Noam Chomsky

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy... of language and to the theory and practice of education. In particular, he is widely recognized as having been the architect of the Prussian education system which was used as a model for education systems in countries such as the United States and Japan. Humboldt was born in Potsdam, Margraviate of Brandenburg, and died in Tegel, Province of Brandenburg. His younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt, was equally famous, as a geographer. Humboldt was a philosopher of note and wrote On the Limits of State Action in 1791-2 , one of the boldest defences of the liberties of the Enlightenment. It influenced John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty through which von Humboldt's ideas became known in the English-speaking world.
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John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of... progressive education and liberalism. Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics. In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt. Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means.
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Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his psuedonym George Orwell, was an English author. His work is marked by a profound conscientiousness of social injustice, an intense dislike of totalitarianism, and a passion for clarity in language. His two most popular works are 1984 and Animal Farm.

Charles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research,... system analysis and ethics. Churchman was born in Philadelphia in 1913, Pennsylvania, to Clark Wharton Churchman and Helen Norah Fassitt, descendents of old line Philadelphia families. His first intellectual love was for philosophy and this far-ranging love for wisdom captivated him to the end of his life. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1935, a master's in 1936, and a PhD in 1938, all in philosophy. One of his teachers was Edgar A. Singer, who had been a student at Harvard of the philosopher and psychologist William James. Before completing his dissertation, in 1937, he became Instructor of Philosophy, also at the University of Pennsylvania.
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