Aims of Education" of 1916 pointedly

criticized the formalistic approach of modern British teachers who, he claimed, did not
care about the culture andself-education of their students.
In 1924, Whitehead (then 63) was invited by Henry Osborn Taylor (1856 - 1941) to
teach philosophy at Harvard University. Philosophy was a subject
that fascinated Whitehead but that he had also not previously studied in any depth
or taught, but he accepted the post and the Whiteheads were to spend the rest of their
lives in the United States. His "Science and the Modern World" of 1925, based on a
series of lectures given in the United States, served as an introduction to his
laterMetaphysics. His most important book, "Process and Reality" (1929), took this
theory to a level of even greater generality. He finally retired from teaching in 1937 at
the age of 74.
Whitehead received many honours throughout his career. He became a Fellow of
the Royal Society in 1903. He was appointed president of the Aristotelian
Society from 1922 to 1923. He was elected to the British Academy in 1931, and was
awarded theOrder of Merit in 1945. Many universities awarded him honorary degrees,
including Manchester, St. Andrews, Wisconsin, Harvard, Yale and Montreal.
Whitehead died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 30 December 1947, aged 86. There
was no funeral, and his body wascremated. His family carried out his instructions that
all of his papers be destroyed after his death, and there was no critical edition of his
writings until the 1978 edition of "Process and Reality" and the more
recent "Whitehead Research Project".

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Whitehead's intellectual life is often divided into three main periods. During his early
period at Cambridge (from 1884 to 1910) he worked mainly on mathematics and Logic.
His intermediate period in London (from 1910 to 1924) dealt largely with issues
ofPhilosophy of Science and Philosophy of Education. His later period at Harvard (from
1924 onwards) saw him work on moregeneral issues in philosophy, including the
development of a comprehensive metaphysical system which came to be known
asProcess Philosophy. Over the course of his lifetime, Whitehead published
roughly two dozen books.
The first period of Whitehead's activities, then, was devoted
to mathematics and Logic. It began with "Universal Algebra", published in 1898 after
seven years of work, continued with "Mathematical Concepts of the Material
World" (1905), and culminated in the monumental "Principia Mathematica" (1910 1913) written in collaboration with Bertrand Russell. Their work was an extension of
the Logicism of the late 19th Century German mathematician and logician Gottlob
Frege, which was based on the premise that mathematics itself is just
an extension of Logic, and therefore that some or all mathematics is reducibleto Logic.

The new concepts of Symbolic Logic introduced in the work turned the prevailing
assertion of Immanuel Kant (that the valid inferences of Logic followed from
the structural features of judgements) on its head. Their new Logic was
much broader in scope than traditional Aristotelian Logic, and
even contained classical Logic within it, albeit as a minor part. It resembled more
amathematical calculus and dealt with the relations of symbols to each other.
In his second period, Whitehead was preoccupied with a Philosophy of
Science without metaphysical exposition, and his work included "An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge" (1919), "The Concept of
Nature" (1920), "The Principle of Relativity" (1922) and "Science and the Modern
World" (1925). The latter mentioned the idea of a metaphysical synthesis of existence,
but did not yet attempt it.
The genesis of Whitehead's Process Philosophy during this third period may be
attributed to the shocking collapse ofNewtonian physics in the aftermath of Albert
Einstein's work. His speculative metaphysical views started to emerge with his
1920 "The Concept of Nature" and expanded in his 1925 "Science and the Modern
World". His 1927 Gifford Lectures at theUniversity of Edinburgh were published in
1929 as "Process and Reality", the book that founded Process Philosophy as a major
contribution to Western Metaphysics. The main tenets were summarized in his last and
most accessible work, "The Adventures of Ideas" (1933).
Whitehead firmly believed that the sharp division between nature and mind,
established by Descartes, had "poisoned all subsequent philosophy", and held that in
reality "we cannot determine with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the
body ends". He deemed human experience to be "an act of self-origination including
the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region, located within the
body, but not necessarily persisting in any fixed coordination within a definitepart of
the brain". Upon this concept of human experience, Whitehead founded his new
metaphysical "philosophy of the organism", his cosmology, his defense
of speculative reason, his ideas on the process of nature and his rational approach
to God.
In his Philosophy of Organism or Organic Realism, now usually known as Process
Philosophy, he posited subjective formsto complement Plato's eternal
objects (or Forms). The theory identified metaphysical reality
with change and dynamism, and held that change in not illusory or
purely accidental to the substance, but rather the very cornerstone of reality or Being.
His view of God, as the source of the universe, was therefore
as growing and changing, just as the entire universe is in constant flow and change
(essentially a kind of Theism, although his God differs essentially from the revealed
God of Abrahamic religion). Later process philosophers, including Charles
Hartshorne (1897 - 2000), John B. Cobb Jr. (1925 - ) and David Ray Griffin (1939 - ),
developed the theory further into a full-blown Process Theology.
Whitehead's rejection of mind-body Dualismwas similar to elements in Buddhism,

although many Christians and Jews have found Process Theology a fruitful way of
understanding God and the universe.
Whitehead believed that "there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths". His
political views sometimes appear to be very close to Libertarianism, although he never
used the label, and many Whitehead scholars have read his work as providing a
philosophical foundation for the Social Liberalism of the New Liberal of the first half of
the 20th Century.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (3rd Earl Russell) (AKA Sir Bertrand Russell)
(1872 - 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician and historian.
He is generally credited with being one of the founders of Analytic Philosophy,
and almost all the various Analytic movements throughout the 20th Century
(particularly Logicism, Logical Positivism and Ordinary Language Philosophy) owe
something to Russell. His major works, such as his essay "On Denoting" and the
huge "Principia Mathematica" (co-author with Alfred North Whitehead), have had a
considerable influence on mathematics (especially set theory), linguistics and all
areas of philosophy.
He was a prominent atheist, pacifist and anti-war activist, and championed free
trade between nations and anti-imperialism. He was a prolific writer on many
subjects (from his adolescent years, he wrote about 3,000 words a day, with relatively
few corrections), and was a great popularizer of philosophy.

Life
Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at the Russell family seat at "Ravenscroft" in the
village of Trellech in Monmouthshire, southeast Wales, into an aristocratic family. The
Russell family had been prominent in Britain for several centuries, since Tudor times,
and had established themselves as one of Britain's leading Whig (Liberal) families. His
father was John Russell, Viscount Amberley, (son of John Russell, 1st Earl
Russell, who had twice served as British Prime Minister in the 1840s and 1860s), a
confirmed Atheist and a rather scandalous (for the time) freethinker in matters of birth
control and open marriage. His mother was Katherine Louisa, the daughter of
the 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley, who carried on an open affair with their children's
tutor. He had two siblings, Frank (nearly seven years older) and Rachel (four years
older). John Stuart Mill, the great Utilitarianphilosopher, was Russell's godfather and,
although Mill died the year after his birth, Russell was influenced by his work.
In 1874, when Russell was just two years old, his mother died of diphtheria, followed
shortly by his sister Rachel and, less than two years later, his father also died of
bronchitis following a long period of depression. Bertrand and his brother Frank were
placed in the care of their staunchly Victorian grandparents, who lived at Pembroke

Lodge in Richmond Park near London. Just two more years later, his grandfather also
died, and the Countess Russell was therefore the dominant family figure for the rest of
Russell's childhood and youth. Although she was from a conservative Scottish
Presbyterian family (and successfully overturned a provision in Russell's father's will
that the children be raised as Agnostics), she held progressive views in other areas,
and her influence on Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for
principle remained with him throughout his life.
His brother Frank reacted to the atmosphere of frequent prayer, emotional repression and
formality with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings. Russell's
adolescence was, however, very lonely and he often contemplated suicide (he once remarked
that only the wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide). He was educated at home
by a series of tutors, and he spent countless hours in his grandfather's library. His brother
Frank introduced him as a boy to the work of the Greek mathematician Euclid, which
transformed Russell's life.
In 1890, Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematics Tripos at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he became acquainted with the younger G. E. Moore and
came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to
theCambridge Apostles (Cambridge's elite intellectual secret society). He
quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating with a B.A. in
mathematics in 1893 and adding a fellowship in philosophy in 1895. He fell in love
with the puritanical, high-minded American Quaker Alys Pearsall
Smith and married her (against his grandmother's wishes) towards the end of 1894.
His first published work was a political study, "German Social Democracy", in 1896
and he was soon involved with various groups of social reformers and leftwing Fabian campaigners. His first mathematical book, "An Essay on the
Foundations of Geometry", followed close behind in 1897. In 1903, he wrote his
important "The Principles of Mathematics" and, in 1905, the essay "On
Denoting" (considered one of the most significant and influential philosophical
essays of the 20th Century) was published in the philosophical journal "Mind". He
became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908.
Soon after the beginning of the new century, though, Russell and Whitehead began
working on their groundbreaking masterwork, the "Principia Mathematica", an attempt
to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference
rules in symbolic logic. It became their abiding passion, almost to the exclusion of all
else, and Russell and Alys even moved in with the Whiteheads in order to expedite the
work (although Russell's own marriage suffered as he became infatuated
withWhitehead's young wife, Evelyn). The first of three volumes of the "Principia
Mathematica" was published in 1910, with the second and third volumes following in
1912 and 1913, and, despite some understandable bewilderment over the dense and
complex tract, Russell soon became world famous in his field.

Russell's marriage to Alys remained something of a hollow shell, however, until they
finally divorced in 1921, after a lengthy period of separation. Throughout this period,
Russell had passionate, and often simultaneous, affairs with a number of high society
women, including Lady Ottoline Morrell and the actress Lady Constance Malleson.
In 1911, Russell became acquainted with the young Austrian engineering
student Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he viewed as agenius and as a successor who
would continue his work on Logic. He devoted many hours to dealing with Wittgenstein's
variousphobias and his frequent bouts of despair, but Russell continued to
be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, even as it began to
diverge more and more from his own views, including the later publication
of Wittgenstein's masterwork "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" in 1922.
During World War I, Russell engaged in pacifist activities, which resulted in his
dismissal from Trinity College following a conviction in 1916 and, in 1918, six months'
imprisonment in Brixton prison. In 1920, Russell travelled to Russia as part of an
official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of
the Russian Revolution, during which he metVladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924),
although his experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the Revolution.
He subsequently lectured for a year in Beijing, China, accompanied by his lover Dora
Black, at one point becoming gravely ill withpneumonia (eliciting incorrect reports of
his death in the Japanese press).
On the couple's return to England in 1921, Dora was six months pregnant, and Russell
arranged a hasty divorce from Alys,marrying Dora six days after the divorce was
finalised. They had two children, John Conrad Russell (born 1921) andKatharine
Jane Russell (born 1923). Russell supported himself during this time by
writing popular books explaining matters ofphysics, Ethics and education to the
layman. He also founded (together with Dora) the experimental Beacon Hill School in
1927, and after he left the school in 1932, Dora continued it until 1943.
Russell separated from, and finally divorced, Dora in 1932 (after she had had two
children with an American journalist, Griffin Barry). He married his third wife, an
Oxford undergraduate (who had also been his children's governess since the summer of
1930) named Patricia ("Peter") Spence. They had a son, Conrad Sebastian Robert
Russell, who later became a prominent historian and one of the leading figures in
the Liberal Democrat party.
After the World War II, Russell moved to the United States, teaching at the University
of Chicago and then the University of California, Los Angeles. He was appointed
professor at the City College of New York in 1940 but the appointment was annulled
by a court judgment after a public outcry over his opinions and morals. He joined
the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of
philosophy. These lectures would form the basis of his book, "A History of Western
Philosophy" (1945), a great commercial success which provided him with a steady
income for the remainder of his life.

