Baron d'Holbach Paul Henri
(1723–89)German-born French intellectual. Paul Heinrich Dietrich took the name and French nationality of his maternal uncle, who had made a fortune in Paris. For many years Holbach's salon in Paris ...
Charles Bradlaugh
(1833–91)British social reformer. A republican and keen supporter of reform movements, he was tried, with Annie Besant, in 1877–78 for printing a pamphlet on birth control. The charge failed and ...
deism
Belief in a god who created the universe but does not govern worldly events, does not answer prayers, and has no direct involvement in human affairs. deist n. One who espouses deism. Compare ...
Denis Diderot
(1713–84),French philosopher and man of letters; a leading member of the Enlightenment, and from 1746 editor of the Encyclopédie. His works demonstrated close links with English literature: he ...
Elizabeth Hamilton
(1756–1816),novelist: lives and writes in Edinburgh and Bath; d. and buried in Harrogate. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 1800, The Cottagers of Glenburnie 1808.
Friedrich Engels
(1820–95)German socialist and political philosopher, resident chiefly in England from 1842. The founder of modern communism with Karl Marx, he collaborated with him in the writing of the Communist ...
humanism
[De]A philosophy or ethical system that centres on the concept of the dignity, freedom, and value of human beings. The belief that there is an essential human condition that emerges regardless of ...
libertins
Term used to describe groups of thinkers of atheist tendencies, from the late 16th to the 17th century in France. Influences included Cardano, Bruno, Campanella, and in France itself Montaigne. The ...
Nineteenth Century
A monthly review founded in 1877 by J. T. Knowles, which brought together in its pages the most eminent advocates of conflicting views. Among its contributors were T. H. Huxley, Gladstone, Ruskin, B. ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792–1822)The English poet is also an important figure in the history of British radicalism and atheism. Eton succeded in instilling in him a strong hatred of tyranny and authority, while his The ...
Richard Bentley
(1662–1742),made his reputation as a scholar with his Letter to Mill (1691), a critical letter in Latin on the Greek dramatists. He delivered in 1692 the first Boyle lectures, printed in 1693 as The ...
Royal Irish Academy
The academy was founded in Dublin in 1785 and was given royal recognition the following year. Its aims were the exploration and preservation of Irish culture, collecting manuscripts, and publishing ...
Sir Richard Blackmore
(1654–1729) English physician and authorPrince Arthur (1695) PoetryKing Arthur (1697) PoetryA Satyr Against Wit (1700) PoetryEliza (1705) PoetryAdvice to the Poets (1706) PoetryThe Kit-Cats (1708) ...
Thomas Jefferson Hogg
(1792–1862),educated at Oxford with Shelley and sent down with his friend on the publication of the latter's Necessity of Atheism. His Life of Shelley appeared in 1858. Peacock, in his Memorials of ...
Walter Pater
(b London, 4 Aug. 1839; d Oxford, 30 July 1894).English essayist and critic. A bachelor don at Brasenose College, Oxford, he lived uneventfully with his two spinster sisters and was the unlikely ...
William Paley
(1743–1805)English theologian and moral philosopher. Paley is remembered for two contributions to natural theology. The first is the sustained defence of the argument to design for the existence of ...
