Philosophers Educational Posters & Prints, “B...-”
individuals who made contributions to the study of knowledge itself.

Sir Francis Bacon
Roger Bacon
Mikhail Bakunin
Jeremy Bentham

Nikolai Berdyaev
Henri Bergson
Boethius

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Viscount of St. Albans, Giclee Print

Sir Francis Bacon
b. 1-22-1561; London, England
d. 4-9-1626

Sir Francis Bacon is best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution.

Sir Francis Bacon quotes ~
• “Science is but an image of the truth.”
• "Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read."
• “...to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know.”
• “Knowledge is power.” (Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est)
- Meditationes Sacræ. De Hæresibus. (1597)

Roger Bacon, aka Doctor Mirabilis (wonderful teacher)
b. 1214; Ilchester, Somerset, England
d. 1294; Oxford

Roger Bacon was a medieval Franciscan friar and philosopher who wrote on alchemy, mathematics, optics, astronomy, astrology and theology. He is recognized as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method.

Roger Bacon quotes ~
• “For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.”
• “The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.”

• The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon: Edited, with Introduction and Analytical Table, by John Henry Bridges. Volume 1 (Paperback)

Mikhail Bakunin circa 1860, Giclee Print (Nadar)

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
b. 5-30-1814; Russian Empire
d. 7-1-1876; Bern, Switzerland

Theorist of collectivist anarchism and revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, is often called the father of anarchist theory in general.

Bakunin was influenced by Fichte, Hegel, and Chernyshevsky; met George Sand, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, and Richard Wagner. Bakunin influenced Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, E.P. Thompson, Neil Postman, A.S. Neill, and Noam Chomsky.

Mikhail Bakunin quotes ~
• “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
• “The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.”
• “... it is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.”
• “They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship — their dictatorship, of course — can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.”

Jeremy Bentham
b. 2-15-1748; London, England
d. 6-6-1832

Philosopher, jurist, legal and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, was a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law. His ideas, which influenced the development of welfare, included advocacy of utilitarianism and animal rights.

Bentham also promoted the concept of a type of building, called a panopticon (all+see), that would allow an observer to watch inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being observed.

Jeremy Bentham quote ~
• “The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but rather, “Can they suffer?”

Nikolai Berdyaev
b. 3-18-1874; Kiev, Russia
d. 3-24-1948; Paris, France

Philosopher and spiritual thinker Nikolai Berdyaev calls creative freedom an essential element of human life and human creativeness as complementary to God's creativeness. Humanity is to be justified on the basis of our creative acts, as co-creator in God's work of creation.

Nicholas Berdyaev quote ~
• “God awaits from us a creative act.”
• “It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.” Slavery and Freedom (1939), p.145
• “There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.” Slavery and Freedom (1939), p.147-8

Henri Bergson
b. 10-18-1859; Paris, France
d. 1-4-1941; Paris

Henri Bergson, a major philosophical influence in the first half of the 20th century. He served as a philosophy professor and was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”.

Henri Bergson quotes ~
• “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
• “There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.”

• Creative Evolution

Boethius
b. c. 480 AD; Rome
d. 524-25 AD; Pavia

Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues, became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages.

Boethius quotes ~
• “Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.”
• “Nothing is miserable unless you think it is so.”
• “In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.”

Giordano Bruno
b. 1548; Kingdom of Napoli, present day Italy
d. 2-17-1600; Rome

Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and theologian, was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition as a heretic. He wrote about heliocentrism (the Earth orbits the Sun) and the infinity of the universe.

Giordano Bruno quotes ~
• “There is no law governing all things.”
• “It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”

Martin Buber
b. 2-8-1878; Vienna
d. 1-4-1941; Jerusalem

Martin Buber, a philosopher, translator, and educator, influenced thought in the fields of social psychology, social philosophy, philosophical anarchism, and religious existentialism, focusing on the the nature of being, existence and reality. Buber resigned from his post at the University of Frankfurt in protest when Hilter came to power in Germany

Martin Buber quotes ~
• “Through the Thou a person becomes I.”
• “A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.”
• “God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.”
• “Play is the exultation of the possible.”

• I And Thou

Edmund Burke
b. 1-12-1729; Dublin, Ireland
d. 7-9-1797; England

Edmund Burke is mainly remembered for his support of the American Colonies for independence and his criticism of the French Revolution. Burke was a member of Parliment and “The Club”, a social gathering of people like Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Joshua Reynolds, and Hannah More.

• The Best of Burke: Selected Writings & Speeches of Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke quotes ~
• “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
• “No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
• “Good order is the foundation of all things.”