Pedro da Fonseca

Called in his own time ‘the Portuguese Aristotle’, Pedro da Fonseca was a sixteenth-century Jesuit philosopher and theologian. Schooled as a Thomist, Fonseca was a master of the Greek, Arabic and scholastic traditions, which enabled him to pursue his own independent line on various issues dealt with by Aquinas and Aristotle. As reflected in his [...]

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, studied with Russell in Cambridge from 1911 to 1914 and worked again in Cambridge (with some interruptions) from 1929 to 1947.
His first book, [...]

Eric Voegelin

Throughout his career, Voegelin was concerned with modernity; unlike his contemporaries he sought the explanation of its character and deformities (especially totalitarianism) in the restoration of ‘political science’ as Plato and Aristotle understood it. He therefore explored order in the individual’s soul, political society, history and the universe, and its source in God. He did [...]

Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taught that the evolutionary process is governed by a ‘law of complexification’ which dictates that inorganic matter will reach ever more complex forms, resulting in inorganic matter being followed by organic matter and organic matter being followed by conscious life forms. Viewed by observers, humans are material systems within a larger [...]

Jean Piaget

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the founder of the field we now call cognitive development. His own term for the discipline was ‘genetic epistemology’, reflecting his deep philosophical concerns. Among Piaget’s most enduring contributions were his remarkably robust and surprising observations of children. Time after time, in a strikingly wide variety of domains, and [...]

Constantin Noica

Although Constantin Noica is one of the most representative Romanian philosophers, he is little known in the West. His most important writings have not yet been translated. In the early part of his life he wrote studies in the history of philosophy with particular focus on Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. He went on to contribute [...]

Carl Gustav Jung

Jung was among the leaders in the development of depth psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. An early follower of Sigmund Freud, he broke with the founder of psychoanalysis in 1913 and established his own school of analytical psychology.
Jung’s theoretical development originated in his work on the word association test and the theory [...]

Kurt Gödel

The greatest logician of the twentieth century, Gödel is renowned for his advocacy of mathematical Platonism and for three fundamental theorems in logic: the completeness of first-order logic; the incompleteness of formalized arithmetic; and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis with the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.
A Sudeten German born [...]

Jacques Maritain

Maritain was one of the most influential twentieth-century interpreters of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His interests spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology.
His acknowledged masterpiece is The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). In this work, Maritain expands on Thomistic thought and seeks to explain the [...]

Ernst Cassirer

Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of ‘symbolic form’, for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for [...]