He returned to Britain in 1944 and rejoined the faculty of Trinity College. He was
now world famous, even outside of academic circles, and frequently either the subject
or author of magazine and newspaper articles, as well as a regular participant in many
BBC radio broadcasts. In 1949, he was awarded the Order of Merit and, in 1950,
the Nobel Prize for Literature (at least partly on the merit of his "A History of
Western Philosophy"). In 1952, Russell divorced his third wife, and soon after the
divorce married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, whom he had known since 1925.
Edith remained with him until his death, and by all accounts their marriage was
a happy, close and loving one.
Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in various political causes (primarily
related to nuclear disarmament, opposition to the Vietnam War and Israeli
aggression in the Middle East), in company with several other prominent intellectuals
of the time, and became something of a hero among many of the youthful members of
the New Left. He published his three-volumeautobiography in 1967, 1968 and 1969,
and, although frail, he remained lucid and clear thinking up to the day of his death.
Russell died of influenza on 2 February 1970, aged 97, after suddenly falling ill while
reading at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales. He
was cremated at Colwyn Bay and, in accordance with his wishes, there was no
religious ceremony. His ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains later that
year.

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At the beginning of the 20th Century, Russell along with G. E. Moore and Alfred North
Whitehead, was largely responsible for the British "revolt" against the
dominant Idealism of G. W. F. Hegel. They strove to eliminate what they saw
as meaningless andincoherent assertions in philosophy and
sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by
breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest grammatical
components. Russell, in particular, saw formal Logicand science as the principal tools
of the philosopher, and he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of Metaphysics,
adopting William of Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities
(Occam's Razor) as a central part of the method of analysis.
Russell was particularly critical of the doctrine of internal relations (the idea
that everything has some relation, however distant, to everything else, so that in order
to know any particular thing, we must know all of its relations), a doctrine he ascribed
to the Absolute Idealism of G. W. F. Hegel and the Pragmatism of C. S. Peirce. Russell
argued that this would make space, time, science and the concept of number not fully
intelligible.
Russell had great influence on modern mathematical Logic. His first mathematical
book, "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry" (1897), was heavily influenced
by Immanuel Kant, but he soon rejected it completely when he realized that it would

have made Albert Einstein's schema of space-time (which he understood to be

superior to his own system) impossible.
As a young man, he became very interested in the definition of number (studying the
work of George Boole, Georg Cantorand Augustus De Morgan), and
followed Gottlob Frege in taking a logicist approach in which Logic was in turn based
upon mathematical set theory. In fact, Russell pursued a parallel course to Frege to
some extent, and spent several years working on ideas that Frege had, unbeknown to
Russell, already addressed. It was only later that Russell became responsible for
bringing the largely unknown Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world.
It was with his 1903 work, "The Principles of Mathematics", though, that Russell
finally superceded Frege's work. He identified what has come to be known as Russell's
Paradox to show that Frege's naive set theory led to a contradiction. The paradox can
be stated as the set of things, x, that are such that x is not a member of x, and is
sometimes explained by the simplistic (but more easily understood) example, "If a
barber shaves all and only those men in the village who do not shave themselves,does
he shave himself?". When he found out about this
breakthrough, Frege completely abandoned his Logicism.
Russell however, continued to defend Logicism (the view that mathematics is in some
important sense reducible to Logic) and, along with his former teacher, Alfred North
Whitehead, wrote the monumental three-volume "Principia Mathematica" (the first
volume, published in 1910, is largely ascribed to Russell). During the ten years or so
that Russell and Whitehead spent on the "Principia", draft after draft was begun and
abandoned as Russell constantly re-thought his basic premises.
Eventually,Whitehead insisted on publication of the work, even if it was not (and might
never be) complete, although they were forced to publish it at their own expense as no
commercial publishers would touch it. Perhaps more than any other single work, it
established the specialty of mathematical or symbolic logic, and it established Russell's
name in the international mathematical and philosophical community. Influential as it
was, though, the work fell prey to the 1931 Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt
Gdel (1906 - 1978) which pointed out the inherent limitations of all but the most
trivial formal systems for arithmetic of mathematical interest.
So, it was only with the effective abandonment of the Principia project, by which time
Russell was nearly 40, that he turned away from Logic and towards other aspects of
philosophy, where he was to prove himself almost as influential.
Perhaps more than anyone before him, Russell made language (or, more specifically,
how we use language), a central part of philosophy. Philosophers such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein and the practitioners of Ordinary Language Philosophy were to a large
extent amplifying or responding to Russell's earlier ideas (often using many of
the techniques that Russell himself originally developed).

His most significant contribution to Philosophy of Language is his theory of

descriptions, which he presented in his seminal essay, "On Denoting" (1905). The
theory is often illustrated using the phrase "the present King of France" (when France
has no king), and Russell's solution was basically to analyze not the term alone but
the entire proposition that contained a definite description, and then allow the
definite descriptions to be broken apart and treated separately from the predication
that is the obvious content of the entire proposition.
Russell's most systematic treatment of philosophical analysis was what he
called Logical Atomism, developed in a set of lectures in 1918. He set forth his
concept of an ideal, isomorphic language that would mirror the world, whereby our
knowledge could be reduced to terms of atomic propositions and their truthfunctional compounds. He believed that the world consists of a plurality of logically
independent facts, and that our knowledge depends on the data of our direct
experience of them. Thus, every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring
directly to objects with which we are acquainted (or they must be defined by other
terms referring to objects with which we are acquainted), a kind of radical Empiricism.
In time, he came todoubt the value of this theory, and was particularly troubled by the
required assumption of isomorphism (a one-to-one relationbetween two sets, which
preserves the relations existing between elements in its domain).
In Epistemology, he distinguished between two ways in which we can be familiar with
objects, "knowledge by acquaintance"(our own sense data, momentary perceptions
of colours, sounds, etc) and "knowledge by description" (everything else, including
the physical objects themselves, which can only be inferred or reasoned to and not
known directly). In his later philosophy, however, Russell subscribed to a kind of neutral
monism (similar to that held by William James and first formulated by Baruch Spinoza)
which maintained that the distinctions between the material and mental worlds were
really arbitrary, and that both could be reduced to neutral properties.
Russell remained throughout his life, though, an out-and-out empiricist, in the tradition
of Locke and Hume, and he always maintained that the scientific method - knowledge
derived from empirical research verified through repeated testing - was the
appropriate method of analysis (Scientism), although he believed that science (and
philosophy, for that matter) could only reachtentative and piecemeal answers, and that
attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. However, the very fact that he made
science a central part of his method was instrumental in making the Philosophy of
Science a full-blooded separate branch of philosophy, and he greatly influenced both
the verificationists in the Logical Positivism movement as well as thefalsificationists.
Although Russell wrote on Ethics, being greatly influenced by the Ethical NonNaturalism of G. E. Moore's "Principia Ethica", he did not believe that Ethics was
really a bona fide part of philosophy. In time, however, he abandoned any belief
in objective moral values and came to prefer a view closer to the Ethical
Subjectivism of David Hume.

For most of his life Russell maintained religion (as well as other systematic
ideologies such as Communism) to be little more than superstition, and remained a
high profile Atheist (although he did accept the ontological argument for the existence
of God for a time during his undergraduate years). He was careful, however, to
distinguish between his Atheism as regards certain types of god concepts, and
his Agnosticism regarding some other types of superhuman intelligence. He believed
that, despite any positive effects it might have, religion was largely harmful to people,
serving to impede knowledge, foster fear anddependency, and cause much of
the war, oppression and misery that have beset the world.
Rusesell had a good ear for a well-turned aphorism and among his many quotable
quotes are:

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without
government.

I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching
for evidence which could support this.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will
allow a solution.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by

absurdities.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for

supposing it is true.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth
stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because
he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

George Edward Moore (usually known as G. E. Moore) (1873 - 1958) was a 20th
Century English philosopher. He was, along with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand
Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the founders of Analytic Philosophy (one of
the two main traditions in 20th Century philosophy, the other being Continental
Philosophy).
He is perhaps best known today for his defence of the ethical doctrine of Ethical NonNaturalism, his emphasis on common sense in Metaphysics (as opposed to
the Absolute Idealism that dominated British philosophical method at the time),
and Moore's Paradox.
For a time in the 1920s and 1930s, he was the pre-eminent British philospher,
working in the most important centre of philosophy in the world at that
time, Cambridge University. Although largely unknown today outside of academic
philosophy, he was nevertheless aninfluential thinker, known for his clear,
circumspect writing style, and for his methodicaland patient approach to
philosophical problems.

Life
Moore was born on 4 November 1873, one of seven children of Daniel and Henrietta
Moore, and grew up in the Upper Norwood district of South London. His early
education came at the hands of his parents, his father teaching him reading, writing,
and music (he was a more-than-competent pianist and composer), and his mother
teaching him French. At the age of eight he was enrolled at Dulwich College, where he
studied mainly Greek and Latin, but also French, German and mathematics.
In 1892, he went to Trintity College Cambridge where he initially studied Classics.
Early in his time at Cambridge he becameclose friends with some of
the writers and intellectuals who would go on to form the Bloomsbury Group,
including Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes. He soon made
the acquaintance of Bertrand Russell, who was two years ahead of him, and J. M. E.
McTaggart (1866 - 1925), who was then a charismatic young Philosophy Fellow. He
followed them into the study of Philosophy, and he graduated in Classics and
Philosophy in 1896. In 1898, he earned a "Prize" Fellowshipwhich enabled him
to continue to study philosophy at Trinity along with Russell and McTaggart.
Beginning around 1897, Moore began to participate in various philosophical societies
(such as the Aristotelian Society and theMoral Sciences Club) and to publish his
early work (many of his best known and most influential works date from this early
period). It was also during this time that Moore instigated the momentous break from
the then dominant philosophy of Absolute Idealism that would prove to be the first
step toward the rise of Analytic Philosophy.

Moore's Fellowship ended in 1904, and he spent a few years away from Cambridge,
living in Edinburgh and Richmond, Surrey, and working independently on various
philosophical projects. However, he returned to Cambridge in 1911 to take up
alectureship position in Moral Science, and he lived there (other than an extended visit
to the United States from 1940 to 1944 as a visiting professor) for the rest of his life.
In 1916, at the age of 43, he married Dorothy Ely, who had been his student, and the
couple had two sons, Nicholas (born in 1918) and Timothy (born in 1922). He earned
a Litt.D. in 1913, and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1918.
In 1921, he became the editor of "Mind", the leading British philosophy journal, and in
1925, he became Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at Cambridge (which soon
became the most important centre of philosophy in the world), confirming his position
as one of the most highly-respected British philosophers of the time. He retired as
Professor in 1939 (to be succeeded by Wittgenstein) and he retired as editor
of "Mind" in 1947, marking the end of his pre-eminence (and the end of the golden
ageof Cambridge philosophy). In 1951, he was awarded the British Order of Merit.
Moore died in Cambridge on 24 October 1958, and he was buried in St. Giles
churchyard.

