John Searle John Rogers Searle (/sɜrl/; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000; the National Humanities Medal in 2004; and the Mind & Brain Prize in 2006. Among his notable concepts is the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence. Biography[edit] Searle's father, G. Politics[edit] In The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971),[4] Searle investigates the causes behind the campus protests of the era. Shortly after 9/11, Searle wrote an article claiming that 9/11 was a particular event in a long-term struggle against forces that are intractably opposed to the United States, and signalled support for a more muscular neoconservative interventionist foreign policy.
Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/ TEWR-ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, pioneering computer scientist, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.[2][3][4] Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.[5] During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. Early life and career[edit] Cryptanalysis[edit]
What Higher Consciousness Really Means, How We Attain It, and What It Does for the Human Spirit “[Leonardo da Vinci’s] unique brain wiring … allowed him the opportunity to experience the world from the vantage point of a higher dimension,” Leonard Shlain wrote in his stimulating inquiry into the source of Leonardo’s genius. But what is “higher consciousness,” really, and can it be unmoored from the baggage of spiritualism and superstition to enrich our secular understanding of what it means to be human? Few contemporary thinkers have done more to reinstate philosophy as a guiding light for public life and a practical tool for personal growth than philosopher and School of Life founder Alain de Botton, who has written beautifully about such enduring ideas as the role of art in human happiness and what Nietzsche teaches us about the character-building role of difficulty. De Botton’s fantastic recent conversation with Tim Ferriss pointed me to this equally fantastic video essay examining the question of higher consciousness.
Philosophical Investigations Philosophical Investigations (German: Philosophische Untersuchungen) is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book was published posthumously in 1953. Wittgenstein discusses numerous problems and puzzles in the fields of semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind, putting forth the view that conceptual confusions surrounding language use are at the root of most philosophical problems. Wittgenstein alleges that the problems are traceable to a set of related assumptions about the nature of language, which themselves presuppose a particular conception of the essence of language. This conception is considered and ultimately rejected for being too general; that is, as an essentialist account of the nature of language it is simply too narrow to be able to account for the variety of things we do with language. Philosophical Investigations is highly influential. The text[edit] Method and presentation[edit]
Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke (/sɔːl ˈkrɪpki/; born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is currently McCosh Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Princeton University and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic. Biography[edit] Saul Kripke is the oldest of three children born to Dorothy K. After teaching briefly at Harvard, he moved to Rockefeller University in New York City in 1967, and then received a full-time position at Princeton University in 1977. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, Omaha (1977), Johns Hopkins University (1997), University of Haifa, Israel (1998), and the University of Pennsylvania (2005). Work[edit]
Marquis de Sade Life[edit] Early life and education[edit] The Marquis de Sade was born in the Hôtel de Condé, Paris, to Jean Baptiste François Joseph, Count de Sade and Marie Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, cousin and Lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Condé. He was educated by an uncle, the Abbé de Sade. Later, he attended a Jesuit lycée, then pursued a military career, becoming Colonel of a Dragoon regiment, and fighting in the Seven Years' War. Sade's father, Jean-Baptiste François Joseph de Sade. Title and heirs[edit] The men of the Sade family alternated between using the marquis and comte (count) titles. For many years, Sade's descendants regarded his life and work as a scandal to be suppressed. Scandals and imprisonment[edit] Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. Beginning in 1763, Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz German mathematician and philosopher (1646–1716) Gottfried Wilhelm (von)[a] Leibniz[b] (1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. Leibniz is also called, "The Last Universal Genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime.[17] He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. As a philosopher, he was a leading representative of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. Biography[edit] Early life[edit]
Graham Priest Graham Priest[1] (born 1948) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and also at St. Andrews University. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. His thesis advisor was John Lane Bell. Work[edit] He is known for his defence of dialetheism, his in-depth analyses of the logical paradoxes (holding the thesis that there is a uniform treatment for many well-known paradoxes, such as the semantic, set-theoretic and Liar paradoxes), and his many writings related to paraconsistent and other non-classical logics. Priest, a long-time resident of Australia, now residing in New York City, is the author of numerous books, and has published articles in nearly every major philosophical and logical journal. Priest has also published on metaphilosophy. In addition to his work in philosophy and logic, Priest practiced Karate-do.