Scholars

Alban William Housego "A. W." "Bill" Phillips, MBE (November 18, 1914 - March 4, 1975), was a well-known New Zealand economist. His most famous economic achievement is the Phillips curve proposed in 1958. He was also the inventor of the MONIAC ​​hydraulic computer.

William James (English: William James, January 11, 1842 - August 26, 1910), American philosopher and psychologist. His brother Henry James was a famous writer. Together with Charles Sanders Peirce, he founded pragmatism. William James was a leading thinker in the second half of the nineteenth century and one of the most influential philosophers in American history. He is known as the "Father of American Psychology."

Confucius (September 28, 551 BC - March 9, 479 BC), whose surname was Zi, his surname was Kong, his given name was Qiu, and his given name was Zhongni. He was respectfully called Confucius or Kongfuzi in later generations. He was an official, thinker and educator of the Lu State in the Spring and Autumn Period of China. Kong was born into the aristocracy of the Song Dynasty and moved to the Lu Kingdom three generations before Confucius. Confucius lost his father when he was three years old. He began to teach disciples when he was about thirty years old. Soon he became the most famous etiquette expert in the Lu State, and successively served as the Zhongdu Prime Minister and the Great Sikou. Later, Confucius was jealous and ostracized, so he resigned and left the state of Lu. He traveled around the country for fourteen years, seeking official opportunities, hoping that the monarch would adopt his political ideas, but he was never appointed. Finally, he returned to the state of Lu, where he concentrated on teaching his disciples and compiling scriptures until his death. In terms of thought, Confucius advocated returning to the "way of the ancient kings", respecting the etiquette of the Zhou Dynasty, respecting the Duke of Zhou, and resisting the arrogance of nobles and usurpation by ministers. The way of governing the country focused on educating the people, advocating the rule of virtue, advocating virtues such as benevolence, filial piety, loyalty, forgiveness, wisdom, and courage, teaching people to restrain themselves, restore propriety, and the golden mean, and do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you. Confucius preached humanism, cared about life issues in this world, believed that human nature is good, emphasized etiquette, and emphasized that emotions should be sincere when saluting. Confucius was the first to pioneer civilian education, advocating "education without distinction," and adopted the method of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude to train and recommend their disciples to join politics and become officials. It is said that Confucius's disciples numbered three thousand, and there were many talented people, including 72 who were proficient in the six arts; important disciples included Yan Yuan, Zi Lu, Zigong, Zi Xia and others. Confucius was a man of great knowledge, profound wisdom and rich emotions. He is proficient in etiquette and music, flexible in handling affairs, and has deep personal charm. Confucius respected ghosts and gods and kept them at a distance. He did not talk about "strange powers and chaos of gods", but also emphasized the rituals of sacrifice. He was convinced that God had given him a special mission to revive the Zhou rites. In terms of classical studies, Confucius revised and edited the Five Classics, often using the "Book of Songs" as a teaching material, and wrote the historical book "Spring and Autumn" to express his subtle thoughts and great ideas. The disciples also compiled a book called "The Analects of Confucius" to record Confucius' words and deeds. Confucius is the founder of Chinese Confucianism and the founder of philosophy and ethics. He enlightened the moral consciousness of the Chinese people. His teachings became an important ideological resource for governing the bureaucratic state for more than two thousand years. Disciples of Confucius regarded him as a saint. Confucius was worshiped by the imperial court and scholar-bureaucrats of all dynasties and revered as the "Teacher of All Times". He was also posthumously named the "Holy Teacher" and "King Wenxuan" for generations. The ceremony to worship Confucius was extremely grand. The descendants of the Kong family are known as "the best family in the world". They have been promoted to officials and nobles by successive courts, and have been awarded the title of Yanshenggong. However, during the New Culture Movement in modern China, intellectuals advocated "Down with the Confucius Family Store". The view at that time was that Confucius symbolized authoritarianism and paternalism.