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Moore's "Principia Ethica", first published in 1903, has become one of the standard
texts of modern Ethics. It was one of themain inspirations for the
movement against Ethical Naturalism (and in favour of Ethical Non-Naturalism) and is
partly responsible for the 20th Century concern with Meta-Ethics (the attempt to define
the essential meaning and nature of ethical problems).
In the "Principia Ethica", Moore argued that most other philosophers working
in Ethics made a mistake he called the"Naturalistic Fallacy" when they tried
to prove an ethical claim by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one
or more natural properties (e.g. "pleasant", "more evolved", "desired", etc). According
to Moore, the term "good" (in the sense ofintrinsic value) is in fact indefinable,
because it names a simple, non-natural property, and cannot be analyzed in terms
ofany other property. His argument (often called the Open Question Argument) is that
the question "What is good?" is an openone, because "good" cannot be called "blue" or
"rough" or "smooth" or "smelly": it lacks natural properties. Thus, when aHedonist, for
example, claims "Anything that is pleasant is also good", it is always possible
to counter with "That thing is pleasant, but is it good?".
Moore further argued that, once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy had
been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness could only be settled by appeal to what
he called "moral intuitions" (self-evident propositions which recommend themselves
to moral reflection, but which are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof), a
view often described as Ethical Intuitionism. However, as a Consequentialist, Moore

distinguished his view from those of Deontological Intuitionists, who held that "intuitions"
could determine questions about what actions are right or required by duty. He argued
that "duties" and moral rules could be determined by investigating the effects of
particular actions or kinds of actions, and so were matters for empirical
investigation rather than direct objects of intuition.
In the "Principia Ethica", and to a greater extent in his later book, the "Ethics" of
1912, Moore promoted a view that has come to be called Ideal Utilitarianism. He
argued that there is no important difference in meaning between concepts like duty
right and virtue on the one hand, and expedient or useful on the other. However,
whereas classic Utilitarianism is hedonistic(in that it defines "good" in terms of
"pleasure"), Moores Utilitarianism is pluralistic, allowing that many different kinds of
objects can have intrinsic value (e.g. the pleasures of personal
relationships, aesthetic enjoyment, etc). Thus, actions should be ordered not to the
greatest happiness or pleasure, but to those states of affairs possessing the highest
degree of good, and directed in this way toward some ideal state.
One of the most important parts of Moore's philosophical development was his break
from Idealism, particularly the Absolute Idealism that dominated British Metaphysics at
the time (and which he himself had inherited from earliest philosophical mentor,J. M. E.
McTaggart), and his defence of what he regarded as a "common sense" form
of Realism or Pluralism. In his 1925 essay "A Defence of Common Sense", he argued
against Idealism and Skepticism toward the external world on the grounds that they
could not give reasons to accept their metaphysical premises that were more
plausible than the reasons we have to accept the common sense claims about our
knowledge of the world. His 1939 essay "Proof of an External World" gave an
example of this, claiming that, by pointing out first one hand and then another, he
could conclude that there are at least twoexternal objects in the world, and that
therefore an external world exists (an argument which deeply influenced Ludwig
Wittgenstein).
Moore is also remembered for what is now commonly called "Moore's Paradox", a
puzzle which also inspired a great deal of work by Wittgenstein. He drew attention to the
peculiar inconsistency involved in a sentence such as: "It will rain, but I don't believe
that it will", which seems impossible for anyone to consistently assert, but which
does not seem to contain any actuallogical contradiction.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) was an Austrian philosopher and
logician, and has come to be considered one of the 20th Century's most important
philosophers, if not the most important.
Both his early and later work (which are entirely different and incompatible, even
though both focus mainly on the valid and invalid uses of language) have beenmajor
influences in the development of Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Language.

The Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle in particular were greatly influenced by
his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (although Wittgenstein alleged that they
had fundamentally misunderstood much of it). The ideas in his later"Philosophical
Investigations" ushered in the era of Ordinary Language Philosophy and brought
language to the forefront of modern philosophy.
His significance has been primarily in the areas of Logic, Metaphysics,Epistemology,
the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Language and thePhilosophy of
Mathematics. However, his influence has extended beyond what is normally
considered philosophy, and may be found in various areas of the social
sciences (including social therapy, psychology, psychotherapy and anthropology) and
the arts.

Life
Wittgenstein (pronounced VIT-gun-shtine) was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna,
Austria, into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. His father was Karl Wittgenstein, an industrialist from a Protestant family
converted from Judaism, who went on to make a fortune in iron and steel; his mother
was Leopoldine Kalmus, from a mixed Jewish-Catholic family. He was the youngest
of eight children, all of whom were baptized as Roman Catholic despite the religious
views of their parents' families.
His father was a leading patron of the arts, especially music, and the Wittgenstein
house often hosted important musicians such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav
Mahler. Both his parents were very musical, and all their children were artistically and
intellectually educated. Ludwig's older brother, Paul Wittgenstein, went on to become a
world-famous concert pianist (even after losing his right arm in World War I), and
Ludwig himself had perfect pitch and played the clarinet throughout his life. His family
were also intensely self-critical to the point of depression and suicidal
tendencies (three of his four brothers committed suicide).
Wittgenstein was educated at home until 1903, after which he began three years of
schooling at the Realschule in Linz (Adolf Hitler was also a student there at the same
time, although it is not known whether the two knew each other). Wittgenstein
apparently spoke an unusually pure high German, albeit with a slight stutter, and
insisted on using the formal form of addresseven with his classmates. He wore
very elegant clothes, and was highly sensitive and extremely unsociable.
In 1906, he began studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, and in 1908 he went
to Victoria University, Manchester to study for his post-graduate degree
in engineering and aeronautics. It was during his research in Manchester that he
became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading
the "Principia Mathematica" of Alfred North Whiteheadand Bertrand Russell and
the "Grundgesetze der Arithmetik" of Gottlob Frege. In 1911, he visited and
corresponded with Frege, who advised him to study under Russell in Cambridge. Later

in 1911, Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms inTrinity College,

Cambridge and was soon attending his lectures and discussing mathematics and
philosophy with him at great length.
He made a great impression on both Russell and G. E. Moore and, as he started to
work on the foundations of Logic and mathematical Logic, Russell began to see
Wittgenstein as a possible successor who would carry on his work. During his time at
Cambridge, Wittgenstein's other major interests were music,
the cinema and travelling, often in the company of his great friend, David Pinsent. He
was invited to join the Cambridge Apostles (the elite Cambridge secret society to
which Russell andMoore had both belonged as students). In 1913, he inherited a large
fortune when his father died, donating some of it, initially anonymously, to Austrian
artists and writers.
Although he was invigorated by his study at Cambridge, Wittgenstein came to feel that
he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded
by other academics, and in 1913 he retreated to the relative solitude of the remote
village of Skjolden, Norway. This isolation allowed him to devote himself entirely to
his work, and he later saw this period as one of the
most passionate and productive times of his life. He wrote an unpublished book
entitled "Logik", a ground-breaking work in the foundations of Logic, which was the
immediate predecessor and source of much of the later "Logisch-Philosophische
Abhandlung" ("Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus").
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 took him rather by surprise (living in seclusion as
he was), but he volunteered for theAustro-Hungarian army, serving on the Russian
front and in northern Italy. He won several medals for bravery and, towards the end
of 1918, he was he was captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Italian army
at Cassino in central Italy. It was in this Italian prison that he completed his magnum
opus, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".
When he heard the news that his friend, David Pinsent, had been killed in action,
Wittgenstein became inconsolable andalmost suicidal. However, with the help of his
Cambridge friends, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946),
Wittgenstein managed to get access to books and to prepare the manuscript of
the "Tractatus", and send it back to England for translation and
publication. Russell had recognized it as a work of supreme philosophical importance
and wrote an introductionfor it (lending the book his reputation as one of
the foremost philosophers in the world), but Wittgenstein argued with Russellover it,
and eventually it was not published until 1821 in German and 1922 in translation.
After the War, Wittgenstein was a profoundly changed man. Although a
militant atheist during his stint at Cambridge, he became something of a born-again
evangelist of sorts after reading "The Gospel in Brief" by Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910),
which he happened to pick up during the War. In 1919, he gave away his portion of the
inherited family fortune to his sistersHelene and Hermine and his brother Paul (he felt

that giving money to the poor could only corrupt them further, whereas the rich would
not be harmed by it) and began to follow a new ascetic life.
Convinced that his "Tractatus" had solved all the problems of philosophy and that the
had precipitated the end of philosophy, he left philosophy entirely and returned to
Austria to train as a primary school teacher. He had somewhat unrealistic
expectations of the rural children he taught, and little patience with those who had no
aptitude for mathematics. His severe disciplinary methods (often involving corporal
punishment, not unusual at the time) and intense and exacting teaching
methods eventually culminated in 1926 in the collapse of an eleven year old boy
whom Wittgenstein had struck on the head. Although he was cleared of misconduct,
he resigned his position and returned to Vienna, feeling that he had failed as a school
teacher.
He worked for a time as a gardener's assistant in a monastery near Vienna, but was
advised that he would not find what he sought in monastic life. His spirits were
restored to some extent by his work on the architectural designs of a modernist house
for his sister Margaret. Towards the end of that project, he was contacted by Moritz
Schlick (1882 - 1936), a leading figure in the newly-formed Vienna Circle and
the Logical Positivism movement, who was tremendously interested in
Wittgenstein's"Tractatus". Although he found the meetings he attended
extremely frustrating, (believing that Schlick and his colleagues had
fundamentally misunderstood his work), the intellectual stimulus did have the effect of
drawing him back into philosophy, and over the course of his conversations with
the Vienna Circle, and especially with the young Frank P. Ramsey (1903 - 1930),
Wittgenstein began to think that there might be some "grave mistakes" in his work.
In 1929, urged by Ramsey and others, he decided to return to Cambridge (using
the "Tractatus" as his doctoral thesis), and was rather disconcerted to find that he
was now considered a philosophical genius and one of the most famed philosophers
in the world. He was duly appointed as a lecturer and was made a Fellow of Trinity
College. In 1931, he broke off his engagement with Marguerite Respinger (a young
Swiss woman he had met as a friend of the family), and most of his romantic
attachments were to young men. In 1934, he conceived the idea of emigrating to
the Soviet Union with his long-time friendFrancis Skinner (1912 - 1941). Although they
were offered teaching positions there in 1935, they preferred to take up manual
work, but returned disillusioned after only three weeks.
From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, where he worked on his ongoing "Philosophische Untersuchungen"("Philosophical Investigations"), in which
he developed a completely new philosophy, quite different from his earlier work, even
though nothing was actually published until after his death in 1951. In 1938, he
travelled to Ireland to visit his friendMaurice Drury who was training as a doctor, and
also at the invitation of the Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera, who was himself an
amateur mathematician. While he was in Ireland, however, Germany annexed Austria in
the Anschluss, and Wittgenstein became technically a citizen of the enlarged

Germany and a Jew under its racial laws. The family tried to have
themselves reclassified as Aryan/Jewish crossbreeds, using their considerable fortune
as a bargaining tool, which they eventually achieved in 1939. By that time, however,
Wittgenstein had been appointed to the chair in Philosophy at Cambridge (after G. E.
Moore's resignation in 1939), and had acquired British citizenship soon afterwards.
During World War II, he left Cambridge and volunteered as a hospital porter in Guy's
Hospital in London, and as a laboratory assistant in the Royal Victoria
Infirmary in Newcastle (arranged by his friend John Ryle, brother of the
philosopher Gilbert Ryle). After the War, he returned to teach at Cambridge, although
he had never really liked the intellectual atmosphere there (he often encouraged his
students to find work outside of academic philosophy, and found teaching an
increasing burden).
Wittgenstein resigned his position at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing,
spending two years living at a guesthouse in East Wicklow, Ireland, and then in the
rural isolation of the west coast of Ireland. In 1949, he was diagnosed as
havingprostate cancer, by which time he had written most of the material that would be
published after his death as "Philosophische Untersuchungen" ("Philosophical
Investigations"), arguably his most important work (the "Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus"notwithstanding) and perhaps the most influential of all post-War
works of philosophy.
He spent the last two years of his life working in Vienna, the United
States, Oxford and Cambridge and, up until two days before his death, he was
working on new material in collaboration with his former student Norman
Malcolm (1911 - 1990), which was published posthumously as "On Certainty".
Wittgenstein died from prostate cancer at the home of his Cambridge doctor, Edward
Vaughan Bevan, on 29 April 1951. Hislast words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful
life". Some thirty thousand pages of incomplete manuscripts were found after his
death.

