Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, in Wilhelmine Germany. After graduating from high school in Koenigsberg in 1924, Arendt began to study theology that fall at the University of Marburg. where she met the young philosopher Martin Heidegger. Her brief but passionate affair with Heidegger, began in 1925 but ended when she went on to study at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers. Because of the Nazi persecution in late nineteen thirties, she fled first to France, and then to the United States, where she obtained her citizenship and spent her rest of her life.

Arendt is a well-known German-American philosopher and political theorist. Some of her best known books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951,The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), and On Revolution (1968). Her books could be characterized by a yearning to reconstruct political philosophy rather than to explore the devolution of political history.

Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece in 384 B.C. His father was a notable physician, under whose influence Aristotle developed his great observational talents. At the age of 17 Aristotle went to Athen to study at Plato's Academy. There Aristotle stayed for 20 years and became Plato's most famous pupil, and indeed turned out to become one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Aristotle himself had a famous pupil, Alexander the Great. Aristotle died at his mothers family's estate in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea in the year of 322BC.

Aristotle was very gifted and talented in various areas. The most central theoretical theme in his philosophy is metaphysics, the study of beings qua being. This involved logic, semantics and metaphysics. In his practical philosphy ethics and philosophy of politics is the main themes. In addition Aristotle were concerned with, and wrote on, epistemology, physics, biology, meteorology, dynamics, mathematics, psychology, rhetoric, dialectic and aesthetics. Aristotle by some ridiculed for his view and works and on physics and highly celebrated for his works on biology. Others defend his views on physics, since they are meant to be concerned with possibility of the science, not the actual observations in physics. In the 20th century a new appreciation has developed of Aristotle's method and its relevance to education, literary criticism, the analysis of human action, and political analysis.

Barthes, Roland was born in Cherbourg, France on November 12, 1915. His father was a naval lieutenant and died in a sea battle one year after Barthes was born. In 1924, the family moved to Paris, where Barthes received his most of his education. From 1962 until his death in 1980, he was the Director of the Institute in the Sciology of 'Signs, Symbols and Representations' at the école des Hautes études, where he conducted seminars on the sociologies of signs and collective representations. In 1976, Barthes was elected to a Chair in Literary Semiology at the Collége de France, France's most prestigious acadmic institution. He is a frequent visitor to the United States, where he taught in many universities.

Barthes is generally recognized as an influential poststructural social, literary, linguistic critic. Some of his works are Critical Essays, Criticisim and Truth, Elements of Semiology, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New Critical Essays, The Rustle of Language, Sollers Writer.

Bergson, Henri (1859-1941) is a French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner of literature.Bergson was born in Paris, October 18, 1859, and received his education at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. He taught in various secondary schools from 1881 until 1898, when he accepted a professorship at the École Normale Supérieure. Two years later he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. In 1914 Bergson was elected to the French Academy. In 1927 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He died January 4, 1941.

The influence of Bergson's earlier books, as well as his many papers and lectures, on the philosophers, artists, and writers of the 20th century is extensive. He was a master prose stylist and a brilliant lecturer.Although often associated with the intuitionalist school of philosophy, Bergsonism is too original and eclectic a philosophy to be thus categorized. Bergson did, however, emphasize the importance of intuition over intellect, as he promoted the idea of two opposing currents: inert matter in conflict with organic life as the vital urge strives toward free creative action.

Some of Bergson's works are Time and Free Will (1889; trans. 1910), Matter and Memory (1896; trans. 1911), Laughter (1900; trans. 1901), Creative Evolution (1907; trans. 1911), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932; trans. 1935).

Simone de Beauvoir was born on Boulevard Raspail, Paris, in 1908. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a strict Catholic from a bourgeois family. It is said that de Beauvoir was inspired to become an intellectual because she was caught between her father's pagan morals and her mother's rigid religious standards. She came to the realization that earthly joys are not to be given up (as her religion dictated) but instead, to be appreciated. This way of thinking changed her for life. She lived passionately and for the moment. In "giving up" religion she developed a deep sense of aloneness.

When Simone was 21 she lived with her grandmother and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. There she met other students and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre became her best friend and intellectual equal for life. "He would prove that he was the right one to spend time with, and he was," she said. He was "the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence." Simone de Beauvoir taught at the Lycee and she became a regular amongst friends who would frequent the cafes to write and discuss. Sartre was one of her favorite companions and they seemed to always be interested in each other. Their relationship became famous for the two commitments that they made to each other and the public. The first, was a promise to remain free to love other people. The second was to preserve their unity by practicing perfect honesty and total openness about everything. Together, they decided that nothing would ever be covert between them. It is said that one time, Sartre proposed to her, and even though she was scared of a possible separation she declined. She felt strongly that her relationship not be institutionalized. She may have had too high of expectations, but she maintained the courage to break concrete patterns and social conventions and taboos.

