Desiderius Erasmus (1468?—1536) Desiderius Erasmus was one of the leading activists and thinkers of the European Renaissance. His main activity was to write letters to the leading statesmen, humanists, printers, and theologians of the first three and a half decades of the sixteenth century. Erasmus was an indefatigable correspondent, controversialist, self-publicist, satirist, translator, commentator, éditeur, and provocateur of Renaissance culture. He was perhaps above all

Paul Ricoeur (1913—2005) Paul Ricoeur was among the most impressive philosophers of the 20th century continental philosophers, both in the unusual breadth and depth of his philosophical scholarship and in the innovative nature of his thought. He was a prolific writer, and his work is essentially concerned with that grand theme of philosophy: le sens de la vie. Ricoeur’s “tensive” style focuses on the tensions running

Scientific Representation To many philosophers, our science is intended to represent reality. Par exemple, some philosophers of science would say Newton’s theory of gravity uses the theoretical terms ‘center of mass’ and ‘gravitational force’ in order to represent how a solar system of planets behaves—the changing positions and velocities of the planets but not their color changes. Toutefois, it is very difficult to give a

Edward Jonathan Lowe (1950-2014) Edward Jonathan Lowe (usually cited as E. J. Lowe) was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. He made sustained and significant contributions to debates in metaphysics, ontologie, philosophy of mind, philosophie du langage, philosophical logic, et philosophie de la religion, as well as contributing important scholarly work in early modern philosophy (most notably on Locke).

Tu Weiming (1940—) Tu Weiming (pinyin: Du Weiming) is one of the most famous Chinese Confucian thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a prominent member of the third generation of “New Confucians,” Tu stressed the significance of religiosity within Confucianism. Inspired by his teacher Mou Zongsan as well as his decades of study and teaching at Princeton University, the University of California, et