Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
François-Marie Arouet was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his nom de plumeM. de Voltaire, he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—especially the Roman Catholic Church—and of slavery. Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, was a French-German philosopher, encyclopedist, writer, and prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He helped in the dissemination of "Protestant and especially German thought", particularly in the field of the sciences, but was best known for his atheism and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770) and The Universal Morality (1776).
William James Durant was an American writer, historian, and philosopher. He became best known for his work The Story of Civilization, which contains 11 volumes and details the history of eastern and western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital (1965) with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.
The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an 11-volume set of books covering both Eastern and Western civilizations for the general reader, with a particular emphasis on European (Western) history.
Ariel Durant was a Russian-born American researcher and writer. She was the coauthor of The Story of Civilization with her husband, Will Durant. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Extended order is an economics and sociology concept introduced by Friedrich Hayek in his book The Fatal Conceit. Hayek describes an extended order as the outcome of a system that embraces specialization and trade, and he claims that it "constitutes an information gathering process, able to call up, and put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control.” The result is an interconnected web where people can benefit from the actions and knowledge of those they don't know. This is possible and efficient, in Hayek's view, because a proper legal framework replaces trust, which is only practical in small circles of people who know each other socially. The extended order is at the heart of Hayek's thesis, in The Fatal Conceit, where he argues that "our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleading, known as capitalism.”
Barkham is a village and civil parish in the borough of Wokingham in Berkshire, England, located around 2 miles (3.2 km) southwest of the town of Wokingham.
The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World is a work of philosophy by Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789).
The Confessions is an autobiographical book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In modern times, it is often published with the title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to distinguish it from Saint Augustine's Confessions. Covering the first fifty-three years of Rousseau's life, up to 1765, it was completed in 1769, but not published until 1782, four years after Rousseau's death, even though Rousseau did read excerpts of his manuscript publicly at various salons and other meeting places.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and the Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
Ronald Leslie Numbers is an American historian of science. He was awarded the 2008 George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for "a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar".
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1968.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress is a book published in five volumes from 1905 to 1906, by Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana. It consists of Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science.
Freedom of Worship or Freedom to Worship is the second of the Four Freedoms oil paintings produced by the American artist Norman Rockwell. The series was based on the goals known as the Four Freedoms enunciated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, in his State of the Union Address delivered on January 6, 1941. Rockwell considered this painting and Freedom of Speech the most successful of the series. Freedom of Worship was published in the February 27, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post alongside an essay by philosopher Will Durant.
Issues in Science and Religion is a book by Ian Barbour. A biography provided by the John Templeton Foundation and published by PBS online states this book "has been credited with literally creating the contemporary field of science and religion."
Ariel is a spirit who appears in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Ariel is bound to serve the magician Prospero, who rescued him from the tree in which he was imprisoned by Sycorax, the witch who previously inhabited the island. Prospero greets disobedience with a reminder that he saved Ariel from Sycorax's spell, and with promises to grant Ariel his freedom. Ariel is Prospero's eyes and ears throughout the play, using his magical abilities to cause the tempest in Act One which gives the play its name, and to foil other characters' plots to bring down their master.
Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age is a book by Will Durant, published in 2001 and was written as a summary of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization. It describes important personalities and events in History. These 'Heroes' include Laozi, Muhammad, Kung fu Tze, The Buddha, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Akhenaton, Jewish prophets, Solon, Pericles, Euripides, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Augustus, The Five Good Emperors, Jesus Christ, Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon, among others. Originally planned as a series of audio lectures, Heroes of History was supposed to have twenty-three chapters, but Durant completed only twenty one before his death in 1981.
