Alexander Crombie
(1762–1840)Alexander Crombie was born in Aberdeen on 17 July 1762 and died at his estate at Phesdo, Kincardineshire in February 1840. He studied at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he ...
Allen Phillips Griffiths
(1927–)A. Phillips Griffiths, known to the philosophical world as ‘Griff’, was born in Llandaff on 11 June 1927. After school in Cardiff, leaving Whitchurch Cardiff Grammar in 1943, he ...
Anthony Collins
(1676–1729)Collins is celebrated primarily as an early ‘free-thinker’ or atheist, with his Discourse of Free-thinking (1713) being the best-remembered of his works. However, he wrote extensively on ...
Anthony Florian Madinger Willich
(d. 1804)Anthony Willich was born at Rössel, Ermland, in East Prussia (now Retzel, Poland) and died in February 1804 at Kharkov in the Ukraine. He was a doctor who ...
Antony Garrard Newton Flew
(1923–)Antony Flew was born on 11 February 1923 in Ealing, London, England. He attended St. Faith’s Preparatory School, Kingswood School, and St. John’s College, Oxford, where he earned a ...
Benjamin Godwin
(1785–1871)Benjamin Godwin was born in Bath on 10 October 1785 and died in Bradford on 20 February 1871. At the age of fifteen he ran away to sea; he ...
Bertram Mitchell Laing
(1887–1960)B. M. (‘Bertie’) Laing was born at Newton Premnay, a farm near Aberdeen, on 24 November 1887 and died in Sheffield on 16 May 1960. He was a student ...
Boyle Lectures
Robert Boyle is best remembered today for his contributions to the natural sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. What is less well known is that Boyle was also a devout Christian ...
Cambridge Platonists
A small group of mid-17th century thinkers centred on Cambridge, whose members included Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and Benjamin Whichcote. The problems they addressed included the rise of low-church ...
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 ...
Daniel Scargill
(fl. 1669)We know little of Daniel Scargill's life. According to Venn, he was a native of Cambridgeshire, who was admitted sizar at Corpus Christi, Cambridge in 1661, matriculating in ...
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 ...
Edward Heneage Dering
(1827–92)Edward Heneage Dering was the author of some best-selling novels and the second husband of the writer Lady Georgina Chatterton, widow of Sir William. With Lady Georgina, he moved ...
ethics (Hooker to Ayer)
It is common to think of ‘the British moralists’ as a clearly defined group of moral philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sir L. A. Selby-Bigge's two-volume anthology with ...
existence of God
Standard arguments for the existence of God have derived either from experience of the natural world, as seen in the cosmological argument and the teleological argument (otherwise known as the ...
fideism
A view that is pessimistic about the role of reason in achieving knowledge of things divine, and that emphasizes instead the merit of acts of faith.
Francis Glisson
(1598?–1677)Francis Glisson died in London on 16 October 1677. It is usually stated that Glisson was born in Rampisham in Dorset in 1597 but recent research (Walker, 1966) suggests ...
freedom of speech
Celebrated as first among civil liberties, freedom of speech (conceived broadly as the expression of verbal as well as non-verbal utterance) is both an instrumental and intrinsic good; instrumental ...
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 ...
George Hickes
(1642–1715),was the acknowledged leader of the first great generation of Anglo‐Saxon scholars which included the Elstobs and Wanley. The climax of his work was the Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium ...