De Beauvoir went to study German philosophy in Berlin and remained in touch with Sartre. By 1943 Simone had completed several works, including: The Blood of Others, and All Men are Mortal. Simultaneously, Sartre had been writing No Exit from his jail cell during the war. The success of their work moved them into circles with Camus, Picasso, Bataille and other artists and intellectuals. In Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) (1949), de Beauvoir traced the development of male oppression through historical, literary, and mythical sources. It shows especially the influence of the philosopher Henri Bergson. De Beauvoir provides a metaphysical context for the experience of choice and freedom: "It's very complicated. These possibles which are in me, it's necessary that little by little I kill off all but one; it's thus that I see life: a thousand possibles in childhood, which fall little by little until on the last day there is no longer more than one reality, one has lived one life; but it is the élan vital of Bergson that I'm thinking of here, which divides, allowing tendency after tendency to fall away until only one is realized."

Simone de Beauvoir attributes the oppression of women to a systematic objectification of the male as "normal" and the female as "Other," leading to the loss of social and personal identity. Her works of fiction focus on women who take responsibility for themselves by making life-altering decisions, and the many volumes of her own autobiography exhibit the application of similar principles in reflection on her own experiences. She explains that, "far from suffering from being a woman, I have on the contrary, from the age 21, accumulated the advantages of both sexes." The Second Sex caused outrage across the world and launched feminism as a serious force. But shortly before writing it she met and fell in love with an American writer, Nelson Algren who was on the brink of success with his two most famous works, The Man with a Golden Arm and Walk on the Wild Side. He was to become one of America's toughest realist writers of the 20th century, and both his best sellers were made into movies, launching the careers of Frank Sinatra and Jane Fonda.

Their influence on each other's work was huge; Nelson Algren repeatedly rewrote his work until Simone de Beauvoir was satisfied, And The Second Sex would have been a very different book had de Beauvoir not met Algren. But de Beauvoir apparantly went too far when she wrote The Mandarins, a thinly-masked account of their relationship. Even to the end of his life Algren savagely attacked her in interviews for what he saw as an unforgivable betrayal. Throughout all these upheavals Simone de Beauvoir maintained her close friendship with Jean Paul Sartre. She traveled and stayed with Sartre until he died in 1980. Their relationship has gone down in history, not only for being the unity of two brilliant thinkers, but also for its equal and genuine qualities, so uncommon for the day. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about her life with Sartre in Adieux: a Farewell to Sartre.

Dogenes was born around 413 B.C in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea. He was once caught in counterfeiting the currency with his father and was banished from the city. So, he went to Athens, where he sought Antisthenes, the founder of cynicism, as his mentor. He pursued the Cynic ideal of self-sufficiency, a life that was natural and not dependent upon the nonessential luxuries of civilization. Because Diogenes believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory, he made his life a protest against what he thought of as a corrupt society. He is said to have lived in a large tub, rather than in a house, and to have gone about Athens with a lantern in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man--but never finding one. He said Plato's lectures were a waste of time. Alexander is reported to have said, "Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes." As it turned out, both Diogenes and Alexander died on the same day in 323 B.C. Alexander was 33 and Diogenes was 90.

Diogenes is generally referred to as "Diogenes the Cynic". He is one of the most striking figures in Greek history; and the most noted of the CYNICS. "Cynicism" derives its name from the Greek word for "Dog". Aristotle refers to Diogenes as "The Dog" and Diogenes seems to have accepted the nickname. Cynicism was not a "school of philosophy", but rather an "erratic succession of individuals" which can be said to have started with the philosopher Antisthenes. Diogenes left behind him no system of philosophy.

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) was born on May 6,1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today Czech Republic). He studied in Vienna under Ernst Brucke, and then in Paris under Charcot; between 1882 and 1885 he worked in the Vienna General Hospital; Later he was worked as professor of neuropathology (1902-1938)in University of Vienna. Freud was forced to leave Vienna by Nazi regime in 1938 and lived in London from then on. Among his works are Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer, 1985), The Interpretaion of Dreams (1900). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904) and Three Contributions to the Sextual Theory (1905), Totem and Taboo (1913), Ego and the Id (1923), New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), and Moses and Monotheism (1939).

