All names in this Index are by birth-certificate, which may not be the name by which you know them.
At the top left-hand
corner of every screen there is a flat rectangular box with an icon of a
magnifying-glass: your search bar. You may well find it easier to find the
person you are seeking there.
First,
the psycho-quacks, the priests of the
deitic delusion, who are placed here, rather than among the scientists of
E,M&C2, because, like the psychotic delusion God, there is absolutely no
verifiable evidence of the existence of this phenomenon: cut open the brain and
you will find tissue, bone, nerves, but nothing that can be held up like a
liver or a kidney and you can point your finger at it and say “this is the
psyche”. Useful though; very useful, as a philosophical metaphor.
Alfred Adler (born Feb 7 1870; died May 28 1937): “founder of the
school of individual psychology”, whatever that means (I demonstrated my wish
to prove myself superior, a need induced through my childhood experiences at
home and at school, by changing “school” to “religion” on Feb 7): bio and ideas here
Johanna Cohn Arendt (Hannah for
short): referenced, quoted
or simply mentioned on Jan 11, March 30, Aug 16, Aug 20, Sept 6; born Oct 14 1906 (linked at Oct 10); died
December 4 1975; and for a flavour of her significance, try any one of these
websites: here, here, here, here and here [philosophers and responses to bullying]
Bruno Bettelheim (born
Aug 28 1903; died
March 13 1990): decidedly Freudian, and fortunate to have eluded the worst part
of the Holocaust, his work was mostly oriented towards emotionally disturbed
children - bio here, core ideas here
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (born February 23 1868; died August 27 1963): the first Black American to
earn a PhD from Harvard, he led the second Pan African Conference in Paris in
1919 and later became a founder of NAACP (click here) [Africa and Philosophers]; bio here
Hans Eysenck: Born
March 4 1916 in Berlin; died September 4 1997 in his adopted Britain): referenced,
rather than actually theorising personality, on Nov 22;
for that try here
Sigismund Schlomo (Sigmund) Freud: his Jewishness on Feb 3; failed to invent the Super-Id on May 3; born on May
6; deluded
about Carl Jung on July 26; referenced re Montaigne
on Feb 28, and Maimonides
on March 30; mentions on Feb 21, April
1 and July 5; officially described as a neurologist, which
ought to grant him access to the E,M&C2 page, but sadly it doesn’t, because
all of his theories and writings are about ther psyche, not the nervous system:
try here
Offspring Anna Freud (born Dec 3 1895; died October 9 1982) was also a psychiatrist - the family home in
Hampstead that is now a museum is named for dad and daughter; her bio here and here
Carl Gustav Jung (born July 26 1875;
died June 6 1961): acolyte of Schopenhauer
on Feb 22; studied by Joseph Campbell on March
26; mentioned on March 30 – responsible for
such meaningful/less terms as “synchronicity”, “archetypal phenomena”, “the
collective unconscious”, “the psychological complex”, “extraversion” and
“introversion” – more on all of these here
Timothy Francis Leary: born Oct 22 1920; died May 31 1996): From my
detailed study of him while under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide,
I can only say that his ideas seemed as lacking in solidity as colourless
liquid, and that his attempts to validate them crumbled into white powder.