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Perhaps more than any other major philosopher, Wittgenstein's work falls into two very
distinct peiods: an early period, culminating in the publication of his groundbreaking "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" ("Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus") in 1921; and a later period of largely unrelated (and indeed
incompatible) work, which was written over many years but not published until two years
after his death as "Philosophische Untersuchungen" ("Philosophical
Investigations").
His early work on the foundations of Logic and his philosophy in general were deeply
influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer andImmanuel Kant, as well as by the new
systems of Logic put forward by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. When his work

began take on an ethical and religious significance during World War I, his "Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus" gradually took shape, although it was still very much in line
with the general Logicist approach of the time as exemplified
by Russell andWhitehead's "Principia Mathematica". Due to various
personal difficulties and arguments, the "Tractatus" was not published until 1921,
and it remained the only philosophical book Wittgenstein published during his lifetime.
For a time, he believed that the work offered a definitive solution to all the problems of
philosophy.
The "Tractatus" attempted to define the limits of Logic in understanding the world. It
claimed that the world consists ofindependent atomic facts (existing states of affairs)
out of which larger facts are built, an idea that later became known asLogical
Atomism and was further developed by Bertrand Russell. Language too consists of
atomic (and then larger-scale)propositions that correspond to the facts of the world
by sharing the same "logical form".
The key to understanding the "Tractatus" is Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning.
He drew an analogy between the way that pictures represent the world and the way
that language (and sentences it is made up of) represent reality and states of affairs,
and he asserted that thoughts, as expressed in language, "picture" the facts of the
world. Furthermore, the structure of language is determined by the structure of reality,
and we are able to talk about reality not just because we have words that stand for
things, but because the words within a sentence have a relationship to each
other that corresponds to the relationship things have to each other in the world.
Indeed, Wittgenstein claimed that, unless language mirrored reality in this way, it would
be impossible for sentences to have any meaning.
It should be stressed here that Wittgenstein was not referring to ordinary everyday
conversational language, but to the"elementary sentences" which undelie ordinary
language, and which can be distilled out of everyday language by analysis. He made
clear that the so-called logical constants ("not", "and", "or" and "if") were not part of the
picturing relationship, but were merely ways of stringing multiple pictures together or
operating on them. Thus, Wittgenstein claimed that we can analyze our thoughts and
sentences to "express" (in the sense of "show", not "say") their true logical form, but
those we cannot so analyze cannot be meaningfully discussed, and so should not
even be spoken of. He believed that the whole of philosophyessentially consists of no
more than this form of analysis, and that non-factual concepts such as those in the
fields of Ethics,Religion and Aesthetics were effectively unsayable and meaningless.
Some commentators have pointed out that the sentences of the "Tractatus" would
not qualify as meaningful according to itsown rigid criteria, and that Wittgenstein's
method in the book does not follow its own demands regarding the only strictly
correct philosophical method. Some have gone so far as to argue that the book is
actually deeply ironic in that it demonstrates the ultimate nonsensicality of any
sentence attempting to say something metaphysical. Either way, having originally
propounded this stance in the "Tractatus", Wittgenstein was to reject it in his

later "Philosophical Investigations". The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, it

should be noted, immediately seized on Proposition 7 of the book, "what we cannot
speak of, we must pass over in silence", even though Wittgenstein himself gave it a
rather different, and much moremystical, interpretation.
By the time of World War II, Wittgenstein's views on the foundations of Logic and of
mathematics had changed considerably, and he now denied that there
were any mathematical facts to be discovered, and denied that mathematical
statements could be "true" in any real sense. He argued that mathematical statements
simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols. He
further denied that a contradiction should count as a fatal flaw of a mathematical
system. His series of lectures on this and other topics were later documented in the
book, "Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics".
He renounced or revised much of his earlier work, and developed a completely new
philosophical method and a newunderstanding of language, culminating in his
second magnum opus, the "Philosophische Untersuchungen"("Philosophical
Investigations"). His earlier search for a perfect language had ended in stalemate,
and his claim that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" began to
appear too restrictive. He started working on a new line of thinking during his time in
Norway in 1936, and continued throughout his stay in rural Ireland towards the end of
life. The book waspublished posthumously in 1953, although in reality it is not
a systematic treatise like his "Tractatus" but rather a series of more or less
independent thoughts and lectures. Although brilliantly aphoristic in style, it is
nevertheless difficult reading, appearing at times almost as a more or less random
jumble of thoughts, and individal paragraphs may have little or no connection to those
preceding or succeeding. It too, however, came to be regarded as just as influential, and
its very different focus from his earlier work (largely
on language and psychology rather than than on logic and objective truth) is usually
referred to as "the late Wittgenstein".
In the "Philosophical Investigations", Wittgenstein moved away from the picture
analogy and towards a "tool" or "use"analogy. He claimed that words should be
thought of as tools and that, in most cases at least, the meaning of a word is just
its use in the language. Thus, competely contrary to the picture theory of meaning,
the structure of language determines what we think of as reality. Also, although a
picture can only give one representation of reality, a tool can have many different uses
(and so, therefore, can words, particularly when used in different circumstances or in
different types of conversation). He likened the various different meanings a word could
have to family resemblances, which can have common features, criss-crossing
simularities or overlapping relationships but nevertheless remain distinct and unique.
Although apparently banal and common-sensical, this idea was quite a radical one as it
militated against several long-held assumptions in philosophy: that words get their
meanings by standing for objects, that words get their meaning by being associated
with ideas in the mind, and that words represent some underlying trait or essence.

He also introduced another analogy, that of language as a kind of game, an activity

governed by pre-set rules over which we have no control, but which allow a certain
limited amount of latitude and interpretation. He suggested that language (and its
uses) was essentially a multiplicity of "language-games" within which the parts of
language function and have meaning. Manyconventional philosophical
problems (e.g. "What is truth?") therefore become simply meaningless wordplay or
"bewitchments" arising from philosophers' misuse of language. Although language
works relatively well as part of the fabric of life, once it is "forced" into a metaphysical
environment (where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual cluesare
absent), then problems arise.
Wittgenstein saw the role of philosophy as merely to describe (not to justify or provide a
foundation for) these language-games. He pointed out that philosophical
problems can be solved using logically perfect language, without the confusing and
muddying effects of everyday contexts, but cautioned that such language is sterile and
can do no actual useful work. Neither was it possible to step back and appraise a
language-game from a non-linguistic poiuit of view, as we are always opering withina
language-game. Much of the "Philosophical Investigations" consists of examples of
how philosophical confusion is generated and how, by a close examination of the
actual workings of everyday language, the first false steps towards philosophical
puzzlement can be avoided. He urged philosophers to bring words back from their
metaphysical to their everyday use", ushering in the era of Ordinary Language
Philosophy.
Along with later philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson in the
1950's and 1960's, Wittgenstein broadened the principle of semantic Holism even
further to arrive at the position that a sentence (and therefore a word)
has meaning only in the context of a whole language (not just a larger segment of
language).
Much controversy has been generated by the implications of Wittgenstein's languagegames theory for the possible existence of a "private language" (a language invented
by an individual to describe his own feelings and sensations in tems that no-one else
could understand). The controversy arises because many philosophers have assumed
that this must be the basic fundamental use of language, because our knowledge of,
and interactions with, the outside world must start with our inner experiences.
Wittgenstein, however, believed that this is not how language works, and that we use
words in conjunction with public criteria, behaviours and situations, so that we
can never in fact speak a private, or entirely personal, language. He points out that
therules which govern any language must have a social aspect and that the meanings
of words depend on the social context within which they are used (what he called
"forms of life").
Although the early Wittgenstein had completely dismissed out of hand all talk
of religion as meaningless nonsense, the later Wittgenstein was concerned to "get
inside" the religious language-game, to look at how words were used in a religious

context and to show that the religious language-game was completely different from
the scientific language-game. He formulated his own version of Fideism which argued
that religion is a self-contained, and primarily expressive, enterprise, governed by its
owninternal logic or grammar. He pointed out that religion is logically cut off from
other aspects of life; that religious discourse is essentially self-referential and does not
allow us to talk about reality; that religious beliefs can be understood only byreligious
believers; and that religion therefore cannot be criticized.
Wittgenstein has in recent years, become influential in areas quite outside of
philosophy, including literary criticism, the arts and aethsetics in general, the social
sciences (particuarly anthroplogy), political theory, etc.

Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) was a 20th Century German philosopher. He was
one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th Century, but also one
of themost controversial. His best known book, "Being and Time", although
notoriouslydifficult, is generally considered to be one of the most
important philosophical works of the 20th Century.
His outspoken early support for the Fascist Nazi regime in Germany has to some
extent obscured and tainted his significance, but his work has exercised a deep
influence on philosophy, theology and the humanities, and was key to the development
of Phenomenology, Existentialism, Deconstructionism, Post-Modernism,
and Continental Philosophy in general.

Life
Heidegger (pronounced HIE-de-ger) was born on 26 September 1889 in Messkirch in
rural southern Germany, to a poor Catholic family. He was the son of the sexton of the
village church, and was raised a Roman Catholic. Even as a child, he was clearly a
strong and charismatic personality, despite his physical frailty. In 1903, he went to the
high school in Konstanz, where the church supported him by a scholarship, and then
moved to the Jesuit seminary at Freiburg in 1906. His early introduction to philosophy
came with his reading of "On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to
Aristotle"by the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838 - 1917).
In 1909, after completing high school, he became a Jesuit novice, but was discharged
within a month for reasons of health. From 1909 to 1911, he started to
study theology at the University of Freiburg, but then broke off his training for the
priesthood and switched to studying philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences.
He completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, before joining the German
army briefly at the start of World War I, (he was released after two months, again due
tohealth reasons). While working as an unsalaried associate professor at the
University of Freiburg, teaching mostly courses

inAristotelianism and Scholastic philosophy, he earned his habilitation with a thesis on

the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus in 1916.
In 1916, he came to know personally the Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl who had
joined the Freiburg faculty, and who took the promising young Heidegger under his
wing. In 1917, he married Elfriede Petri, an attractive economics student and
Protestant with known anti-Semitic views, who would remain at his side for the rest of
his life, despite the very "open" nature of the marriage. In 1918, though, he was again
called up for military duty, and, although he managed to avoid front-line service for as
long as possible, he did serve as an army meteorologist near the western front during
the last three months of the war. Elfriede bore their first son Jrg in 1919; another
son, Hermann, was probably extramarital.
After the end of the War, in 1918, he broke definitively with Catholicism, and returned
to Freiburg as a (salaried) senior assistant to Husserl until 1923. He did not
approve of Husserl's later developments, however, and soon began to
radicallyreinterpret his Phenomenology. In 1923, he was elected to an extraordinary
professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg, although whenever he
could he made his way back to his "spiritual home" deep in the Black Forest, and he
maintained a simple rustic cabin there for the rest of his life. During his time at Marburg,
he had extramarital affairs with at least two of his students, Hannah Arendt (1906 1975) and Elisabeth Blochmann (1892 - 1972), both philosophers in their own right,
and both Jewish (Arendt was later to achieve world fame through her commentaries on
the evils of Nazism).
In 1927, he published "Sein und Zeit" ("Being and Time"), his first publication since
1916, which soon became recognized as a truly epoch-making work of 20th Century
philosophy. The book made Heidegger famous almost overnight and was widely read
by educated men and women throughout Germany. It earned him a full
professorship at Marburg and, soon after, on Husserl's retirement from teaching in
1928, the chair of philosophy at Freiburg University (which he accepted, in spite of
a counter-offerby Marburg). He remained at Freiburg for most of the rest of his life,
declining offers from other universities, including one from the prestigious University of
Berlin. Among his students at Freiburg were Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979), Ernst
Nolte (1923 - ) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995).
With Adolph Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Heidegger (who had previously shown little
interest in politics) joined the Nazi party, and was elected Rector of the University of
Freiburg (his inaugural address, the "Rektoratsrede", has become notorious). During
this period, he not only cooperated with the educational policies of the National
Socialist government, but also offered it his enthusiastic public support, helping
to legitimize the Nazi regime with his own worldwide prestige and influence. One of the
most prominent victims of his malicious, and often unfounded, denunciations was the
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Hermann Staudinger. Heidegger technically resigned his
position at Freiburg in 1934, and took a much less overtly political position thereafter,
although he remained a member of the academic faculty and he retained his Nazi

party membership until it was disbanded the end of World War II (despite some covert
criticism of Nazi ideology and even a period of time under the surveillance of the
Gestapo).
During the later 1930s and 1940s (sometimes referred to as "the turn"), his writings
became less systematic and often more obscure, and he developed a preoccupation
with the question of language, a fascination with poetry, a concern with modern
technology, as well as a new-found respect for the early Pre-Socratic Greek
philosophers. He himself always denied any "turn", arguing that it was simply a matter
of going yet more deeply into the same matters.
At the end of the War, Heidegger returned to Freiburg to face the accusations of the
French occupying force and the University's own denazification commission. He was
summarily dismissed from his philosophy chair because of alleged Nazi sympathies,
and forbidden from teaching in Germany from 1945 to 1951 by the French
Occupation Authority. Despite his apparent lack of remorse, the ban hit Heidegger
hard, and he spent some time in a sanatorium after a suicide attempt. When the ban
was lifted in 1951, he became Professor emeritus at Freiburg and taught
regularly until 1958, and then by invitation until 1967. With the support of some
unlikely allies, such as the Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, and,
perhaps most puzzling of all, his Jewish ex-lover Hannah Arendt, he was almost
completely rehabilitated as a major philosophical figure during Germany'sEra of
Reconstruction after the War, although he never spoke out or publicly apologized for
his war-time activities.
During the last three decades of his life, he continued to write and publish, although
there was little significant change in his underlying philosophy. He divided his time
between his home in Freiburg, his second study in Messkirch, and his isolated
mountain hut at Todtnauberg on the edge of the Black Forest, which he considered
the best environment in which to engage in philosophical thought.
Heidegger died on 26 May 1976, and was buried in the Messkirch cemetery.