Ho-Fung Hung (English: Ho-Fung Hung, born November 13, 1972), American sociologist. In his early years, he studied at St. Joseph's English Secondary School and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently the Weisenfeld Professor of Political Economics in the Department of Sociology and School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His main research areas are political economy, nationalism and social theory. Since 2019, Kong Gaofeng has served as the chairman of the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. In 2024, he won the Levinson Book Award for his book "A City in Danger: Hong Kong from the Perspective of Capital, Empire, and Resistance".

Mencius, born Meng Ke (Meng Ke), was a Chinese Confucian philosopher, often described as the Second Sage (Yasheng) to reflect his traditional esteem relative to Confucius himself. He was part of Confucius's fourth generation of disciples, inheriting his ideology and developing it further. Living during the Warring States period, he is said to have spent much of his life travelling around the states offering counsel to different rulers. Conversations with these rulers form the basis of the Mencius, which would later be canonised as a Confucian classic.

Ji Xianlin (August 6, 1911 - July 11, 2009), also known as Xibu and Qizang, male, was born in Qingping, Shandong Province. He was a Chinese linguist, literary translator, and expert in Sanskrit, Pali, and Tocharian. Professor at Peking University and Fu Jen Catholic University in Peking. He is as famous as Jao Tsung-i, and is known as "Nan Rao Bei Ji" in academic circles. He graduated from the Department of Western Literature of Tsinghua University in 1934 and studied famous Western literary figures such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes. The following year, he went to the University of Göttingen in Germany to study Sanskrit, Pali, and Tocharian, and met foreign students Zhang Yong, Tian Dewang, etc. He encountered the Second World War and received a doctorate in philosophy. He returned to China in 1946 and worked as a professor in the Department of Oriental Languages ​​at Peking University. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1956, participated in the anti-rightist movement and criticized rightists. In the early days of the Cultural Revolution, he participated in the Jinggangshan Corps, a rebel organization led by Zhou Peiyuan, and opposed the Nie Yuanzi faction. He lost the political struggle, was classified as a counterrevolutionary, was sent to the cowshed, and was persecuted. In 1973, he began to translate the Indian epic "Ramayana" and completed the full translation in 1977.

Zeno of Citium (Zeno of Citium; approximately 334 BC - approximately 262 BC) was a Hellenistic philosopher and the founder of the Stoic school. He was born in Gityon, Cyprus, and later settled in Athens for a long time and gave lectures. In about 301 BC, he began to teach in the Stoa Poikile in the Athens Agora. The school was named "Stoa" because of the place where he lectured.

Antony Garrard Newton Flew (English: Antony Garrard Newton Flew, February 11, 1923 - April 8, 2010) was a British philosopher who belonged to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought. He was committed to the philosophy of religion and advocated atheism. His doctoral supervisor was Gilbert Ryle. He taught philosophy at the University of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading in the UK, and York University in Toronto, Canada. He first distinguished the concepts of strong atheism and weak atheism, and proposed the fallacy that "there are no true Scotsmen".

Fray Antonio de Guevara (1480-1545) was a Franciscan monk in the Spanish Empire in Europe during the Renaissance. Served at the royal court as a writer and preacher. His most famous work is The Book of Kings and the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1529), which contains a discussion of the ideal Christian ruler.

Anna Jacobson Schwartz (English: Anna Jacobson Schwartz, November 11, 1915 - June 21, 2012), born in New York City, New York, United States, is a famous economist and economic historian who specializes in monetary economics. She has worked for the National Institute of Economic Research for a long time and is a representative of monetaristism and a member of the Chicago School of Economics.

André Comte-Sponville (French: André Comte-Sponville, March 12, 1952-), was born in Paris, France. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris I. He was an atheist and a materialist, but his ideas took a special form due to his spiritualistic goals. The most important aspect of his work is the overcoming of traditional materialist atheism from a post-materialist perspective, as he demonstrates the spiritualization of atheism. This is particularly prominent in his 2006 essay "The Spirit of Atheism." His book also includes "A Brief Introduction to Philosophy", which introduces Western classic philosophy with explanations of 12 "big questions" in philosophy.

André Gorz (French: André Gorz, French pronunciation: [ɑdʁe ɡɔʁts]; February 9, 1923 – September 22, 2007) was a French left-wing writer, social philosopher, and journalist.

