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Jan 1, 1473
Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473-1543)
Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically-based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" - On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres - is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution. -
Oct 10, 1546
Tycho Brahe
(1546-1601) Tycho Brahe, born in 1546, was the eldest son of a noble Danish family, and as such appeared destined for the natural aristocratic occupations of hunting and warfare. However, he had an uncle Joergen, a country squire and vice-admiral, who was more educated, and childless. Tycho's father had agreed with the uncle before Tycho was born that if Tycho was a boy, the uncle could adopt and raise him. He changed his mind and reneged. Then, when a younger brother was born, the uncle kidnap -
Jan 1, 1561
Sir Francias Bacon
(1561-1626)
Bacon, Francis, philosopher and statesman, was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, by his second wife, a daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, whose sister married William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the great minister of Queen Elizabeth. He was born at York House in the Strand on Jan. 22, 1561, and in his 13th year was sent with his elder brother Anthony to Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he first met the Queen, who was impressed by his p -
Jan 1, 1564
Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642)
He discovered the four moon of Jupiter -
Jan 1, 1571
Johannes Kepler
(1571-1630)
Something with the solar system. -
Thomas Hobbes
(1599-1679)
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is best known for his political thought, and deservedly so. His vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide eve -
Rene Descartes
(1596-1650)
"Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have." Descartes, who was convinced that science and mathematics could be used to explain everything in nature, was the first to describe the physical universe in terms of matter and motion, seeing the universe a as giant mathematically designe -
Room-mates Beneficial to Adolescent Development
The Enlightenment encouraged the development of hundreds of universities and conservatories across Europe. For the first time, many young scholars were placed together in mass dormitories, to share bunks and knowledge. Though many parents expressed concern about diseases and bad influences, great thinker Sir Francis Bacon published a pamphlet on the benefits of letting complete strangers invade your personal space and take your food. -
Baruch Spinoza
(1632-1677)
"All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love." -
John Locke
(1632-1704)
John Locke was an Oxford scholar, medical researcher and physician, political operative, economist and idealogue for a revolutionary movement, as well as being one of the great philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. His monumental Essay Concerning Human Understanding aims to determine the limits of human understanding. -
Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727)
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. -
Pierre Bayle
(1647-1727) Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was a Huguenot, i.e., a French Protestant, who spent almost the whole of his productive life as a refugee in Holland. His life was devoted entirely to scholarship, and his erudition was second to none in his, or perhaps any, period. Much of what he wrote was embedded in technical religious issues such as that of the Real Presence (roughly, the relation between Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist). Nonetheless, for a century he was one the most widely r -
Baron de Montesquieu
(1689-1755)
Montesquieu was one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Insatiably curious and mordantly funny, he constructed a naturalistic account of the various forms of government, and of the causes that made them what they were and that advanced or constrained their development. He used this account to explain how governments might be preserved from corruption. He saw despotism, in particular, as a standing danger for any government not already despotic, and argued that i -
Francois-Marie Arouet
(1694-1778) Voltaire, a great French literary figure, was a popularizer of the science of Newton. He is most famous for his novel Candide in which he makes fun of Leibniz who held that this is the best of all possible worlds. -
Francois Quesnay
(1694-1774)
François Quesnay was the leading figure of the Physiocrats, generally considered to be the first school of economic thinking. The name “Physiocrat” derives from the Greek words phýsis, meaning “nature,” and kràtos, meaning “power.” The Physiocrats believed that an economy’s power derived from its agricultural sector. They wanted the government of Louis XV, who ruled France from 1715 to 1774, to deregulate and reduce taxes on French agriculture so that poor France could emulate wealth -
Emilie du Chatelet
(1706-1749)
1706 Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil du Chatelet was born to Alexandra Elizabeth de Froulay and Louis Nicolas Le Tonnelier de Breteuil.
