Vocation : Writers : Religion/ Philosophy

Henri Atlan (born 27 December 1931) is a French biophysicist and philosopher.

Gilbert Durand (1 May 1921 – 7 December 2012) was a French academic known for his work on the imaginary, symbolic anthropology and mythology.According to Durand, Imagination and Reason can be complementary. He defended the status of the image, traditionally devalued in Western thought, particularly in French philosophy. He advocated a multidisciplinary approach.
He distinguished between two regimes: the diurnal and the nocturnal, to classify symbols and archetypes.

Pierre Laffitte (21 February 1823 – 4 January 1903) was a French positivist philosopher.
Laffitte was born at Béguey, Gironde. Residing at Paris as a teacher of mathematics, he became a disciple of Auguste Comte, who appointed him his literary executor. On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte's death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhered to Émile Littré, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the philosophy of science of Comte's earlier period. From 1853 Laffitte delivered Positivist lectures in the room formerly occupied by Comte in the rue Monsieur le Prince. He published Les Grands Types de l'humanité (1875) and Cours de philosophie première (1889). In 1893 he was appointed to the new chair founded at the Collège de France for the exposition of the general history of science, and it was largely due to his inspiration that a statue to Comte was erected in the Place de la Sorbonne in 1902. Laffitte died in Paris.
Lafitte with a delegation of positivists visited Constantinople in 1877 visited Midhat Pasha to advocate positivist principles as a non-Christian, modern system.

Étienne Vacherot (29 July 1809 – 28 July 1897) was a French philosophical writer.

Daniel Bensaïd (25 March 1946 – 12 January 2010) was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre.

Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch (28 October 1867 – 17 April 1941) was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He has also been credited with performing the first artificial 'cloning' of an animal in the 1880s, although this claim is dependent on how one defines cloning.

Eduard Spranger (27 June 1882 – 17 September 1963) was a German philosopher and psychologist. A student of Wilhelm Dilthey, Spranger was born in Berlin and died in Tübingen. He was considered a humanist who developed a philosophical pedagogy as an act of 'self defense' against the psychology-oriented experimental theory of the times.Spranger was the author of the book Lebensformen (Translated as Types of Men), which sold 28,000 copies by the end of 1920. Spranger theorizes that types of human life are structures in consciousness. His belief was that personality types have a basis in biology, but can not be fully explained by biology. He wrote, "On a lower level, perhaps, the soul is purely biologically determined. On a higher level, the historical, for instance, the soul participates in objective values which cannot be deduced from the simple value of self-preservation." He criticized psychologists who reduced the psyche and society to abstract elements of science. Another characteristic of Spranger's thought is his interest in holism, which involves the discovery that "everything is part of everything else," and that the "totality of mind is present in every act." He asserts that quantitative calculations of sensations, reflexes, and citations from memory are meaningless units, that when synthesized, do not add up to the meaningful whole that we all live.

William Stern (born Ludwig Wilhelm Stern; April 29, 1871 – March 27, 1938) was a German psychologist and philosopher who originated personalistic psychology, which placed emphasis on the individual by examining measurable personality traits as well as the interaction of those traits within each person to create the self.
Stern coined the term intelligence quotient (IQ) and invented the tone variator as a new way to study human perception of sound. Stern studied psychology and philosophy under Hermann Ebbinghaus at the University of Berlin, and quickly moved on to teach at the University of Breslau. Later he was appointed to the position of professor at the University of Hamburg.
Over the course of his career, Stern authored many books pioneering fields of psychology such as differential psychology, critical personalism, forensic psychology, and intelligence testing. Stern was also a pioneer in the field of child psychology. Together with his wife, Clara Joseephy Stern, the couple kept meticulous diaries detailing the lives of their 3 children for 18 years. He used these journals to write several books that offered an unprecedented look into the psychological development of growing children.