Harvard University phrases it slightly differently here. He is also
associated with a man named Baba Ram Dass, likewise findable at the Harvard
link
Carl Ransom Rogers (born January 8 1902; died February 4 1987): wobbling between good and bad behaviour on March 30; his version of the gospel rests on “humanistic
psychology”, for which try here, though the term does seem to infer that all
the other denominations of the cult are in some way inhuman. I am also bothered
by the concept of psychotherapy as “client-centred”, which contains a strong
hint, at the very least, of servicing what Tom
Lehrer once called “the diseases of the rich”
Oliver Wolf Sacks (born July 9 1933; died Aug 30 2015): the man
who mistook his profession for a science, and therefore, like Freud, described himself as a neurologist,
though his other famous book, “An Anthropologist on Mars”, describes (I am
quoting his own website) "patients struggling
to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism,
parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome,
schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease", of which only one,
epilepsy, can be counted as definitely neurological, though others might be so
defineable, if they were studied as such
Lou Andreas-Salomé (born February 12 1861 in Saint Petersburg; died
February 5 1937 in Germany): renaming Rilke
on Dec 4;
but here because she defined herself as a psychoanalyst, and in truth the term Freudian should be replaced by the
more-difficult-to-pronounce Salomeynian,
because he learned everything he knew about life from her, as did Rilke, as had
Nietzsche before them; read her, and
their, full tale here
* * * *
The pure philosophers
François-Marie Arouet (aka
Voltaire): with Françoise de Graffigny on Feb
1, Madame de Staël on April 22, and Sophie de Grouchy on May 5; writing to
"Sappho de Normandie" (that's Mme du
Boccage) on Oct 5; quoted
on Oct 2 and Nov 18; Nov
1
and Dec 5 for earthquakes; mentioned on Jan 18
and Feb 26;
turned
into mulch on May 30; his website at Oxford University here [philosophers and responses to bullying] [pseudonyms]
Marcus Aurelius (born April 26 121 CE; died March 17 180 CE): mistakeable
for Montesquieu on Jan 18; fascinating link to George
Eliot's "Middlemarch” on Feb 8 -
also on the non-British purple cloaks page because he served as Emperor of Rome
from 161 until his death; but on this page as a Stoic philosopher, for which
click here
Gaston Louis Pierre Bachelard: (born June 27 1884; died October 16 1962) needs
rethinking with every new piece of information you learn about him, on Nov 22 – bio here,
and a question: does “historical epistemology” place him among the historians, or even the
librarians of Babel, rather than, or as well as, here with the philosophers: oh but these artificial boundaries
are so random, so grey-lined, so restricting
Pierre Bayle (born November 18 1647; died December 28 1706):
not on Jan 23,
that’s Stendhal;
his thoughts on Spinoza on Nov 18 - and exactly the same question as for Bachelard: Bayle “is best known for his Historical and
Critical Dictionary” as per this website
Richard H Popkin: translating Pierre
Bayle on Nov 18; more of his books listed here
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir: (became existential on Jan 9 1908: died April 14 1986) mentioned on April 15; any woman who can write a book about her gender entitled “The Second Sex” has to be in my “Woman-Blindness” collection, even though I have put the end of the 19th century as its stopping-point: more on her, and it, here – and then you read this piece of third-rate journalism, and realise at once the scale of her irony! “Apart from her classically featured face, what strikes one about Simone de Beauvoir is her fresh, rosy complexion and her clear blue eyes, extremely young and lively”; I wonder if a woman journalist would have written something of the same, about, say, Jean-Paul Sartre? Oh, this article was by a woman! Skip it then, and read this.*
* but then I was looking for something about Yevtushenko, and came upon a piece in the same
“Paris Review”, and guess what! it’s the magazine’s style, regardless of
gender: “Yevtushenko is a very tall, ash-blond young man with a small head atop
a long athletic body, pale blue, humorous eyes, a slender nose in a round face,