Anselm (1033-April 21, 1109), also translated as Anselm, Anselm, was an Italian medieval Catholic cleric, philosopher, and theologian who served as the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Known as the last church father and the first scholastic philosopher. Using formal logic to demonstrate Christian orthodoxy, he proposed the "ontological argument" for the existence of God and the "redemption theory" of soteriology, pushing medieval theological issues in a new direction of rational concern.

Shaozheng Mao (?—?), a senior official of the State of Lu in the Spring and Autumn Period, was named Mao. "Shaozheng" was an official position established by the Zhou Dynasty. The "surname-first name" system of later generations was not finalized at that time. It was very common for people to have their professional names preceded by their real names. It is said that all three thousand disciples of Confucius were attracted away by it many times, causing Confucius to be "three full and three empty". Only Yan Yuan among the seventy-two sages remained unmoved. Confucius photographed the Prime Minister of Lu and executed Shaozhengmao in seven days. The incident was first recorded in "Xunzi", and was later recorded in "Yin Wenzi", "Shuo Yuan", "Confucius' Family Sayings", "Historical Records" and other books. In addition to the "Historical Records", the "Five Evils" were mentioned in all of them. As for the competition for disciples, it was first seen in "Lun Heng" written by Wang Chong of the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, there is no record or mention in the early "Zuo Zhuan", "Guoyu", "The Analects", "Mencius" and other books. Shaozhengmao was not recorded in the annals of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. He was first recorded in the official history system in the "Historical Records". However, except for being an official who "disrupted the government" and was punished by Confucius, there are no other specific records of Shaozhengmao's words and deeds. He was also not mentioned by other figures of the same period. Therefore, the motives for Confucius' execution, Shaozhengmao's identity, and even the authenticity of the incident and the existence of Shaozhengmao himself have been deeply questioned and discussed by later generations.

Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904 - November 6, 1997), a German philosopher, was born in Münster. He studied philosophy, law, and sociology in Berlin and the University of Münster, and later became a professor of philosophical anthropology at the University of Münster. In the 1960s, Pieper became widely known as a freelance writer. In 1947, he published "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" (Leisure, the Basis of Culture). The English translation was published in 1952, which aroused enthusiastic response from the British and American circles. T.S. Eliot introduced it in an article, and Alan Tate, the representative poet of New Criticism, also published a book review. Eliot believed that Pieper was a thinker with the charm of "one man's philosophy".

Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science writer. He is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. His other works include the bestsellers Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, suffering and the role of storytelling in human evolution. In Sapiens, Harari writes about a "cognitive revolution" that supposedly occurred roughly 70,000 years ago w

Sir Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson (English: Sir Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson; born April 18, 1964) is a British and American historical scholar who is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and concurrently a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard University, the London School of Economics and Political Science and New York University. He has also been a visiting professor at the New School for the Humanities and a senior fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University. He also briefly served as a visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and taught at Tsinghua University in China from 2019 to 2020. Ferguson's research and lecture areas mainly cover international history, economic history, financial history, and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism. He generally held a more positive view of the British Empire. In 2004, Ferguson was selected as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. In addition, he has also written and hosted a number of television historical documentaries, among which "Money Rising" won the International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. In 2024, Ferguson was knighted by Charles III for his contributions to literature and historical writing. In addition to academic research, Ferguson has also been active in the media and public commentary fields for a long time. He has served as a special editor for Bloomberg TV and a columnist for "Newsweek", and has been writing a semi-monthly column for "Bloomberg Opinion" since June 2020. In addition, he has also been a regular contributor to "The Spectator" and "The Daily Mail". In 2021, Ferguson co-founded the University of Austin. Starting in June 2024, he will also serve as a bi-weekly columnist for "The Free Press". In addition, Ferguson has written for various journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. Politically, he is often seen as a conservative and has claimed to support Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Cui Xifan, a Taoist figure in the Tang Dynasty. It's called "Zhiyi Zhenren". He wrote "Medicine Mirror" to discuss the Taoist inner alchemy method. This book had a great influence on the history of Neidan. "Ten Books on Cultivation: Tianyuan Becomes the Medicine Mirror" contains Cui Xifan's autobiography, which is titled "Tang Gengzi looked forward to the day when he came to the end of the year, Cui Xifanfan, the real person." In the Southern Song Dynasty, it was recorded in "Daoshu" that Lu Dongbin received the "Medicine Mirror" from Cui Xifan, and further understood the essence of inner elixir. Lu Dongbin's poem downloaded from the volume of "Chunyang Zhenren Huncheng Collection" says: "Reading Cui Gong's "Medicine Mirror" makes people's hearts and minds clear." Volume 45 of "Xianjian" records that Lu Yan "recovered in the first year of Guangming of Emperor Xizong (880), met Cui Gong's "Medicine Mirror", and knew that cultivating one's life is not bad at all."