Freud is considered generally as the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was both a medical doctor and a philosopher. As a doctor, he was interested in charting how the human mind affected the body, particularly in forms of mental illness, such as neurosis and hysteria, and in finding ways to cure those mental illnesses. As a philosopher, Freud was interested in looking at the relationship between mental functioning and certain basic structures of civilization, such as religious beliefs. Freud believed, and many people after him believe, that his theories about how the mind worked uncovered some basic truths about how an individual self is formed, and how culture and civilization operate.

G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1770. He studied theology at the University of Tubingen. After serving as a tutor at Bern and Frankfurt, he was a lecturer and then a professor at the University of Jena (1801-06), headmaster of a school in Nuremberg (1808-16), and professor at Heidelberg (1816-18) and Berlin (1818-31). He died in Berlin, during a cholera epidemic, on Nov. 14, 1831.

Hegel was an idealist philosopher who has influenced many areas of modern philosophy; his strongest influence was on Karl Marx, and he had a negative influence on Søren Kierkegaard, whose rebellion against his objective systematizing originated the school of existentialism.

Hegel wrote books on philosophy, religion, and history. His most important works include the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the Science of Logic (1816), the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), the Philosophy of Right (1821), and the Philosophy of History (from lectures in 1822), all of which has been translated in many languages.

Martin Heidegger was born in the German village of Messkirch in a Roman Catholic family. His father worked part time as a sexton at the Sankt Martin and he wished for Martin to enter theology. After completing a Jesuit Grammar School, Heidegger enrolls at the University of Freiburg where he studies theology as well as philosophy, classic Latin and Greek, history and mathematics.

Because of health problems, Martin Heidegger decides to forego a career in theology and concentrate his studies in philosophy. When in 1916 Husserl moves from Göttingen to Freiburg, Martin Heidegger soon develops a close interest in phenomenology. Initially, Husserl expected Heidegger to carry his torch, but gradually it becomes clear that Heidegger chooses a path that takes him further and further away from Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. This was a great disappointment for the master. In addition to studying Husserl’s work, Heidegger reads St. Augustine and existentialists such as Kierkegaard. In 1923 Heidegger goes to Marburg, where he collaborates with the theologian Bultmann. In Marburg he also writes Being and Time, that was printed in 1927 in Husserl’s Yearbook of Philosophical and Phenomenological Research. In 1928 Heidegger returns to Freiburg where he is offered the chair of the retiring Husserl who is now 70 years old. Heidegger starts his new position with an inaugural lecture entitled “What is Metaphysics?”

In 1933 Adolph Hitler comes to power and this causes great tumult and has dire consequences for Heidegger’s later career. In order to prevent difficulties and on the request of his colleagues Heidegger assumes the rectorship at the university. He also becomes a member of the NSDAP and on May 27, 1933 Heidegger delivers his rectoral lecture in which he makes some unfortunate statements expressing sympathy for the party ideals and the fate of the German people. In February 1934, within ten months already, Heidegger withdraws from his rectorship position and he cuts his membership in the party. But despite his distantiation from the Hitler regime Heidegger has never been forgiven by his critics for his short nazi period. Under post-war French occupation of Germany Heidegger is banned from a university position. But in 1951 Heidegger is offered a honorary professorship at the University of Freiburg. He gives lectures until his retirement in 1959 and continues to write and publish until his death on May 26, 1976 in Freiburg.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was born in a Jewish family on April 8, 1859, in Prostejov, a small town in Tsjechoslovakia between Prague and Vienna. His favorite subject was mathematics but he also studied literature, theology, law, philosophy and astronomy. As a student at the University of Leipzig, he followed lectures in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. He graduated from the University of Vienna with a doctoral dissertation in theoretical mathematics on the calculus of variation.

In 1887 Edmund Husserl married Malvine Steinschneider and he is baptized in the Luthern Church. In 1888 he met the philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano, under whose influence he chose an academic career in philosophy. In the next phase of his intellectual thought Husserl developed a descriptive psychology as an early form of phenomenology. In 1911 he published his article "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in which he criticizes forms of naturalism, historicism and psychologism. In his subsequent publications Husserl announces the birth of the new science of phenomenology and elaborates on the distinction between phenomenological psychology as the foundational science for all psychological disciplines, and transcendental phenomenology as first philosophy. After 1916 Husserl taught at the University of Freiburg where he acquired a great following. In 1937 he was ordered by the German authorities to leave his Freiburg residence because of his Jewish background. By this time, Husserl had lost most of his German students owing to the Nazi threat. He became quite lonely and died the following year on April 28.