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Heidegger's writings are notoriously difficult and idiosyncratic, indulging in

extended word play, employing his own spelling, vocabulary and syntax, and
inventing new words for complex concepts. This was partly because he was discussing
veryspecifically defined concepts (which he used in a very rigorous and consistent
way) but it does make reading and understanding his work very difficult.
"Sein und Zeit" ("Being and Time"), published in 1927, was his first significant
academic work, and is considered by most to be his
most important and influential work. It is a tour de force of philosophical reasoning,
and all but hammered home the last nail in the coffin of the
popular Phenomenology movement of his one-time teacher and mentor, Edmund

Husserl. Husserl was entirely convinced that he had discovered the undisputable
truth of how to approach philosophy, and it was this (essentiallyHusserl's and Descartes's before him - view of man as a subject confronted by objects) that
Heidegger reacted against.
Heidegger completely rejected the approach of most philosophers since Descartes, who
had been trying to prove the existence of the external world. More specifically, his
rejection of Phenomenology came when he considered specific concrete examples in
which the phenomenological subject-object relation appears to break down. One such
example was that of an expert carpenter hammering nails, where, when everything is
going well, the carpenter does not have to concentrate on the hammer or even the nail,
and the objects become essentially transparent (what Heidegger called "ready to
hand"). Similarly, when we enter a room, we turn the door knob, but this is such a basic
and habitual action that it does not even enter our consciousness.
Thus, it is only really when something goes wrong (e.g. the hammer is too heavy, the
door knob sticks) that we need to become rational, problem-solving beings. The
existence of hammers and door knobs only has any significance and only makes
any sense at all in the whole social context of wood, houses, construction, etc (what
Heidegger called "being in the world").
Heidegger's main concern was always ontology or the study of being and, in "Being
and Time", he asked the deceptively simple question "what is 'being'?", what is actually
meant by the verb 'to be'. His answer was to distinguish what it is for beings to be
beings ("Sein") from the existence of entities in general ("Seindes"), and
concentrating on the being for whom a description of experience might actually matter,
the being for whom "being" is a question, the being engaged in the world (Dasein").
He further argued that time and human existence were inextricably linked, and that we
as humans are alwayslooking ahead to the future. Thus, he argued, being is really just
a process of becoming, leading him to totally reject theAristotelian idea of a fixed
human essence.
Although Heidegger's initial analysis of humans as Dasein makes them sound rather
like zombie-like beings moulded by society and culture and merely reacting to events,
he then introduced the concept of authenticity. He made a sharp distinctionbetween
farmers and rural workers, whom he considered to have an instinctive grasp of their
own humanity, and city dwellers, who he described as leading inauthentic lives, out of
touch with their own individuality, which in turn causes anxiety. This anxiety is our
response to the apparently arbitrary cultural rules under which we, as Dasein,
become accustomed to living out our lives, and Heidegger says that there are two
responses we can choose: we can flee the anxiety by conforming even more closely to
the rules (inauthenticity); or face up to it, carrying on with daily life, but, crucially,
without any expectation of any deep final meaning (authenticity). The latter approach
allows us to respond to unique situations in an individual way (although still within the
confines of social norms), and this was Heidegger's idea of how one should live. For

Heidegger, thisacceptance of how things are in the real world, however limiting it may
be, is itself liberating.
Although often considered a founder of Existentialism, (mainly because his discussion
of ontology is rooted in an analysis of themode of existence of individual human
beings), Heidegger vehemently rejected the association, just as he had
rejectedHusserls Phenomenology. However, his works such as "Being and
Time" and "What is Metaphysics?" were certainly a biginfluence on Jean-Paul
Sartre (and especially on his "Being and Nothingness", the title of which is a direct
allusion to Heidegger's "Being and Time").
For Heidegger, genuine philosophy can not avoid confronting questions
of language and meaning, and he maintained that the description of Dasein could only
be carried out in terminology inherited from the history and tradition of Western
philosophy itself. Thus, he saw "Being and Time" as just a first step in his grand
overall project, which was to be followed by what he called the destruction of the
history of philosophy (a retracing of philosophy's footsteps, and a transformation of its
language and meaning). However, he never completed this second step, as he began
to radially re-think his own views.
While his earlier work (essentially "Being and Time") was conceived as a very definite
analysis of being which applied to all humans anywhere at any time, he later realized
that the time or period in which people live fundamentally affects the way they live their
lives. For instance, the ancient Greeks were much more rooted than moderns, and
they had a much more naturalisticworldview; the medieval Christians believed that
they were created creatures and that God's plan for the world could be
discerned; modern society, on the other hand, sees itself as comprised of active
subjects with desires to satisfy, and other objects were to be made use of.
These different worldviews, therefore, create quite different understandings of just
what it is tobe.
After the World War II, and Heidegger's so-called "turn", then, Heidegger began to
write of the commencement of the history of Western philosophy, the PreSocratic period of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, as a brief period of
authenticopenness to being. This was followed, according to Heidegger, by a long
period, beginning with Plato, increasingly dominated by
the forgetting or abandonment of this initial openness, occurring in different
ways throughout Western history.
Although he had, at first, considered anxiety to be a universal experience, he realized
that the Greeks did not experience it, and, for different reasons, neither did the medieval
Christians. Modern society, however, with its technological, nihilistic understanding of
being, leads to the kind of rootlessness and distress which causes anxiety. So,
Heidegger believed that anxiety is very much a modern disease. Furthermore, he
believed that modernity is a unique epoch of history in that we have an awareness of
history itself, and we have essentially come to the end of philosophy, having tried out

and discarded all the possible permutations of philosophical thought (what Heidegger
described as Nihilism).
Heidegger's important later works include "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" ("On the
Essence of Truth", 1930), "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" ("The Origin of the
Work of Art", 1935), "Bauen Wohnen Denken" ("Building Dwelling Thinking",
1951),"Einfhrung in die Metaphysik" ("An Introduction to Metaphysics",
1953), "Die Frage nach der Technik" ("The Question Concerning Technology",
1954), "Was heisst Denken?" ("What Is Called Thinking?", 1954), "Was ist das die Philosophie?" ("What Is Philosophy?", 1956), "Unterwegs zur Sprache" ("On
the Way to Language", 1959) and "The End of Philosophy" (1964).
Language, always a major concern of Heidegger, became almost an obsession in his
later work. In his view, language was not an arbitrary construct; nor was was it invented
merely to correspond to, or describe, the outside world. For Heidegger, vocabulary (a
sell as metaphors, idioms and the whole construction of language), actively names
things into being, and can have a powerful and proactive effect on the world. For him,
then, it was the poets, not the philosophers, priests or scientists, who were the
vanguard of humanity and its hope for future development.

Gilbert Ryle (1900 - 1976) was a 20th Century British philosopher, mainly associated
with the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement.
He had an enormous influence on the development of 20th Century Analytic
Philosophy, particularly in the areas of Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language.
He was especially well-known for his definitive critique of
the Dualism of Descartes (for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine")
and other traditional mind-body theories. His form of Philosophical
Behaviourism (the belief that all mental phenomena can be explained by reference to
publicly observable behaviour) became a standard view for several decades.

Life
Ryle was born on 19 August 1900 in Brighton, England, one of ten children in a
prosperous family. His father was a doctor but also a generalist who had interests in
philosophy and astronomy, and passed on to his children an impressive library, and the
young Ryle grew up in an environment of learning.
He was educated at Brighton College and, in 1919, he went to Queen's College,
Oxford, initially to study Classics, although he was soon drawn to Philosophy.
He graduated with first class honours in 1924 and was appointed to a lectureship in
Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. He became a tutor a year later, and remained at

Christ Church until World War II (and remained at Oxford for his entire academic
career until his retirement in 1968).
A capable linguist, Ryle was recruited to intelligence work with the Welsh
Guards during World War II, and rose to the rank ofMajor by the end of the War. He
returned to Oxford in 1945 where he was elected Waynflete Professor of
Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was
generally regarded as easy-going and sociable and an entertaining conversationalist,
but a fierce and forbidable debater, unforgiving of pomposity and pretentiousness.
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and editor of the
philosophical journal "Mind" for nearly twenty-five years from 1947 to 1971. He
published his principal work, "The Concept of Mind", in 1949.
A confirmed bachelor, he lived after his retirement in 1968 with his twin sister, Mary,
in the village of Islip, Oxfordshire.Gardening and walking gave him immense pleasure,
as did his pipe (without which he was rarely seen). Ryle died on 6 October 1976
at Whitby in North Yorkshire, after a day's walking on the moors.

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In his writing, Ryle had a literary and instantly recognizable style. He is mainly known
for his book, "The Concept of Mind"(1949), but he also wrote a collection of shorter
pieces called "Dilemmas" (1954), as well as "Plato's Progress" (1966) and "On
Thinking" (1979). "The Concept of Mind" in particular was recognized on its
appearance as an important contribution tophilosophical psychology and Philosophy
of Mind, and an important work in the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement.
In his "The Concept of Mind" of 1949, Ryle attacked the body-mind Dualism (the
claim that the Mind is an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body)
which has largely permeated Western Philosophy since Ren Descartes in the 17th
Century, rejecting it as a redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before
the biological sciences became established. He dismissed the idea that nature is
a complex machine, and that human nature is a smaller machine with a"ghost" in it
to account for intelligence, spontaneity and other such human qualities (he referred
to Descartes' model as "the dogma of the ghost in the machine").
Ryle believed that the classical theories (whether Cartesian, Idealist or Materialist)
made a basic "category-mistake" by attempting to analyze the relation between "mind"
and "body" as if they were terms of the same logical category. He argued that
philosophers do not need a "hidden" principle to explain the supra-mechanical
capacities of humans, because the workings of the mind are not distinct from the
actions of the body, but are one and the same. Looked at another way, he characterized
the mind as a set of capacities and abilities belonging to the body.

He claimed that mental vocabulary is merely a different way of describing action, and
that a person's motives are defined by that person's dispositions to act in certain
situations. He concluded that adequate descriptions of human behaviour need never
refer to anything but the operations of human bodies, which can be seen as a form
of Philosophical Behaviourism (also known as Analytical or Logical Behaviourism)
which became a standard view among Ordinary Language philosophers for several
decades (although more recently it has morphed into a kind of Functionalism).
Ryle also formulated a cartography analogy for his conception of philosophy. He
suggested that competent speakers of a language are to a philosopher what simple
villagers are to a mapmaker. The villager knows his way around his village well
enough for personal and practical purposes, but may not be able to use a map to
pinpoint or describe routes to an outsider. In the same way, philosophers should be able
to explain and make apparent the meaning of sentences by "mapping" the words and
phrases of a particular statement, generating what Ryle called "implication threads",
such that each word or phrase of a statement contributes to the statement in such a
way that, if the words or phrases were changed, the statement would have adifferent
implication. Philosophy, then, should search for the meaning of these implication
threads in the statements in which they are used.

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905 - 1980) was a French philosopher, writer and
political activist, and one of the central figures in 20th Century Frenchphilosophy.
He is best known as the main figurehead of the Existentialism movement. Along with
his French contemporaries Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) and Simone de
Beauvoir (1908 - 1986), he helped popularize the movement through
his novels andplays as well as through his more academic works. As a young man,
he also made significant contributions to Phenomenology.
He was a confirmed Atheist and a committed Communist and Marxist, and took a
prominent role in many leftist political causes throughout his adult life.

Life
Sartre was born in Paris, France on 21 June 1905. His father was Jean-Baptiste
Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, who died of a fever when Sartre was only 15
months old; his mother was Anne-Marie Schweitzer, of Alsatian origin and cousin to
the German Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer (1875 - 1965). His mother
raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor of
German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him toclassical literature at
a very early age. As a boy, he was small and cross-eyed andsocially awkward. When
his mother remarried in 1917, the family moved to La Rochelle.

