Henri Bergson

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his poetry and fiction and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events, he also wrote many... misanthropic diatribes on human nature. Valéry was born of a Corsican father and Genoese-Istrian mother in Sète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault, but he was raised in Montpellier, a larger urban center close by. After a traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university, then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was, for a while, part of the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé. Though his earliest publications date from his mid-twenties, Valéry did not become a full-time writer until 1920, when the man for whom he worked as private secretary, a former chief executive of the Havas news agency, Edouard Lebey, died of Parkinson's disease.
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Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.... Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied. The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity, was the only way to attain liberation.
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Baruch Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical... criticism, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely." Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Spinoza's name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means "the Blessed".
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Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th century Enlightenment. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences using reason and logic. This stood in sharp contrast... to the skepticism and lack of agreement or progress in empiricist philosophy. Kant’s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason , aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume. He stated: Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that: Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history.
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Gustave Le Bon was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded... theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behavior and crowd psychology. His work on crowd psychology became important during the first half of the twentieth century when it was used by media researchers such as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media. He also contributed to controversy about the nature of matter and energy. His book The Evolution of Matter was very popular in France , and though some of its ideas—notably that all matter was inherently unstable and was constantly and slowly transforming into luminiferous ether—were used by some physicists of the time , his specific formulations were not given much consideration. In 1896 he reported observing a new kind of radiation, which he termed "black light" , though it was later discovered not to exist.
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