Cui Yongyuan (February 20, 1963 -), whose ancestral home is Wuyi, Hebei Province, was born in Beichen, Tianjin. He is a professor at Communication University of China and once served as a program host at China Central Television. Graduated from the Journalism Department of Beijing Broadcasting Institute (now Communication University of China). His famous work is the talk show "Tell the Truth". He has produced the feature film "Movie Legend", hosted the talk show "Xiao Cui Talks", and has written the best-selling book "Nothing But That". He resigned from CCTV in 2013 and joined the Communication University of China as a teacher. He established his own studio and devoted himself to oral history research. He has since been involved in many public opinion turmoils, including the 2013 genetically modified food controversy, the 2018 Yin-Yang contract incident in the film and television industry, and the Shaanxi 100-billion mining rights case.

Léon Brunschvicg (French: [leɔ bʁœəsvik]; November 10, 1869 – January 18, 1944) was a French idealist philosopher. In 1893, he co-founded the Journal of Metaphysics and Morals with Xavier Leon and Elie Allevi.

Aurelius Augustinus (Latin: Aurelius Augustinus, November 13, 354 - August 28, 430), known as Augustine of Hippo (Latin: Augustinus Hipponensis; English: Augustine of Hippo) or Saint Augustine (English: Saint Augustine or Saint Austin), also translated as Augustine, Saint Augustine, was an early Catholic theologian and philosopher. Born in the city of Tagaste in the African province of North Africa at the end of the Roman Empire, he was born into a Berber family. He was educated in Rome and received the Sacrament of Baptism in Milan. He served as the Catholic Bishop of Hippo Regius (located in today's Algerian city of Annaba). Augustine's work "Confessions" is called the "first" autobiography in Western history and is still recited today. The Augustinians were a Catholic religious order that followed the way of life they instituted. After his death, Augustine was canonized as a saint and a doctor of the church by the Catholic Church. He was also regarded as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church and others, and was called Doctor Gratiae (Latin: Doctor Gratiae, a title derived from his emphasis on God's grace in his debate with Pelagius). However, some of his theological theories were not recognized by Eastern Christianity and were regarded as an important source of several heretical theories. His death is also regarded by Western historians as the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe on a spiritual level.

Zhuangzi (about 369 BC - 286 BC), named Zhou, also known as Zixiu, was born around the same time as Mencius in the Song Dynasty (now Dongming County, Heze City, Shandong Province) and served as an official in Qiyuan. He was a thinker, philosopher, and writer in the middle period of the Warring States Period in China. He was a representative figure of the Taoist school and the inheritor and developer of Laozi's thoughts. Later generations called him "Laozi and Zhuangzi" together with Laozi. In AD 742, at the beginning of the Tianbao reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, Zhuang Zhou was granted the title of Nanhua Zhenzhen, and his book "Zhuangzi" was named Nanhua Sutra, which was classified as the Zibu Taoist category in Sikuquanshu. During the reign of Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty, he was posthumously named "The True Monarch of Wei Yuantong".

Frank Hyneman Knight (English: Frank Hyneman Knight, November 7, 1885 - April 15, 1972), born in McLean County, Illinois, United States, was an economist who proposed Knight's uncertainty. Professor at the University of Chicago and one of the pioneers and founders of the Chicago School.

Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama, Japanese-American writer and political economist. Fukuyama received a BA in Arts from Cornell University (majoring in Classics and Politics) and a PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington.