Bertrand Russell

George Boole was an English-born mathematician and logician. His work was in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and he is now best known as the author of The Laws of Thought. As the inventor of the prototype of what is now called Boolean logic, which became the basis of the... modern digital computer, Boole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science. Boole said, no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise ... those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning ... George Boole's father, John Boole , was a tradesman in Lincoln and gave him lessons. He had an elementary school education, but little further formal and academic teaching. William Brooke, a bookseller in Lincoln, may have helped him with Latin; which he may also have learned at the school of Thomas Bainbridge. He was self-taught in modern languages.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. The novelist Mary Shelley was his second wife. He is most famous for such... classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included Queen Mab , Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs and the unfinished work The Triumph of Life. The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound were dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. Although he has typically been figured as a "reluctant dramatist", he was passionate about the theatre, and his plays continue to be performed today. He wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi and St.
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Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and logician. He also had a medical degree and was unusually well versed in biology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws, relations and developments in the universe could be explained as the functioning of a world mind.... His medical studies were pioneering works in scientific psychology. Lotze was born in Bautzen, Saxony, Germany, the son of a physician. He was educated at the gymnasium of Zittau; he had an enduring love of the classical authors, publishing a translation of Sophocles' Antigone into Latin verse in his middle age. He attended the University of Leipzig as a student of philosophy and natural sciences, but entered officially as a student of medicine when he was seventeen. Lotze's early studies were mostly governed by two distinct interests: the first was scientific, based upon mathematical and physical studies under the guidance of E. H. Weber, Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann and Gustav Fechner. The other was his aesthetic and artistic interest, which was developed under the care of Christian Hermann Weisse.
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John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important... to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa.
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