1850 - 1900 CE Flashcards
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1815 - 1902
Leader of the women’s suffrage movement in USA along with Susan B Anthony.
Rudolf Lotze
1817 - 1881
Argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws and relations, then developments in the universe could be explained as the functioning of a world mind.
His medical studies were pioneering works in scientific psychology.
Karl Marx
1818 - 188 3
Influential German philosopher best known for writing the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
Held that human societies develop through class conflict.
In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour-power in return for wages.
Historical materialism.
Believed that “class consciousness” would develop and a revolution would happen.
Friedrich Engels
1820 - 1895
Developed Marxism with Karl Marx and supported him financially so he could write.
Herbert Spencer
1820 - 1903
English polymath who originated the phrase “survival of the fittest” after reading Darwin’s book.
Developed an all-embracing view of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies.
Very popular and often compared to Bertrand Russell.
Susan B Anthony
1820 - 1906
Played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. Also involved in abolitionist movement.
Worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Eventually in 1978 the 19th amendment was ratified and women were allowed to vote.
Travelled widely and gave many speeches.
First female depicted on US coinage in 1979.
Charles Sander Peirce
1839 - 1914
“The father of pragmatism”.
“America’s greatest logician”.
Defined the concept of abductive reasoning.
Mathematical induction and deductive reasoning.
As early as 1886, he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits. The same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.
Philipp Mainländer
1841 - 1876
“Perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature”.
“The will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality.”
William James
1842 - 1910
“The father of American psychology”.
Established pragmatism with Charles Sanders Peirce.
Radical empiricism.
Published The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 - 1900
Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony.
Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power.
Vilfredo Pareto
1848 - 1923
Pareto principle is named after him for his work on income distribution.
Gottlob Frege
1848 - 1925
“The father of analytic philosophy”.
“The greatest logician since Aristotle”.
Henri Poincare
In maths he was “the last universalist” since he excelled in all fields.
Discovered a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory.
Made inroads to special relativity.
Suggested gravity waves.
Josiah Royce
1855 - 1916
“The founder of American idealism”.
One of the few American philosophers who studied and wrote history.
Sigmund Freud
1856 - 1939
The founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Redefined sexuality to include its infantile forms - the Oedipus complex.
Repression and theory of the unconscious.
Id, ego and super-ego.
Libido - sexualised energy.
Death drive - the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt.
Edmund Husserl
1859 - 1938
Estsblished the school of phenomenonology.
In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality.
In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy.
Husserl’s thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.
Henri Bergson
1859 - 1941
Nobel prize in literature.
Known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
John Dewey
1859 - 1952
“Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.”
Dewey considered two fundamental elements - schools and civil society - to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality.
He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.
Jane Addams
1860 - 1935
The first female public philosopher in USA and an important figure in suffrage movement.
She helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace.
Pierre Duhem
1861 - 1916
As a philosopher of science, he is remembered principally for his views on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria.
Rudolf Steiner
1861 - 1925
Attempted to reconcile science with spirituality.
Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947
English mathematician and philosopher best known as the defining figure of process philosophy.
Bertrand Russell was his student.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.
Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947
English mathematician and philosopher best known as the defining figure of process philosophy.
Bertrand Russell was his student.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.
Max Weber
1864 - 1920
Father of sociology along with Marx and Durkheim.
Believed there are multiple causes to any outcome.
Weber was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive rather than purely empiricist methods, based on a subjective understanding of the meanings that individuals attach to their own actions.
Weber is also known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, emphasising the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as driving factors of capitalism.
J. M. E. McTaggart
1866 - 1925
Idealist metaphysician known for “The Unreality of Time” (1908), in which he argues that time is unreal. The work has been widely discussed through the 20th century and into the 21st.
Carl Jung
1975 - 1961
Worked with Freud on a joint vision of human psychology but then their ideas developed into different systems.
Individuation - the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered this the main task of human development.
Synchronicity.
Archetypal phenomena.
The collective unconscious.
The psychological complex.
Extraversion and introversion.
