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Matthew Arnold (1822‐1888)

A master of both poetry and prose, Matthew Arnold remains significant today for the same reasons that the Victorian Age as a whole retains significance.

William Blake (1757-1827)

Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing. Poet, painter, and engraver, Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752)

Butler's interest was in applying the principles of human nature to an individual's own life and to the relationships that exist between individuals.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

For Carlyle, German culture was embodied in the piety of Luther, the sacred necessity of the Reformation, and the creation, by Goethe in particular, of Romantic idealism, a literary antidote to both eighteenth-century rationalism and modern materialism.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1775-1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, philosopher, and literary critic whose writings have been enormously influential in the development of modern thought.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

The French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798‐1857) developed a system of positive philosophy. He held that science and history culminate in a new science of humanity, to which he gave the name ʺsociology.ʺ

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

A founding figure of both modern sociology and anthropology, Durkheim succeeded in dramatically changing the ways in which social scientists think about the relationship between individuals and society.

Ludwig Anselm Feuerbach (1804-1872)

To his own age, Feuerbach seemed a Prometheus, a revolutionary who robbed Christianity of its superhuman aura and pointed to the anthropological origin of all religions.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

The enduring literary fame of Flaubert was established all at one go, in the course of a famous trial that simultaneously brought him success and scandal.

George Eliot (1819-1880)

The most learned and respected novelist of the later Victorian period, George Eliot suffered a decline in reputation after her death and into the early twentieth century.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Goethe is widely recognized as the greatest writer of the German tradition. His stature derives not only from his literary achievements as a lyric poet, novelist, and dramatist but also from his often significant contributions as a scientist and as a critic and theorist of literature and of art.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

From the generation following Goethe there is perhaps no writer more controversial than Heine. Although best known now for his early lyrics, during most of his life he was renowned for his witty prose, his political journalism, and his caustic satires.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)

Denied recognition during his lifetime, Hölderlin has come to be regarded as a central figure of the German Classical-Romantic period, best known for his lyric poetry.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

As one of his biographers said, no one else writes with such strength and vivacity about the extreme human emotions of joy and pain.

David Hume (1711-1776)

Called the "Great Infidel" by some and "le bon David" by others, Hume was and has remained one of the most important British philosophers, essayists, and historians of the eighteenth century.

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907)

The work of Huysmans, novelist, essayist, and art critic, provides one of the clearest examples of the transformation of popular philosophy and literary art that took place near the turn of the century.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813‐1855)

Søren Kierkegaardʹs extensive catalogue of published and unpublished works had, both in Denmark and abroad, a profound influence on the theology, philosophy, and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

To the extent that the eighteenth century in Germany was indeed an age of the unfettered critical spirit, as Immanuel Kant assured his contemporaries it was, it found its most articulate voice in Lessing.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786)

"The circumstances of my life are so insignificant that I can’t promise my readers any particular entertainment  on that basis; indeed, they have struck me, too, as so insignificant as for me to decide against recording any part of them.”

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

J. S. Mill was the most famous and influential British moral philosopher of the nineteenth century. He was one of the last systematic philosophers, making significant contributions in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and social theory.

John Henry Newman (1801–1890)

Certainly the most significant Roman Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century, Newman has also come to be seen as the most seminal of modern Catholic thinkers.

Novalis (pseudo. for Friedrich von Hardenberg; 1772-1801)

Poet, aphorist, novelist, mystic, literary and political theoretician, student of philosophy and the natural sciences, Friedrich von Hardenberg—best known by his pen name, Novalis—was one of the most striking figures of German Romanticism.

William Paley (1743-1805)

Paley's version of Utilitarianism became known as Rule Utilitarianism. He defended the sacrifice of short-term particular happiness for the sake of maintaining rules of conduct that are demonstrably conducive to long-term, general happiness.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Pascal did not publish any philosophical works during his relatively brief lifetime. His status in French literature today is based primarily on the posthumous publication of a notebook in which he drafted or recorded ideas for a defence of Christianity, the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (1670).

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804)

Priestley's range of intellectual interests was great, even by the standards of the eighteenth century. He was a Dissenting minister, and his chief concerns were theological.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Rousseau was the most original, profound, and creative writer of the eighteenth century. He was also the most controversial—and perhaps the most obscure.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

One of the most interesting of the second-tier philosophers of the period. He was also an eminent classicist and theologian. From a modern philosophical point of view it is probably his hermeneutics (i.e. theory of interpretation) and his theory of translation that deserve the most attention.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Among 19th century philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place.

Voltaire (pseudo. François‐Marie Arouet; 1694‐1778)

The story of Voltaireʹs life and literary career is among the most remarkable in the history of French literature. In many regards, it is also one of the more challenging and, at times, even perplexing.

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Weber has long been recognized as one of the founders of modern sociology. His theoretical works continue to provide elaboration and clarification of the logical and epistemological foundations of social science.

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