Biographies G

 

 

 

 

 

Galileo (1564-1642)
Italian physicist and astronomer, a major figure in the scientific revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
French post-impressionist painter, who gave up his middle-class life in Paris to pursue his art in Tahiti and elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jean Gebser (1905-1973)
German thinker, best known for The Ever-Present Origin  (1950) and other books on the development of human consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

Clifford Geertz (1926- )
American anthropologist, professor at Princeton and elsewhere, and author of such books as Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and Local Knowledge (1983).

 

 

 

 

 

Image from Britannica Online

Edward Gibbon (1737-94)
British historian, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

 

 

 

 

 

William Gladstone (1809-1898)
Four time prime minister of Great Britain and leader of the Liberal Party. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kurt Gödel (1908-1970)
Austrian-born, American logician who formulated "Gödel's proof," which demonstrated that any logical system is doomed to internatal inconsistency and self-refutation.

 

 

 

 

 

E. H. Gombrich (1909- )
German-British art historian, much influenced by gestalt psychology; author of Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Jay Gould (1941- )
Professor of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, defender of Darwinian evolution, and author of such books as Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, The Mismeasure of Man, Norton, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History.

 

 

 

 

 

John Gower (1330-1408)
English poet, a contemporary of Chaucer.

 

 

 

 

 

Marjorie Grene  (1910- )
American philosopher, at different times a student of Jaspers and Heidegger and a research assistant to Polanyi, for some time resident in Ireland, and later a faculty member at the University of California, Davis; author of The Knower and the Known, Approaches to a Philosophical Biology, Descartes.

 

 

 

 

 

Howard E. Gruber (1922- )
Developmental psychologist and professor (at the University of Geneva, Rutgers, Columbia University), one of the foremost researchers in the 20th Century into the creative process, and author of such books as Darwin on Man.

 

 

 

 

 

René Guenon (1887-1951)
French orientalist and scholar of the perennial philosophy, author of The Reign of Quantity and many other books.