Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637) was a Dutch pioneer of early modern atomist and mechanist speculation. By profession a maker of candles and water supply systems, and later head of ...
Belinskii was considered by his followers in the nineteenth century, and by the official ideology of the Soviet period, to be not only Russia’s greatest literary critic, but ...
Walter Benjamin was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers of culture. His work combines formal analysis of art works with social theory to generate an approach which ...
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was an influential German intellectual, whose activity spanned the late years of the German empire and the volatile Weimar period, culminating in a tragic ...
Jeremy Bentham held that all human and political action could be analysed in terms of pleasure and pain, and so made comprehensible. One such analysis is how people ...
Nikolai Berdiaev, Russian religious idealist, was one of many non-Marxist thinkers expelled from Russia by communist authorities in 1922. Although attracted to Marxism in his youth, even then ...
So far as he can be classified, Bergson would be called a ‘process philosopher’, emphasizing the primacy of process and change rather than of the conventional solid objects ...
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Bergson’s thinking focuses on the major questions of philosophy: What is time? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the significance of evolution? What are the sources ...
George Berkeley, who was born in Ireland and who eventually became Bishop of Cloyne, is best known for three works that he published while still very young: An ...
Berlin said that he decided about 1945 to give up philosophy, in which he had worked up to that time, in favour of the history of ideas. Some ...
Bhartṛhari is the Indian philosopher of grammar par excellence. Drawing on practically all the schools of thought of his time – religious, philosophical, linguistic and ritual – ...
Biel was the last great systematizer of scholastic theology and philosophy. Not noted for originality, he sought to produce a synthesis of the work of his predecessors. His ...
Poet, playwright, essayist and philosopher, Blaga was the most interesting and original Romanian thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. His philosophical ideal was a system ...
Blasius of Parma was an important Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer who popularized the achievements of Oxford logic and Parisian physics in Italy. He questioned the Aristotelian foundations ...
Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream ...
Jean Bodin was one of the great universal scholars of the later Renaissance. Despite political distractions, he made major contributions to historiography and the philosophy of history, economic ...
Boethius was a principal transmitter of classical Greek logic from Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists to the schoolmen of the medieval Latin West. His contemporaries were largely ...
Boethius developed an original theory of scientific knowledge designed to reconcile science with Christian doctrine without allowing one to determine the contents of the other. His main strategy ...
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, né Malinovskii, was a Russian thinker who helped Lenin create the Bolshevik or Communist Party, broke with Lenin over a mixture of philosophical and political ...
Boltzmann is famous in both physics and philosophy for interpreting thermodynamics in terms of molecular movement as if the second or ‘entropy’ law were merely statistically valid. This ...
Bernard Bolzano was a lone forerunner both of analytical philosophy and phenomenology. Born in Prague in the year when Kant’s first Critique appeared, he became one of the ...
Bonaventure (John of Fidanza) developed a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which Neoplatonic doctrines are transformed by a Christian framework. Though often remembered for his denunciations of ...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian who associated Christian belief and political action in an exemplary fashion. His part in the struggle of the Confessing Church and ...
In his youth, Bonnet made a meticulous and creative study of insects, which won him international fame for his discoveries, as well as his methods. He turned to ...
George Boole, a British mathematician, is credited with making a fundamental contribution to modern logic. If Leibniz’s manuscript essays on logic, effectively unknown until the end of the ...