- Voltaire (philosopher) (allthetropes.org)
François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) (the original one). French dude, 1694-1778. Satirical philosopher. He is best known for his witty defense of civil liberties, freedom of religion, and free trade. His views earned him a stay in the Bastille, where he gained his penname. He would go on to inspire multiple philosophers and satirical authors, especially amongst those who supported his views. His writings also inspired both the French and American revolutions. He was also a scientist who published multiple essays. Prolific, as he published more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. The name Voltaire comes from Arouet le jeune (“Arouet the Young”), converted to Latin script where U=V and J=I; AROVET L I -> VOLTAIRE. He is eminently quotable, and mis-quotable.
- Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering
- Star Tales - Lynx (ianridpath.com)
Johannes Hevelius, the Polish astronomer who introduced this constellation in his star catalogue of 1687, continued to measure star positions with the naked eye long after other astronomers had adopted telescopic sights. The French astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) wrote in 1644 that Hevelius had the ‘eyes of a lynx’ and this constellation can be seen as an attempt to demonstrate that.[note] Indeed, Hevelius wrote in the Introduction to his catalogue that anyone who wanted to observe it would need the eyesight of a lynx (‘oculos habeat Lynceos’), although he undoubtedly exaggerated the faintness of the 19 stars he catalogued in it, typically by a full magnitude.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Voltaire (plato.standford.edu)
François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.
- Voltaire (Wikipedia)
François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire (/vɒlˈtɛər, voʊl-/; also US: /vɔːl-/; French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity (especially of the Roman Catholic Church) and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.