He first became attracted to philosophy on reading the "Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness" by Henri Bergson(1859 - 1941) as a teenager in the 1920s. He
attended high school at the Lyce Henri IV in Paris, and then went on to study at the
elite cole Normale Suprieure (the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers
and intellectuals) from 1924 until 1929, where he absorbed the ideas of Immanuel
Kant, Georg Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger among others.
While at the cole Normale, he came into contact with such notables as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961), Raymond Aron (1905 - 1983), Simone Weil (1909 1943), Jean Hippolyte (1907 - 1968) and Claude Lvi-Strauss (1908 - ). Most
importantly, he also met Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986), who was studying at
the Sorbonne at that time, and the two became inseparable and remained lifelong
companions (although not monogamously), deliberately challenging
the culturaland social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings. De
Beauvoir went on to become a noted thinker in her own right, as well as a popular
writer and prominent feminist.
Sartre graduated from the cole Normale Suprieure in 1929 with a doctorate in
philosophy, and then served for a period as a conscript in the French Army from 1929
to 1931. He obtained a position teaching philosophy at the lyce in Le Havre, and then
obtained a grant to study at the French Institute in Berlin in 1933 where he studied
the Phenomenology of Husserl andHeidegger in more detail, and began to develop his
own profoundly original Existentialism. He published two important early works, "La
Transcendance de l'go" ("Transcendence of the Ego") and "Esquisse d'une
thorie des motions" ("Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions") in 1936 and 1938
respectively, and his groundbreaking existentialist novel "La Nause" ("Nausea")
came out in 1938.
In 1939, at the start of World War II, Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he
served as a meteorologist. He wascaptured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux,
and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war in Nancy and then in Stalag
12D at Trier, Germany. He was released in April 1941 due to poor health and
given civilian status. He recovered his position as a teacher at the Lyce Pasteur near
Paris, and then soon after took up a new position at the Lyce Condorcet.
He settled near Montparnasse in Paris, where a group of intellectuals gathered
around him in the cafs of the Left Bank, especially the Caf de Flore. He participated
in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Libert with other writers
including de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. After the high-profile writers Andr
Gide (1869 - 1951) and Andr Malraux (1901 - 1976) were approached but did not
join, Sartre became discouraged and the group soon dissolved and he turned
to writing in earnest. He wrote the plays "Les Mouches" ("The Flies") in 1943
and "Huis-clos" ("No Exit") in 1944, managing to avoid German censorship, and his
most important scholarly work on Existentialism, "L'tre et le nant" ("Being and
Nothingness"), was written in 1943.

Although some commentators criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during

the German occupation, he was an active contributor to "Les Lettres Franaise" and
to "Combat", clandestine newspapers of the French Resistance, through which he
met Albert Camus, a like-minded philosopher and author. Sartre and de Beauvoir
remained close friends with Camus until he turned away from Communism in 1951.
After the War, Sartre and de Beauvoir established "Les Temps Modernes" ("Modern
Times"), a monthly literary and political review, and he started writing full-time as well
as continuing his political activism. He drew on his war experiences for his
great trilogy of novels, "Les Chemins de la Libert" ("The Roads to Freedom")
(1945 - 1949). In 1948, the Roman Catholic Church placed his complete works on
its Index of Prohibited Books.
During this post-War period, Sartre was a very public intellectual and could always be
found openly chatting, discussing and writing in the cafs of St. Germain des Prs and
the trendy Left Bank of Paris. Despite his rather unprepossessing appearance, he
attracted the attentions of many glamorous women, and had many mistresses in
addition to his on-going relationship with Simone de Beauvoir (whom he affectionately
called "the Beaver") and with Michelle Vian. He also attracted a lot of press coverage,
much of it negative, and he was publicly accused of moral corruption and of
spreading hopelessness among the young. Eventually, he was hounded out by the
attentions of the press and forced to retreat from his public caf lifestyle. He moved
back to his mother's house in the rue Bonaparte where he could work in peace.
Although he never officially joined the Communist Party, Sartre
embraced Communism for many years, while continuing to defended Existentialism.
Indeed, he spent much of the 1950s trying to reconcile the individualist
philosophy of Existentialismwith the collective vision of Marxism and Communism.
His continued support for Russian Communism officially ended, however, on the entry
of Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956, and he roundly condemned both the Soviet
intervention and thesubmission of the French Communist Party to the interests of
Moscow.
His ongoing critiques of Communism led to his formulation of "Sartrian Socialism", a
model which demanded that Marxismrecognize differences between one society and
another and respect human freedom. His "Critique de la raison
dialectique"("Critique of Dialectical Reason") of 1960 was intended to
give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defence than it had received up until then,
and also to reconcile it with his existentialist ideas about free will. In the 1960s, he
travelled to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro (1926 - ) and spent a great deal of time
philosophizing with Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928 - 1967), whom he idolized.
He became increasingly politically active during the late 1950s and 1960s. He took a
prominent role in the struggle againstFrench rule in Algeria, and he was an eminent
supporter of the Front de Libration nationale (FLN) (National Liberation Front, the
Algerian socialist party) in the Algerian War of 1954 - 1962 and one of the signatories
of the Manifeste des 121. He also had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkam, who

became his adopted daughter in 1965. Along with Bertrand Russell and others, he
vociferously opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He was actively involved in
the student strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968, during which he was arrested
several times for civil disobedience.
In the aftermath of the 1968 Paris unrest, Sartre lost faith in the French Communist
Party and in Communism is general, and returned to a more individualist, but
still radical, outlook, closer to Anarchism. He remained outspoken in his radical views,
though, and caused something of a scandal by trying to justify the Munich
massacre in which eleven Israeli Olympians were killed by the a Palestinian terrorist
organization in 1972.
With his witty and sardonic autobiography, "Les mots" ("Words") of 1964,
Sartre renounced literature, calling it a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in
the world. In the same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but
he declinedit in protest against the values of bourgeois society (just as he had earlier
refused the Lgion d'honneur in 1945).
During the 1970s, Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially due to his
merciless pace of work (and his use ofamphetamines). The last project of his life, a
massive analytical biography of the French author Gustave Flaubert, as well as a
proposed second volume of the "Critique of Dialectical Reason", both
remained unfinished. He died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from an oedema of the lung,
and was buried in the Cimetire de Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was attended
by 50,000 mourners.

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Adopting and adapting the methods of Phenomenology and, particularly, the work
of Martin Heidegger, Sartre set out to develop an ontological account of what it is to
be human. The basis of his Existentialism is found in his early book "La
Transcendance de l'go" ("Transcendence of the Ego") of 1936, was developed
in "L'tre et le nant" ("Being and Nothingness") of 1943, and refined and
summarized in "L'existentialisme est un humanisme" ("Existentialism is a
Humanism") of 1946.
But he also believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life
situations, and that novels and plays describing such fundamental experiences
have as much value for the elaboration of philosophical theories as do discursive
essays. Thus, his novels such as "La Nause" ("Nausea") of 1928 and the "Les
Chemins de la Libert" ("The Roads to Freedom") trilogy of 1945 to 1949, were also
important vehicles of his thought, as were his plays like "Les Mouches" ("The Flies")
of 1943, "Huis-clos" ("No Exit") of 1944 (with its famous line, "L'enfer, c'est les autres"
or "Hell is other people"), and "Les Mains Sales" ("Dirty Hands") of 1948, and his
volume of short stories, "Le Mur" ("The Wall"). A whole school of absurd literature
subsequently developed.

In Sartre's Existentialism, "existence is prior to essence" (or, put a different way, the
existence of humans precedes consciousness), in the sense that the meaning of
man's life is not established before his existence, and man is "thrown into"into a
concrete, inveterate universe that cannot be "thought away". Thus, it is what we
do and how we act in our life thatdetermines our apparent "qualities". As Sartre put it:
"At first [Man] is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have
made what he will be".
Sartre firmly believed that everyone, always and everywhere, has choices and
therefore freedom. Even in the most apparently cut-and-dried situations, even in the
face of what appears to be inevitablity, a person always has a choice of actions,
whether it be to do nothing, whether it be to run away, or whether it be to risk one's very
life. This freedom is empowering, but it also comes with responsibility.
Sartre famously declared that "man is condemned to be free" (meaning, free from all
authority) and, although he may seek toevade, distort or deny that freedom (what
Sartre called "mauvaise foi" or bad faith"), he will nevertheless have to face up to it if
he is to become a moral being. Individuals are responsible for the choices they
make, and for their emotional lives, but because they are always conscious of
the limits of knowledge and of mortality, they constantly live with existential
dread or"angst".
In his 1946 essay, "L'existentialisme est un humanisme" ("Existentialism is a
Humanism"), seen by many as one of thedefining texts of
the Existentialist movement, Sartre described the human condition in a
succinct summary form: "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That
is the first principle of existentialism." Thus, freedom entails total responsibility, in the
face of which we experience anguish, forlornness and despair, and genuine human
dignity can be achieved only in our active acceptance of these emotions.
Sartre concluded from his arguments that if God exists, then man is not free; by the
same token, if man is free, then God does not exist. Atheism, then, is taken for
granted in Sartre's philosophy, but he maintained that the "loss of God" is not to be
mourned. On the contrary, in a godless universe, life has no meaning or purpose
beyond the goals that each man sets for himself, and individuals must
therefore detach themselves from things in order to give them meaning.
Although Sartre is considered by many to be an important and innovative philosopher,
others are much less impressed by his contributions. Heidegger himself thought that
Sartre had merely taken his own work and regressed it back to the subjectobjectorientated philosophy of Descartes and Husserl, which is exactly what Heidegger
had been trying to free philosophy from. Some see Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 1961) as a better Existentialist philosopher, particular for his incorporation of
the body as our way of being in the world, and for his more complete analysis
of perception (two areas in which Heidegger's work is often seen as deficient).

Willard Van Orman Quine (AKA W. V. O. Quine, or "Van" to his friends) (1908 - 2000)
was an American philosopher and mathematical logician, widely considered one of
the most important philosophers of the second half of the 20th Century.
His criticisms and modifications of Logical Positivism and Pragmatism were
instrumental in moving 20th Century Analytic Philosophy along, and he revolutionized
developments in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic, Philosophy of
Language and Philosophy of Mathematics. His consistent application of analytic
methods led him to a kind of extreme Empiricism, Naturalism and Physicalism.
He published over twenty books and numerous articles, all written in a distinctive crisp
and witty style. For the last 70 years of his long life, he was affiliated in some way
with Harvard University, first as a student, then as a teacher and professor, and finally
as an emeritus elder statesman.