Even after his death, the threat continued, posing a serious danger to the survival of his unpublished writings. The Belgian scholar Herman van Breda, who visited Freiburg, assisted Husserl's widow to find safe refuge in Belgium until she emigrated to the United States. And with the help of Belgium External Affairs, van Breda succeeded in smuggling more than 45,000 pages written in shorthand into Belgium. In addition to Husserl's library, van Breda also managed to save some of Husserl's furnishings, such as his desk now on display in the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain. Edmund Husserl became the founder of the modern phenomenological movement that inspired many influential scholars such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Derrida.

Luce Irigaray was born in Belguim in 1930. She received a Master's Degree from the University of Louvain in 1955. Soon after that, she taught high school in Brussells. In the early 1960s, Irigaray moved to France and received a Master's Degree in psychology and a Diploma in Psychopathology and a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Paris in the subsequent years. In 1982, Irigaray held the chair in Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. After working for a short period for the Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Belgium, she began to work at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris where she is currently Director of Research in Philosophy.

IRIGARAY is well recognized as a French feminist philosopher. Early receptions of Irigaray in the English-speaking world often mistakenly labeled her an 'essentialist.' This view is now generally considered not accurate, as a better understanding has been gained of the complex linguistic, philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas she wrote. Irigaray is the author of Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) This Sex Which is Not One (1977), Amante Marine: de Friedrich Nietzsche (1983), L'Oubli de l'Air: Chez Martin Heidegger (1983), Ethique de la Difference Sexuelle (1984), Parler n'est jamais neutre (1985) and Sexes et Parentes (1987).

William James (1842--1910) was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. His father, Henry James was a Swedenborgian theologian. William James received very good education when he was young and travelled a lot. After graduationg from school, he worked at Havard University, first as an instructor of anatomy and physiology, then professor of philosophy and psychology.

In psychology James is best known for the "stream of consciousness" approach to mental phenomena which he held in opposition to the then dominant structuralism. James believed that mental processes ought to be studied as processes and not as static bits of consciousness as the structuralists had suggested. In philosophy, he is best known for his pragmatistic philosphy.

Some of William James's works are The Principles of Psychology (1890). A Textbook of Psychology (1892), The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), Memories and Studies (1911), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Karl Jaspers was born 23 February 1883 in Oldenberg in Germany and began his career first as a medical doctor. From 1921 to 1937 he was professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, but was removed by the Nazis, and although reinstated in 1945, he eventually settled in Basel.

Karl Jaspers was generally recognized as a existentialist philosopher, a psychologist and theologian. In many ways, Jaspers linked the philosophical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jaspers' role in existentialism is very significant. He coinded the term "Existenzphilosophie"-- a forerunner of the term existentialism. He derived from Kierkegaard and Nietzche a sense of philosophy not as a rational inverstigation of the world, but as an individual, private and lived-out struggle. He viewed his philosophy as active, forever changing. This approach compelled Jaspers to protest any attempt to group him with other philosophers.

Schleiermacher is born on November 21, 1768, in Breslau, Lower Silesia. His father is a Prussian army chaplain. Friedrich Schleiermacher attends Moravian boarding schools and later becomes a student at the University of Halle from 1787-1790, until he passes theological examinations in Berlin. He works first as a house tutor (1790-93), then as a pastor in Landsberg (1793-96), and next as a university preacher at Halle (1803-06). In 1799 he publishes On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers and in he begins publishing a German translation of Plato. In 1809 he associates with Wilhelm von Humboldt and he becomes a professor of theology at the newly founded University of Berlin. He coninues to write on hermeneutics and publishes the Soliloquies. It was especially Wilhelm Dilthey who made Schleiermacher's work known in his essay "The Origins of Hermeneutics" published in 1900.

Schleiermacher defined hermeneutics as "the art of understanding the discourse of another person correctly." He is often misinterpreted as a Romantic theorist who considers the process of interpretation to consist of an "intuitive" and "empathetic" identification with the thoughts and feelings of the author of a text. But this psychological hermeneutics does not adequately represent Schleiermacher's view. He sees "intuition" to be linked to a world which transcends both the cognitive and the practical life of the individual. The individual is organically connected to this world. There must be a method which gives access to the meaning of texts across generations. Schleiermacher distinguishes between "grammatical" (focus on language) and "technical" (focus on the person) interpretations. Successful interpretation requires an (ultimately impossible) integration of both dimensions but this is inherently an infinite task.