and an open manner that was startling in the Moscow of those days.” click here for the rest of what is actually a very
interesting piece about him)
Henri-Louis Bergson (his élan became vital on Oct 18 1859; but then devitalised on January 4
1941): Life and Creative Evolution (what else is the poētikōs?) here
Isaiah Berlin (born June 6 1909 in Riga; died November 5 1997):
commenting on “Dr Zhivago” on Oct 23; commenting on Liberty here
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás (George
Santayana) (born
Dec 16 1863; died September 26 1952):
the man who said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”;
bio, novel and poetry, in addition to the philosophy, here
Marcus Tullius Cicero (born Jan 3
106 BCE; murdered or assassinated December 7 43 BCE): his letters discovered by Petrarch on his birthday; referenced by Montaigne on Feb 28
Uriel da Costa (Adam Romes was his pen-name, and actually
Uriel is among the Pseudonyms as well, because his birthname was Gabriel): This is how it works: a name comes up in a piece I am researching, but a
mere passing mention, so set aside to return to later on. Eventually I do, and
in the process another name comes up, another passing mention, another amber
light left waiting to turn green. So I wrote about Rabbi
Aboab on Feb 1, which led to his mentor Rabbi Uzziel (see Feb 1), and that in turn called up another name which, upon
investigation, took me back to Aboab from another direction: Uriel
da Costa (born as a New Christian, in Portugal, in 1585; committed suicide as a
“heretical” Jew in Amsterdam in April
1640) – the whole of his extraordinary story here (the Anu
Museum is on the campus of Tel Aviv university)
René Descartes (Renatus Cartesius on his
books):
born March 31 1596 in the village which now has his name, but in those days was
still called La Haye; ceased thinking on Feb
11 1650; doubting whether he agrees with Spinoza on Feb 21; thinking that he
may agree with Pyrrhon on May 11; making his own mind up on March
29 – the inventor of analytic geometry, which applied
algebra to geometry; bio here; all of his achievements here
Denis Diderot: (born Oct 5 1713; died July 31 1784): mentioned on Nov 18 - rather more an encyclopaedist than a thinker
of new thoughts, so should he be counted among the
historians? bio and work here (and that second paragraph would make a perfect
blurb for this blog! – while “Scepticism is the first step towards truth” could
be placed as a partner-motto alongside the one at the top of this page, and
goes with the first half of the Descartes quote on Feb
11) – bio here
Ralph Waldo Emerson (born May 25 1803; died April 27 1882): fired "the shot heard around the world" on April 18; mentioned June 19: for his first 30 years he belonged on the reverend writers page (click here), Unitarian in his case; for many of the remainder
he would probably have liked to be counted among the poets
(click here); but destinations are unimportant, it is the
journey that matters (click here), so this page is where he needs to be (same
website’s home page here)
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (born Feb 28
1533; died September 13 1592): translated by Giovanni
(John) Florio on Jan 30;
mentioned on June 19
and Nov 30
– being a cousin of Roderigo Lopes
may explain why Shakespeare was so
avid a disciple of Montaigne (Emerson was too; click here), though it was in John Florio’s translation that he read the
essays (click here); as to the man
himself, bio and significance here, works here
José Ortega y Gasset: (born May 9
1883; died October 18 1955): bio here
Germaine Greer: born Jan 29; mentioned on Jan 9
and July 11
Sophie Marie Louise de Grouchy (“Citoyenne Condorcet”) (born April 8 1764;
died September 8 1822) : bringing the
two ends of the French Revolution together on May
5 and the Napoleonic Age page
of Woman-Blindness; bio and achievements here
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: (born Aug 27
1770; died November 14 1831) – his website here
Martin Heidegger: (born
Sept 26 1889; died May 26 1976) – but
he could just as easily be on the GER
page as a Nazi and an anti-Semite, and many think he should be: click here – but he could just as easily be on the GER page as a key influence on some of the
most left-wing thinkers of the age of Stalin (further down the same link) – and
yet... and yet...