Life
Quine was born on 25 June 1908 in a modest frame house in Akron, Ohio, USA. His
father, Cloyd Robert Quine, was an engineer and manufacturing entrepreneur and
continued to work at the Akron Equipment Company until his death in 1967. His
mother, Harriet Van Orman, was a college-educated local schoolteacher. He had an
elder brother called Robert Cloyd Quine.
His interest in philosophy began early and, aged nine, he fretted over the absurdity of
heaven and hell. He chose scientific courses at his local high school, and was an
ardent stamp collector and list-maker, fascinated by etymology and obsessed
with maps and faraway places. Later in high school, his brother gave him William
James' "Pragmatism", which he read compulsively (although he always claimed that it
was reading Edgar Allen Poe's short story "Eureka" that first filled him with a desire
to understand the universe).
He earned his B.A. in mathematics and philosophy in 1930 from Oberlin College (a
private, highly selective liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio), where his appetite for
"cosmic understanding" was sharpened by reading Bertrand Russell. He was awarded a
scholarship to Harvard University, which marked the start of a remarkable 70-year
association with the institution. He completed his Ph.D. in just two years in 1932, under
the supervision of Alfred North Whitehead, and was then appointed aHarvard Junior
Fellow, which excused him from having to teach for the next four years.
In 1932, he married his first wife, Naomi Clayton. Thanks to a fellowship, he travelled
in Europe during 1932 and 1933, meetingAlfred Tarski (1901 - 1983) (who was later to
accept Quine's invitation to attend a congress in Cambridge, thereby avoiding the Nazi
crackdown in Poland) and other Polish logicians, as well as Kurt Gdel (who had just

produced his renowned Incompleteness Theorem) and the Logical Positivists Rudolf
Carnap (1891 - 1970), Moritz Schlick and other members of theVienna Circle, and
their British disciple, Alfred Ayer. He became Carnap's "ardent disciple" and, although
they were to become increasingly combative philosophically, they remained firm
friends.
During the 1930s, he developed his ideas in many articles, mainly on Logic and set
theory, as well as his first book, "A System Of Logistics" in 1933. In 1940, he
produced the popular textbook, "Mathematical Logic". He became an Instructor of
Philosophy at Harvard in 1936, and then Associate Professor in 1941.
Quine was a talented linguist and preferred to learn his audience's French, German,
Spanish, Portuguese or whatever, andlecture in that rather than English. For example,
during World War II, he lectured on Logic in Brazil in Portuguese. He also served in the
United States Navy in a military intelligence role, reaching the rank of Lieutenant
Commander. In 1945, Quine and his wife, having had two daughters, Elizabeth (born
1935) and Norma (born 1937), separated and they were divorced two years later.
He was promoted to full professor at Harvard in 1948. In the same year, he married
again, his second wife being Marjorie Boynton (who he had met while serving in the
Navy), and they were to bear a son and a daughter, Douglas (born 1950)
andMargaret (born 1954). Quine loved Dixieland jazz and played the banjo in jazz
groups during this period, as well as the piano.
Quine held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 until
his retirement from Harvard in 1978, and then as Professor Emeritus until his death in
2000. His prolific output and his obsession with travelling continued up to and
beyond his retirement (throughout his life he visited 118 countries) and he commuted
daily to his Harvard office well after his retirement.
He first established his wider reputation with his seminal 1951 book, "Two Dogmas Of
Empiricism", but he continued publishing and revising at a frantic pace for most of the
rest of his life, including "Word And Object" (1960), "Philosophy of
Logic" (1969), "Set Theory and Its Logic" (1963), "Methods of Logic" (1972), "The
Roots of Reference" (1973), "Theories and Things" (1981), "Pursuit of
Truth" (1989), "Quiddities" (1990) and "From Stimulus to Science" (1995).
Among the eighteen universities which awarded him an honorary degree were The
University of Lille, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Uppsala University, the
University of Bern and (of course) Harvard University. He was elected tofellowships of
many learned societies including the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (1949), the British Academy(1959), the Instituto Brasileiro de
Filosophia (1963), the National Academy of Sciences (1977), the Institut de
France(1978) and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1979).

Quine died on 25 December 2000. His ashes rest between his parents in the Glendale
Cemetary, Akron, Ohio, with portions also scattered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Harvard, Massachusetts, and Meriden, Connecticut.

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Quine's philosophy at first seems utterly fragmentary, with fundamental shifts in

doctrine. However, over time, his philosophy assumed a growing systematic
coherence.
In Epistemology, he was known for rejecting epistemological Foundationalism in favour
of what he called "naturalized epistemology", whose task was to give
a psychological account of how scientific knowledge is obtained. This was in effect a
kind of Fallibilism (the doctrine that all claims to knowledge could, in principle,
be mistaken, and that we need not have logically conclusive justifications for what we
know).
Quine's seminal 1951 essay, "Two Dogmas Of Empiricism", and its follow-up "From
a Logical Point of View" of 1953, were the works which first established his reputation.
In these works, he denied the importance (and even the existence) of the"analyticsynthetic distinction", a claim that was seen almost as heresy in most Analytic
Philosophy camps of the day. The distinction between "analytic" statements (those
true simply by the meanings of their words, such as "All bachelors are unmarried")
and "synthetic" statements (those true or false by virtue of facts about the world, such
as "There is a cat on the mat") had first been established by Immanuel Kant in the 18th
Century, and was one of the cardinal doctrines of Logical Positivism. Quine argued
that ultimately the definition of "analytic" was circular and that the whole notion of truth
by definitionwas unsatisfactory. He further argued that there is in fact no distinction
between universally known collateral information and conceptual or analytic truths.
By denying it, Quine effectively made even the "truths" of Logic and mathematics
totally empirical, and opened the door for logical and mathematical statements to be (in
principle at least) modified or even abandoned in the light of experience, in much the
same way as factual statements are. This led to the development of a naturalistic and
revitalized Epistemology, and his work heralded a major shift away from the views
of language descended from Logical Positivism, and a new appreciation of
thedifficulty of providing a sound empirical basis for theses
concerning convention, meaning and synonymy.
The other main tenet of Logical Positivism attacked by Quine in these works was that
of Reductionism (the theory that any meaningful statement gets its meaning from
some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate
experience). Although Quine's criticisms played a major role in the decline of Logical
Positivism, he remained a Verificationist. Thus, he believed that, while it may be
possible to verify or falsify whole theories, it is not possible to verify or
falsify individual statements. He also subscribed to a kind of Relativism, believing that

for any collection of empirical evidence, there would always be many theories able to
account for it.
In his Metaphysics and ontology (or "ontic theory" as Quine referred to it), two articles
stand out, "Steps toward a Constructive Nominalism" (1947) and "On What There
Is" (1948). In general, his ontology was originally nominalistic, maintaining that
only particular individuals exist, and that universals or abstract entities do not exist
(except perhaps aslinguistic symbols). He made clear, however, that accepted
scientific theories allow for more than one ontic theory of existence, and that it
is incorrect to seek to determine that just one such ontic theory is true. The primacy
of mathematical logic in Quine's ontology is evident in his celebrated definition of
being: "To be is to be the value of a variable".
"Word And Object" (1960), along with his later "Pursuit of Truth" (1990), attacked
prevailing theories in Philosophy of Language which see meanings as objects in a kind
of museum of ideas, with verbal expressions as their arbitrary, interchangeable labels.
By this time, he had abandoned his earlier Nominalism by acknowledging the existence
of abstract entities, and he also developed a behaviourist account of language
learning. It was in "Word And Object" that he first proposed his thesis of
the indeterminacy of translation, particularly regarding radical translation (the
attempt to translate a hitherto unknown language). He noted that there are
always different ways one might break a sentence into words, and different ways
to distribute functions among words, so that a single sentence must always be taken
to have more than one different meaning. He effectively broadened the principle of
Semantic or Confirmation Holism still further to arrive at the position that
asentence (and therefore a word) has meaning only in the context of a whole
language.
Quine's early work was mainly on mathematical Logic, including significant
contributions to the development of the important mathematical area of set theory,
particularly in his papers "A System of Logic" (1934), "New Foundations of
Mathematical Logic" (1937), "Mathematical Logic" (1940), "Methods of
Logic" (1950) and "Set Theory and Its Logic" (1963).
He also developed an interesting paradox, which has come to be known as Quine's
Paradox: "yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when
preceded by its quotation.

Sir Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer (better known as Alfred Ayer or A. J. Ayer) (1910 1989) was a 20th Century British philosopher in the Analytic Philosophytradition,
mainly known for his promotion of Logical Positivism and for popularizingthe
movement's ideas in Britain.

He saw himself as continuing in the British Empiricist tradition of Locke and Humeand
more contemporary philosophers like Bertrand Russell, and is often considered second
only to Russell among British philosophers of the 20th Century in the depth of
his philosophical knowledge.

Life
Alfred Ayer was born on 29 October 1910 in London, England, into a wealthy family
of continental origin. His mother, Reine, was from a Dutch-Jewish family; his
father, Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist. He grew up in the well-todo St. John's Wood area of London, and was educated at the exclusive Ascham St.
Vincent preparatory school for boys at Eastbourne, and then at even more
prestigious Eton College.
A precocious but mischievous child, Ayer always felt himself to be something of
an outsider. From an early age, he tried to convert his fellow students to Atheism, and
at the age of at he 16 started to show aserious interest in philosophy, duly impressed
by his reading of Bertrand Russell's "Sceptical Essays" and G. E. Moore's"Principia
Ethica".
In 1929, he won a classics scholarship to Christ Church College at the University of
Oxford, where one of his philosophy tutors, Gilbert Ryle (1900 - 1976), introduced him
to Wittgenstein's "Tractatus". Ryle, who became a major figure in the Ordinary
Language Philosophy movement, also enabled the young Alfred to study for a time
with Moritz Schlick (1882 - 1936), then leader of the influential Vienna Circle, out of
which the Logical Positivism movement grew. From 1933 to 1944, he was
a lecturer andresearch fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.
During World War II, Ayer served in the British military, working for the Special
Operations Executive (a secret intelligence and espionage unit) and helping to
organize the French resistance movement in London. He was popularly known after
the War as a participant on the BBC discussion program "The Brains Trust". He was a
noted social mixer and womanizer (he wasmarried four times), and enjoyed dancing
and attending the London clubs, as well as being a well known face in the crowd at his
beloved Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, where he was known as "The Prof".
Despite his reputation for aloofness and vanity, his circle of friends included
many famous names in the fields of politics, literature and philosophy.
Ayer was the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University
College London from 1946 until 1959, when he became Wykeham Professor of Logic
at the University of Oxford, a position he retained until 1978. He was an Honorary
Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death, president of
the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952, and president of the British Humanist
Association from 1965 to 1970.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ayer kept up a hectic schedue of lecture tours throughout
Europe and South America, and then later in China, Russia, India and Pakistan. He
taught and lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting
professor at Bard College in New York State. In 1963, he had a son, Nicholas, by his
second wife, Dee Wells, an experience which apparently had a profound effect on
him. Throughout this period, he continued to be active the British Labour Party, which
he had first joined before the War. Among other honours, he was knighted in 1970.
He is generally considered to have been an outspoken atheist, although "igtheist" (a
person who believes that "God" denotes no verifiable hypothesis) may be a better
description. However, in 1988, shortly before his death, he received much publicity after
an unusual near-death experience, which weakened his inflexible attitude that there
is no life after death, and prompted him to write an article called "What I saw when I
was dead". He died of a collapsed lung in London on 27 June 1989.

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A. J. Ayer had a crisp, clear and informative writing style, in which he could lay bare
the bones of a philosophical difficulty in a few paragraphs of strikingly simple prose.
He is often considered second only to Berrand Russell among British philosophersof
the 20th Century in the depth of his philosophical knowledge.
In addition to two autobiographies, he wrote books on Bertrand Russell, G. E.
Moore, David Hume and Voltaire, all of whom had a lasting influence on his own work.
He saw himself as continuing in the line of British Empiricism established
by Lockeand Hume and more contemporary philosophers like Russell.
Ayer began the book that made his philosophical name, "Language, Truth, and
Logic", at the tender age of 23 as a young lecturer at Oxford, and it was published
three years later in 1936. The book is regarded as a classic of 20th Century Analytic
Philosophy and Logical Positivism, and is still widely read in philosophy courses
around the world. In it, he popularized theverification principle (an issue at the heart of
the debates of the Vienna Circle at the time), that a sentence is meaninglessunless it
has verifiable empirical import (see the section on Verificationism).
He also claimed in the book that the distinction between a conscious human and
an unconscious machine merely resolves itself into a distinction between "different
types of perceptible behaviour" (a contentious argument which anticipates the
1950Turing test of a machine's intelligence or consciousness). He also put forward
an emotivist theory of Ethics (a kind of Moral Anti-Realism or Non-Cognitivism, which
holds that that ethical judgments are primarily just expressions of one's own attitude
and imperatives designed to change the attitudes and actions of others), which
he never abandoned.
His later works include "Foundations of Empirical Knowledge" (1940), "The
Problem of Knowledge" (1956) and "Logical Positivism" (1966). In 1973,

his "Central Questions of Philosophy" was published. The book was a

comprehensive confirmation of his Logical Positivist outlook that large parts of what
was traditionally called "philosophy" (including the whole
ofMetaphysics, Theology and Aesthetics) were not matters that could be judged as
being true or false and that it was thusmeaningless to even discuss them.
These claims, and his complete rejection of the possibility of synthetic a
priori knowledge, made him rather unpopularamong other British philosophers. For
many years he kept up a highly public ongoing battle against the Ordinary Language
Philosophy of J. L. Austin (1911 - 1960) and Peter Strawson (1919 - 2006) in
particular.

Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) was a French philosopher, historian, critic and
sociologist, often associated with the 20th Century Structuralism, PostStructuralism and Post-Modernism movements (although he himself alwaysrejected
such labels).
He was no stranger to controversy, and he was notorious for his radical leftist
politics. Although not without his critics, he has however had a profound influence on
a diverse range of disciplines.

