René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, and later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification", often in contrast to other possible sources of knowledge such as faith, tradition, or sensory experience. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".
Charles Margrave Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.
Étienne Henri Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a neo-Thomist philosopher. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" (member) of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Elisabeth of the Palatinate, also known as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate, or Princess-Abbess of Herford Abbey, was the eldest daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and Elizabeth Stuart. Elisabeth of the Palatinate was a philosopher best known for her correspondence with René Descartes. She was critical of Descartes' dualistic metaphysics and her work anticipated the metaphysical concerns of later philosophers.
Postanalytic philosophy describes a detachment from the mainstream philosophical movement of analytic philosophy, which is the predominant school of thought in English-speaking countries. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines the movement as denoting "philosophers who owe much to Analytic philosophy but who think that they have made some significant departure from it." The movement cannot be unified into a single positive project as it is defined it terms of what it stands against, although it has generally been seen as bridging the gap between analytic and continental philosophy.
Desmond M. Clarke was an Irish author and professor of philosophy at University College Cork (UCC). His research interests include history of philosophy and theories of science, with a specific interest in the writings of René Descartes, as well as contemporary church/state relations, human rights, and nationalism.
In his final philosophical treatise, The Passions of the Soul, completed in 1649 and dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, René Descartes contributes to a long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of "the passions". The passions were experiences – now commonly called emotions in the modern period – that had been a subject of debate among philosophers and theologians since the time of Plato.
Ernan McMullin was an Irish philosopher who last served as the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He was an internationally respected philosopher of science who has written and lectured extensively on subjects ranging from the relationship between cosmology and theology, to the role of values in understanding science, to the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. He is the only person to ever hold the presidency of four of the major US philosophical associations. He was an expert on the life of Galileo.
Dermot Moran is an Irish philosopher specialising in phenomenology and in medieval philosophy, and he is also active in the dialogue between analytic and continental philosophy. He is currently the inaugural holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a founding editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
Rémi Brague is a French historian of philosophy, specializing in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought of the Middle Ages. He is professor emeritus of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Romano Guardini chair of philosophy (emeritus) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Interactionism or interactionist dualism is the theory in the philosophy of mind which holds that matter and mind are two distinct and independent substances that exert causal effects on one another. An example of your mind influencing your body would be if you are depressed, you can observe the effects on your body, such as a slouched posture, a lackluster smile, etc. Another example, this time of your body affecting your mind would be: If you struck your toe very forcefully on a door, you would experience terrible pain. Interactionism is one type of dualism, traditionally a type of substance dualism though more recently also sometimes a form of property dualism. Many philosophers and scientists have responded to this theory with arguments both supporting and opposing its relevance to life and whether the theory corresponds to reality.
Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..
Ruth Hagengruber is a German philosopher, currently professor and head of philosophy at the University of Paderborn. She specialises in the history of women philosophers as well as philosophy of economics and computer science and is a specialist on Émilie Du Châtelet. Hagengruber is the director of the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists and founder of the research area EcoTechGender. She invented the Libori Summer School and is the creator of the Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers, for which she holds the position of editor in chief together with Mary Ellen Waithe.
Alison Simmons (born 1965) is an American philosopher and Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. Her primary scholarly interests are in early modern theories of mind, the relationship between mind and body, natural philosophy, and sensory perception. With Barbara Grosz, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
William Franke is an American academic and philosopher, professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.
Peter Scott Adamson is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. He holds two academic positions: professor of philosophy in late antiquity and in the Islamic world at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; and professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at King's College London.
Richard L. Velkley is an American philosopher and Celia Scott Weatherhead Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. Velkley is known for his expertise on Kant, Rousseau, and post-Kantian philosophy. He is a former associate editor of The Review of Metaphysics (1997–2006) and a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America (2017–18).
The Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists (HWPS) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Paderborn, focused on the work of historical women philosophers and scientists. The Center is responsible for the publication of the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. The Center also awards the annual Elizabeth of Bohemia prize, Europe's first prize honoring women philosophers. The Center received a major grant from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for the study of women philosophers in Ukraine, and also maintains a research network and talk series for researchers working on the history of women philosophers and scientists.
Dmitri Nikulin is a philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York City, New York, US. He has been a visiting professor at the École pratique des hautes études, Paris and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He has been a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Germany, at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he worked with Alvin Plantinga, and at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, Germany.