Thomas
Hobbes: (born April 5 1588; died December 4 1679): mentioned
on Oct 10 – bio here; read “Leviathan” here
David Home (pronounced Hume and
formally changed to that spelling in his twenties : listed with some of the key figures of the European Enlightenment on Jan 18; suffered from what his physician called "the
disease of the learned” here
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (born July 1 1646; died November 14 1716): optimistic about Pierre Bayle (and probably pessimistic about Voltaire but that
isn’t on the page) on Nov 18, but this needs to be understood
in the context of Nihilism v The Zero Positive, and why he is right about
“optimism” (sadly, given human nature and the 3rd-rateness of God if there even
is one, ours almost certainly is “the best of all possible worlds” - he wrote
that in “Théodicée”, in 1710); bio here, philosophy here; he also invented Calculus and
Binary numbers, came up with the first calculating machine that could add,
subtract, multiply and divide, and formulated the theory of monads,
inter alia (here)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (born January
22 1729 ; died February 15 1781): try here, but look
at the Mahler Foundation page as
well (if only for the pictures): influenced by Spinoza on Feb 21
George Henry Lewes (born
April 18 1817; died November 30 1878):
unable to divorce his wife, so living openly with Mary Anne Evans on July 1 – bio here
Henry Louis Mencken (born Sept 12
1880; died January 29 1956): quoted on Sept
13; bio here; books and writings here
George Edward (G.E; he hated both names and never used them) Moore (Bill to his wife): born Nov 4 1873; died October 24 1958): made an
interesting threesome with Wittgenstein and Bertrand
Russell as the threesome of Cambridge, except that there were rather
more Apostles than just these three (click here)
Zhong Ni (his birthname, but he was given the title Kong Fūzi - 孔夫子, "Master Kong" - which is then Latinised as Confucius):
either Aug 27 or Sept 28 for his birthdate (born 552 BCE; died 480 BCE);
mentioned on Jan 3; read his “Analects”
here
Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche (born October 15
1844; confirmed dead by representatives of God on Aug
25 1900): “Human, All Too Human” on Jan 11; human
all too inhuman (the "Ubermensch") on Feb 21;
Nihilism on May 11; Shaw’s “Man and Superman” on May 30; Menckened on Sept 13; cartooned
on Sept 29; born Oct 15; Wagnered on Oct 27; mentioned
on Feb 22, Oct 10
and Nov 30
Pyrrhоn ho Ēleios (Pyrrho of Elis) (born 360 BCE; died 270 BCE): highly questionable if he did or did not father
skepticism on May 11
François de la Rochefoucauld: (born Sept
15 1613; died March 17 1680) - where all the other philosophers
require volumes, and then still more volumes, Rochefoucauld managed to say
everything there was to say in just five hundred and four maxims (I tried to restrict my own “Notes On The Death of Zarathustra” to the same number, but failed),
though he did then add supplements in later editions (I supplemented “Zara”
with quotes from other people), several of which are quoted on the Sept 15 page, all of which are readable here
Susan Rosenblatt (Sontag): born Jan 28;
mentioned re Germaine Greer on Jan 29; at odds with Norman Mailer on March 15
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (born June 28
1712; died July 2 1778): with Sophie de Grouchy on May 5; mentioned
on Jan 18, April 15 and Nov 18
- the man more responsible than any other for giving the vote to the stupid:
click here
Bertrand Arthur William Russell: (born May 18 1872; died February 2 1970): I am not
entirely certain how one does the “philosophy of mathematics”, but apparently
this was his specialism, besides campaigning for that silly fantasy “peace
between nations”; apparently G.E. Moore
couldn’t stand him, and as to him getting a Nobel Prize; well, yes, maybe –
but for Literature?