Stephan Strasser escaped with his wife from Austria to Belgium after the Anschluss in 1938 by the Nazis. Even in Belgium he had to go into hiding during the war. Van Breda offered him work at the Husserl Archives, where, in the space of 25 months, Stephan Strasser, his wife and mother-in-law transcribed 20,000 pages of Husserl's shorthand into ordinary text. These experiences and his studies with de Waelhens in 1944 were formative for Strasser's philosophical career. In 1949, Strasser received an appointment in Philosophical Psychology and Anthropology at the Universtity of Nijmegen, and he was also given the Chair in Normative and Historical Pedagogy. He kept the Chair in Pedagogy until 1970. He retired in 1975.

After an initial interest in neo-Thomistic thought, Strasser became closely acquainted with the work of Husserl. He rejected the philosophy of Sartre and also showed no sympathy for humanistic psychology, structuralism and Marxist thought. For a time, he became intensely interested in Heidegger, but eventually he moved closer to Merleau-Ponty and in his later years especially to the work of Levinas. Strasser exercised significant international influence. In North America, his writings provided access to continental thought; in Germany, he helped introduce the French Levinas; in France, he helped introduce the German Husserl; and in Japan, he helped introduce the human science approach.

Throughout his career, it was Strasser's ambition to practise human science without doing violence to what is human. His 1947 inaugural lecture was on the theme "Objectiviteit en Objectivisme" (Objectivity and Objectivism). In 1950, he introduced the Husserliana series by publishing the first volume: Cartesianische Medita-tionen und die Pariser Vorträge (Cartesian Meditations and the Paris Lectures). Strasser published Fenomenologie en Empirische Menskunde, published in English as Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (1963). He had close connections with Duquesne University in Pittsburg, where in 1984 a special alcove was dedicated to his work and correspondence. Duquesne University Press also published The Idea of Dialogical Phenomenology (1969) and Understanding and Expla-nati-on (1985).

After completing a primary and secondary teacher education program, Jan Hendrik van den Berg entered medical school. In 1946, he completed his doctoral work with a dissertation on schizophrenic psychosis. Van den Berg studied in France and Switzerland and received a lectorate in psychopathology in 1948. In 1951, he was appointed to the Chair of Pastoral Psychology at the University of Utrecht. Van den Berg's writings were an important contribution to the reputation of the Utrecht School. His publications have been widely translated into many languages. His book Het Ziekbed (1952) was published in English as The Psychology of the Sickbed (1966); but the French title says most about its content: Conseils au Visiteur d'une Malade Alité (Advice for Visitors of Bedridden Patients) (1969). The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry (1955) was reissued as A Different Existence (1974), which still is an excellent introduction to the phenomenological approach. In addition to many phenomenological studies in psychology and psychiatry, he also wrote several lucid methodological introductions, such as Zien: Verstaan en Verklaring in de Visuele Waarneming (Seeing: Understanding and Interpretation in Visual Perception) (1972).

Jan Hendrik van den Berg has been especially conscious of the historical and cultural embeddedness of phenomenological psychology. In fact, he was far ahead of the later postmodern critique of the dangers of foundationalism, essentialism, and historical and cultural universalism. He argues that the very project of all phenomenology is contextualized by limits of language, culture, time, and place. According to van den Berg, phenomenological psychology does not claim to have found a universally valid approach to human phenomena; rather, it is always self-conscious of its anthropological starting point. Van den Berg became especially known for the development and application of a historical phenomenological approach that he termed the metabletical method. Metabletica is a word derived from the Greek meaning "to change." His book Metabletica: Principles of a Historical Psychology (published in English in 1961 as The Changing Nature of Man) describes the changing relation between adults and children many years before a similar work by the French historian Philipe Ariès. For example, Van den Berg describes the process of the infantilization of adulthood and the appearance of puberty as a historial and cultural phenomenon. The special feature of the metabletical method is that it approaches its object of study not diachronically, as development through time, but synchronically, from within a meaningful constitution of relations among different events during the same shared period. For example, in Leven en Meervoud (1963) (published in English in 1974 as Divided Existence), he provides a concrete portrayal and a surprisingly early postmodern interpretation of the development of the human psyche by connecting it with a variety of simultaneous developments in the surrounding culture, showing how the sense of self-identity is increasingly fragmented, divided, and determined by externals.