Life
Michel Foucault (pronounced foo-CO) was born on 15 October 1926 to a notable
provincial family in Poitiers in west central France. His father, Paul Foucault, was an
eminent surgeon and hoped his son would follow him into the profession. Hisearly
education was a mix of success and mediocrity until he attended the JesuitCollge
Saint-Stanislas, where he excelled. After World War II, he gained entry to the
prestigious cole Normale Suprieure in Paris, the traditional gateway to
an academic career in the humanities in France.
At the cole Normale, he suffered from acute depression, and became fascinated
with psychology. He joined the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953, inducted
into the party by the prominent Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918 - 1990),
although he left the party due to concerns about what was happening in the Soviet
Union under Joseph Stalin (1878 - 1973) and was never a particularly active member.
A particularly influential lecturer was the Existentialist and Phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961). In 1952, he earned a degree in psychology (then a
relatively new qualification in France) as well as in philosophy.
After a brief period lecturing at the cole Normale, he took up a position teaching
psychology at the University of Lille from 1953 to 1954, but it soon became clear to
him that teaching was not his real vocation. From 1954 to 1958, his friend and

mentorGeorges Dumzil (1898 - 1986) arranged a position for him as French cultural
delegate to the University of Uppsala in Sweden, and then he briefly held positions
at Warsaw University and at the University of Hamburg before returning to Francein
1960.
He took up a post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, where he
completed his doctorate. His doctorate thesis was later published in an abridged edition
as "Folie et draison" ("Madness and Insanity", also re-published as "Madness and
Civilization" and "History of Madness"), and was extremely well-received. He also
met Daniel Defert (b. 1937), with whom he lived in a non-monogamous
partnership for the rest of his life. When Defert was posted to Tunisia for his military
service in 1965, Foucault moved to a position at the University of Tunis. In 1966 he
published "Les Mots et les choses" ("The Order of Things"), which was enormously
popular despite its length and difficulty, and was responsible for bringing Foucault
toprominence as an intellectual figure in France.
The mid-1960s saw the height of interest in Structuralism, (which was set to topple
the Existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre), and Foucault was
quickly grouped with scholars such as Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981), Claude LviStrauss (1908 - ) and Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980) as one of the newest wave of
thinkers, although he always rejected the label ofStructuralism.
He was greatly affected by the student riots of May 1968 (both in France and locally in
Tunis), and returned to Paris in the fall of 1968. In the aftermath of the student riots
(which contributed to the fall of the De Gaulle government in France), a new
experimental university, Paris VIII, was established in the Vincennes suburb of Paris,
and the newly radicalized Foucault was appointed as the first head of its philosophy
department in December 1968. He appointed mostly young leftist academics, such
as Judith Miller (1941 - ), whose radicalism provoked the Ministry of Education
to withdraw the department's accreditation. Foucault notoriously also joined students
in occupying administration buildings and fighting with police.
In 1970, he was elected to France's most prestigious academic body, the Collge de
France, as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought, a position he retained
until his death. His partner Defert joined a French ultra-Maoist group, and Foucault's
own political involvement increased still further, including his founding of the Groupe
d'Information sur les Prisons ("Prison Information Group"), an organization
established to voice the concerns of prisoners, and many protests on behalf
of homosexuals and other marginalized groups.
In the late 1970s, political activism in France tailed off with the disillusionment of
many left wing militants, a number of whom broke with Marxism to form the socalled New Philosophers, often citing Foucault as their major influence (a status
about which Foucault had mixed feelings). He continued to write, including the early
volumes of a six-volume project "Histoire de la sexualit" ("The History of
Sexuality"), which he was never to complete. Foucault began to spend more time in

the United States, at the University at Buffalo and especially at the University of
California at Berkeley. In 1979, he made two tours ofIran, undertaking extensive (and
controversial) interviews with political protagonists in support of the new interim
government established there after the Iranian Revolution.
Foucault died in Paris of an AIDS-related illness on 25 June 1984, at a time when little
was known about the disease (the event was consequently mired in controversy). His
partner, Defert became a prominent AIDS activist and the founding president of the first
AIDS awareness organization in France. Prior to his death, Foucault
had destroyed most of his unpublished manuscripts and prohibited in his will the
publication of anything he might have overlooked.

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Foucault's first major book was "Folie et draison: Histoire de la folie l'ge
classique" in 1961 (later published in English as"Madness and Insanity",
as "Madness and Civilization" and as "History of Madness"), which examined ideas,
practices, institutions, art and literature relating to madness in Western history.
His "Les Mots et les choses: Une archologie des sciences humaines" ("The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences"), first published in 1966,
posited that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of
truth that constituted what was acceptable. This was the book that brought Foucault
to prominence as an intellectual figure in France.
1969's "Archologie du Savoir" ("The Archaeology of Knowledge") was his main
excursion into methodology and his analysis of the statement as the basic unit of
discourse. It was the book which mainly led to his identification withStructuralism. In
1975, Foucault's "Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison" ("Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison") marked his continuing politicization during the
1970s, and his particular focus on the rights of prisoners.
Three volumes of his ambitious "Histoire de la sexualit" ("The History of
Sexuality") were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first (and most
referenced) volume, "La volont de savoir" ("The Will to Knowledge"), published in
1976, focused primarily on the last two centuries and the emergence of a science of
sexuality and of "biopower" in the West as a way of managing groups of people. The
second two volumes, "L'usage des plaisirs" ("The Use of Pleasure") and "Le souci
de soi"("The Care of the Self") were first published in French in 1984, and deal with
the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. Foucaults idea that the body and
sexuality are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena made a significant
contribution to the feminist critique of Essentialism.
There has been much criticism of Foucault's lax standards of scholarship,
his historical inaccuracies and misrepresentationof facts, and his rejection of the
values and philosophy associated with the Enlightenment while simultaneously

secretlyrelying on them. However, the sheer volume of citations in standard academic

journals (in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, art, history, anthropology, geography,
archaeology, communication studies, public relations, rhetoric, cultural studies,
linguistics, sociology, education, psychology, literary theory, feminism, queer theory,
management studies, the philosophy of science, political science, urban design,
museum studies, and many others) suggest that his influence has been profound
indeed.

Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) was a 20th Century Algerian-born Frenchphilosopher,

best known as the founder of the Deconstructionism movement in the 1960s, and for
his profound impact on Continental Philosophy and literary theoryin general. He
deliberately distanced himself from the other philosophical movements on the French
intellectual scene (e.g. Phenomenology,Existentialism, Structuralism),
and denied that Deconstructionism was a methodor school or doctrine of philosophy
of any sort.
He was a prolific author and became one of the most well known philosophers of
contemporary times. His work was always highly cerebral and "difficult", and he has
often been accused of pseudophilosophy, sophistry and deliberate obscurantism.

Life
Jacques Derrida (pronounced de-ri-DAH) was born on 15 July 1930 in the small town
of El-Biar (now a suburb of Algiers) in Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewishfamily, the third
of five children. He spent his early years in El-Biar, but at the age of 12 he
was dismissed from his lyce by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic
quotas set by the Vichy government, and he chose to skip school rather than attend the
Jewish lyce which arose.
For a while, he dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player, and took part in
numerous competitions, but in his later teens he also started to read philosophers and
writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus(1913 1960) and Andr Gide (1869 - 1951) and began to think seriously about philosophy.
He became a boarding student at the Lyce Louis-le-Grand in Paris and, after failing
his entrance examination twice, he was admitted to the prestigious cole Normale
Suprieure (where Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and many other French
intellectuals and academics began their careers) in 1952. There, he became friends
with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918 - 1990) and with the philosopher
and critic Michel Foucault, whose lectures he attended. He also
studied Hegelunder Jean Hyppolite (1907 - 1968).

He completed his philosophy dissertation on Edmund Husserl and was offered a place
at Harvard University and moved to theUnited States. In June 1957, he
married Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston, and they were to have two
sons, Pierre (1963) andJean (1967). He was called up for military service during
the Algerian War of Independence in 1957, but elected to teachsoldiers' children for
two years in lieu.
In the early 1960s, Derrida began a long association with "Tel Quel", a Paris-based
leftist avant-garde journal for literature and philosophy, strongly influenced
by Nietzsche. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964, and at
the cole Normale Superieure from 1964 to 1984. In 1967, Derrida published his first
three books, which would make his name: "Writing and Difference", "Speech and
Phenomena" and "Of Grammatology" (the latter remains his most famous work).
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year, sometimes
experimenting with non-traditional styles of writing. He carried on a sequence
of encounters with proponents of Analytic Philosophy such as J. L. Austin (1911 1960) and John Searle (1932 - ).
He travelled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions, including as
director of studies at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales in Paris (he
had a third son, Daniel, in 1984 by Sylviane Agacinski, a professor at the EHESS) and
as the first president of the Collge international de philosophie, which he cofounded in 1983 with Franois Chtelet (1925 - 1985) and others. He became
Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine in 1986, and was a
regular visiting professor at several other major American universities,
including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University and
the New School for Social Research. He was awarded honorary doctorates by
various American, British and European universities, and appeared in a selftitle biographical documentary in 2002.
Derrida had always been involved in various (generally leftist) political causes,
including support for the Parisian student protesters in 1968, denouncement of
the Vietnam War, cultural activities against the apartheid government of South Africa
and on behalf of Nelson Mandela in the 1980s, support for Palestinian liberation,
protests against the death penalty and opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he reduced his workload
significantly. He died in a Parisian hospital on 8 October 2004.

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Derrida's initial work in philosophy was largely phenomenological, and his early
training as a philosopher was done largely through the lens of Edmund Husserl. Other
important inspirations on his early thought include Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin
Heidegger, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913), the Lithuanian-

French philosoher Emmanuel Lvinas(1906 - 1995) and the Austrian

psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939).
He soon started to express a dissatisfaction with
both Phenomenology and Structuralism (the other main movement of the period),
finding them limiting and overly simplistic. After his 1966 lecture, "Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Science", Derrida found himself identified as
a key figure in the early Post-Structuralist movement, and was one of the first to
propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, He pointed to an apparent destabilizing or de-centring in intellectual life (referring to the displacement of
the author of a text as having greatest effect on a text itself, in favour of the
various readers of the text), which came to be known as Post-Structuralism.
A preoccupation with language is apparent in much of Derrida's early work, especially
in his ground-breaking "Of Grammatology" of 1967, and he especially asked
the questions "What is 'meaning'?" and "Where does 'meaning' come from?" He
argued that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous
categories (e.g. sacred/profane, sign/signifier, mind/body, etc), and he referred to his
procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as"deconstruction".
In very simplistic terms, Deconstructionism (or sometimes just Deconstruction) is a
theory of literary criticism that questionstraditional assumptions about certainty,
identity, and truth. It asserts that words can only refer to other words, and attempts to
demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. Derrida's
particular methods of textual criticisminvolved discovering, recognizing and
understanding the underlying assumptions (unspoken and
implicit), ideas andframeworks that form the basis for thought and belief. Derrida
himself denied that it was a method or school or doctrine of philosophy (or indeed
anything outside of reading the text itself).
In the mid-1980s, Derrida began teaching on the relationship between philosophy
and Nationalism, and published "Of Spirit: Heidegger and the
Question" on Heidegger's Nationalism in 1987. His work took an even more "political
turn" around 1994, heralded by the publication of "Spectres of Marx" (professing his
faith in a deconstructed Marxism), and arguably an "ethical turn" with works such
as "The Gift of Death" of 1995.
Derrida's work was always highly cerebral and "difficult". Proponents of Analytic
philosophy, such as W. V. O. Quine, J. L. Austin (1911 - 1960) and John Searle (1932
- ), repeatedly accused Derrida of pseudophilosophy and sophistry, and even his
French contemporary Michel Foucault accused him of "obscurantisme
terroriste" ("terrorist obscurantism"). No less an intellectual and linguist than Noam
Chomsky (1928 - ) admitted to not understanding Derrida's work, and denounced
his"pretentious rhetoric" and "intentional obfuscation". Other accusations are of an
extreme Skepticism and Solipsism, verging on Nihilism, that effectively denies the
possibility of knowledge and meaning.