She was named Gabrielle-Emilie. (Much later in her life, Voltaire and others dropped the Gabrielle and called her Emilie. Voltaire is also responsible for calling her du Chatelet. Her husband's name was the Marquis du Chastellet. Most of her publications were made under that name. Such was the power of Voltaire that after his time, most ref -
William Pitt
(1708-1778)
William Pitt was born at Hayes, Kent on 28th May 1759. He suffered from poor health and was educated at home. His father, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was the former M.P. for Old Sarum and one of the most important politicians of the period. The Earl of Chatham was determined that his son would eventually become a member of the House of Commons and at an early age William was given lessons on how to become an effective orator. When William was fourteen he was sent to Pembroke Hal -
Louis XIV
(1710-1774)
After becoming king in 1715, the young Louis XV, known as the “Beloved”, decided in 1722 to reinstall the government and court in the Château de Versailles, abandoned since the death of Louis XIV. In 1725, he married Marie Leszczinska and fathered an heir to the throne. Passionately interested in science and botany, he enriched the gardens of the Château and commissioned the building of the Petit Trianon palace for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. -
David Hume
(1711-1776)
The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religi -
Rousseau
(1712-1778)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Europe. His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, was the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. In this work, Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. -
Denis Diderot
(1713-1784)
Denis Diderot was the most prominent of the French Encyclopedists. He was educated by the Jesuits, and, refusing to enter one of the learned professions, was turned adrift by his father and came to Paris, where he lived from hand to mouth for a time. Gradually, however, he became recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the day. His first independent work was the Essai sur le merite et la vertu (1745). As one of the editors of the Dictionnaire de medecine (6 vols., Paris, 17 -
Madame de Popadour
(1721-1764)
She was a french whore. -
Adam Smith
(1723-1790)
Adam Smith was born in a small village in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where his widowed mother raised him. At age fourteen, as was the usual practice, he entered the University of Glasgow on scholarship. He later attended Balliol College at Oxford, graduating with an extensive knowledge of European literature and an enduring contempt for English schools. -
Paul-Henri Thiry
(1723-1789)
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (8 December 1723 – 21 January 1789[1]) was a French-German author, philosopher and encyclopedist. He was an important figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate. He spent most of his life in Paris, where he kept a salon. He is best known for his atheism. He wrote a lot. Most of his writings are against religion. His best-known book is the System of Nature. -
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stat -
Edmund Burke
(1729-1797)
Edmund Burke, was born in Dublin, January 12, educated at a Quaker boarding school and at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1750 he entered the Middle Temple, London, but soon abandoned law for literary work. His Vindication of Natural Society, was published in 1756, as was also his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. From 1761 to 1783 he was back in Dublin as private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, at that time premier, and entered Parl -
George 3
(1738-1820)
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738[1] – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of these two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death. He was concurrently Duke and prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg ("Hanover") in the Holy Roman Empire until his promotion to King of Hanover on 12 October 1814. He was the third British monarch of t -
Frederick the Great
(1740-1786)
Frederick the Great remains one of the most famous German rulers of all time for his military successes and his domestic reforms that made Prussia one of the leading European nations. Frederick II (the Great) was king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, and he stands as one of the greatest of the Enlightened Despots. He was an absolute ruler, but he lived under the principle that he was the "first servant of the state." He consequently did not rule by his own personal whims, but always und -
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759-1797)
The Anglo-Irish feminist, intellectual and writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, was born in London, the second of six children. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, was a family despot who bullied his wife, Elizabeth Dixon, into a state of wearied servitude. He spent a fortune which he had inherited in various unsuccessful ventures at farming which took the family to six different locales throughout Britain by 1780, the year Mary's mother died. -
Cathrine the Great
(1762-1796)
atherine II, (Russian: Екатерина II Великая, Yekaterina II Velikaya), also known as Catherine the Great (German: Katharina die Große), Empress of Russia, was born in Stettin, Pomerania, Prussia on 2 May [O.S. 21 April] 1729 as Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg. She was the most renowned and the longest-ruling female leader of Russia, reigning from 9 July [O.S. 28 June] 1762 after a coup d'état and the assassination of her husband, Peter III (just after the end of t -
Joseph 2
Ruled from (1780-1790) -
Aristotle
(384 B.C.- 322 B.C.) He did cool stuff.