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre: (born June 21
1905 [unpublished]; gave up both essence and existence on April 15 1980; “Les Mouches” on May 30; mentioned on Jan
9, Feb 21
Mathieu Delarue: vainly pursuing freedom on Feb 21
Arthur Schopenhauer: (born Feb 22 1788;
died September 21 1860); Menckened
on Sept 13 (and mentioned as such on Sept 12); simply mentioned on April
22 –
“the
philosopher of pessimism”, but I honestly don’t see how that is any different
from calling Leibnitz “the
philosopher of optimism”: both simply describe the world as they see it, and it
doesn’t exactly glow with the aura of high human standards; more interesting to
explore the fact that he came from Gdańsk, so he wasn’t really German at all,
but Polish - and then explore the lists of German thinkers, composers, etc, and
how many of them turn out not to have been German after all? (the same study of
20th century until now Americans would probably come up with similar
results: all borrowed, imported, stolen, bought)
Charles
Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu: quoted and quoted on his
birthdate, Jan 18 1689 (died February
10 1755); the innocent
source of the world’s most anti-Semitic book on Aug 26; referenced on June 19 - mostly politics,
but as a philosopher, not as an ideologue: bio here
Socrates of Athens (born
circa 470 BCE; died 399 BCE): moving humanity into middle school on Jan 3 - I
am conscious that I know practically nothing about him (that’s a quote), but if I were to write more about
him, it would be an attempt to work out, given that both had him as their
starting-point, how Plato and Aristotle turned out such
complete opposites, the one a right-wing fascist, the other a left-wing liberal
(and ironically it was the former, Plato, who wrote about his death, but
followers of the Platonic model who killed him, removing the poētikōs from the
republic: click here)
Benedict de Spinoza (Bento or Baruch Spinoza):
analysed by Montesquieu
on Jan 18,
and by Pierre Bayle on Nov 18; died Feb 21
1677; used as an exemplar on June 3 and Sept 13; excommunicated on July 27 1656, though my account of it is actually on Feb 1; David Nieto on Sept 30;
mentioned on Oct 10
[born November 24 1632 but I don’t have that on that date]
Juan de Prado (born
circa 1563; died 24 May 1631): “publicly disseminating heterodox ideas and inciting
others to start a riot against the rabbis” on Feb 21; “a Spanish Roman Catholic
priest” according to Wikipedia! Better off going here for his
bio
Daniel de Ribera: the third of the excommunicees on Feb 21, but I am unable to find anything more about him
Orobio de Castro: one of the Woke and Cancel Brigade who excommunicated Spinoza on Feb 21
Henry David Thoreau: (born July
12 1817; died May 6 1862): Walden Woods is what made him
famous, but I would love to be able to move him from this page to the
“responses to bullying”: he wrote about the need for civil disobedience – click
here for the generality, here for the text - but
did he ever turn theory into practice (refusing to pay his state poll tax
doesn’t count)?
Timon of Phlius (born
circa 320 BCE; deathdate unknown but circa 230 BCE): known as Timon the Sillographer from his three books of “Silloi” –
lampoons and satires in mock-Homeric form (with emphasis on the “mock”... click
here):
questioning again everything he hadn’t already questioned with Pyrrho on May 11
Giambattista Vico (born June 23 1668; died January 23 1744): introduced to his Oxford colleagues by Matthew Arnold on Dec 24; but you will also find him mentioned under James Joyce and Sam Beckett – bio here
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund (born September 11 1903; died August 6 1969): remembered by his pseudonym as Adorno, or fully Theodor W. Adorno, the W keeping the Wiesengrund for sentimental reasons: an inferno of over-written criticism on Feb 11; this website includes this para, which I am sure must be a quote from me: “He argued that humans in modern society are programmed at work and in their leisure, and though they seek to escape the monotony of their workplace, they are merely changing to another piece of the machine - from producer to consumer. There is no chance of becoming free individuals who can take part in the creation of society, whether at work or play.”
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (born April 26 1889 in Vienna, where he went to school with Hitler; died April 29 1951 in Cambridge): in the line of great thinkers on Feb 22; honoured with a plaque at the The London Bridge Niche on Feb 23
Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin): born April 27 1759; died September 10 1797): this is mum, in case you are confused; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, without the bracket, is the daughter, better known by her married name as Mary Shelley – she’s on the serious scribes page); as to mum, she’s a key figure on the Blue-Stockings page of Woman-Blindness, so I am saying no more here
Fanny Imlay: daughter of Mary
Wollstonecraft and “Captain” Gilbert
Imlay on April 27; some years later the
half-sister of Mary
Shelley
Gilbert Imlay: first “partner” (they never
married) of Mary Wollstonecraft on April 27 - try here
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