Colin Wilson

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic.... Not limited to empiricism, but believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, he worked on a method of phenomenological reduction by which a subject may come to know directly an essence. Although born into a Jewish family, Husserl was baptized as a Lutheran in 1886. He studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl himself taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928. Thereafter he gave two notable lectures: at Paris in 1929, and at Prague in 1935. The notorious 1933 race laws of the Nazi regime took away his academic standing and privileges.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains... substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, amor fati, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
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George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was an influential spiritual teacher of the early to middle 20th century. Gurdjieff called his discipline "The Work" according to his principles and instructions, or the "Fourth Way" and at one point described his teaching as being "esoteric Christianity". At different... times in his life, Gurdjieff formed and closed various schools around the world to teach the work. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives and humanity's place in the universe. The title of his third series of writings, Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', expresses the essence of his teachings. His complete series of books is entitled All and Everything. Gurdjieff was born to a Greek father and Armenian mother in Alexandropol , then part of the Russian Empire.
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Benjamin Walker is the truncated pen name of George Benjamin Walker, who also writes under the pseudonym Jivan Bhakar. He is a British citizen, and an Indian-born author on religion and philosophy, and an authority on esoterica in all its curious forms. He was born George Benjamin Walker, in... Calcutta , the son of Dr Simeon Benjamin Walker, M.D., and Mary Emily Fordyce, both of Pune, , India. In some remote dialects, such as the one of the tribe who created Benjamin Walker, his name is spelt Bianjiamian Wiakiar [Source: CBBC]. Dr Simeon Walker carried out a great deal of humanitarian work, in India, establishing a centre of studies called The Hall of Literature, Science and Hygiene that was formally opened by the Gaekwar of Beroda in 1900. The building was accidentally burned to the ground in 1902, along with thousands of books, manuscripts and official documents in Sanskrit, Marathi, Gujarati, Hebrew, and English, many of which had been contributed by scholars and old families who desired to contribute to this enterprise.
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