The Philosopher

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Trelleck on 18th May, 1872. His parents were Viscount Amberley and Katherine, daughter of 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley. At the age of three he was left an orphan. His father had wished him to be brought up as an agnostic; to avoid this he was made a ward of Court, and brought up by his grandmother. Instead of being sent to school he was taught by governesses and tutors, and thus acquired a perfect knowledge of French and German. In 1890 he went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, and after being a very high Wrangler and obtaining a First Class with distinction in philosophy he was elected a fellow of his college in 1895. But he had already left Cambridge in the summer of 1894 and for some months was attaché at the British embassy at Paris.

CHOMSKY, Noam. American linguist and political writer born on Dec. 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Avram Noam Chomsky was introduced to linguistics by his father, a Hebrew scholar who worked with historical linguistics. Noam studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a doctoral degree in linguistics in 1955, and then he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where today he is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language

Described by Bertrand Russell as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating,"Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Helping to inspire two of the century's principal philosophical movements, the Vienna Circle and Oxford ordinary language philosophy, he is considered one of the most important figures in analytic philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers in Canada and the U.S. rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) and Philosophical Investigations among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, the latter standing out as "...the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations." Wittgenstein's influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences, yet there are widely diverging interpretations of his thought.