名人生平.doc

1 Biography of Homer Homer is the man who,according to legend,wrote the two great epics of Greek history:the Iliad(the tale of the Trojan War)and the Odyssey(about the travels of Odysseus).Both books are considered landmarks in human literature and Homer is therefore often cited as the starting point of Western literary and historical tradition.The details of Homers life are a mystery;some scholars believe that no such man ever existed,and that the works credited to him were actually told and gathered by many people over many centuries.Other stories give various birthplaces and ages for Homer and suggest he was a wandering poet or minstrel.Homer is usually said to have been blind,a point on which nearly all the legends agree.Biography of Aristotle Aristotle is one of the big three in ancient Greek philosophy,along with Plato and Socrates.(Socrates taught Plato,who in turn instructed Aristotle.)Aristotle spent nearly 20 years at Platos Academy,first as a student and then as a teacher.After Platos death he travelled widely and educated a famous pupil,Alexander the Great,the Macedonian who nearly conquered the world.Later Aristotle began his own school in Athens,known as the Lyceum.Aristotle is known for his carefully detailed observations about nature and the physical world,which laid the groundwork for the modern study of biology.Among his works are the texts Physics,Metaphysics,Rhetoric and Ethics.Biography of Archimedes Archmedes(ar-ke-me-deez),a renowned mathematician.His astonishing skill in mechanics was such that some of the greatest real triumphs of antiquity may be ascribed to him.His inventions amazed his contemporaries:the lifting of weights by means of pulleys and the endless screw are among them.A Roman historian celebrates the warlike engines produced by the skill of Archimedes.His mind ever fruitful of extraordinary resources,when Syracuse was besieged by Marcellus,he constructed a burning-glass on a scale of such magnitude that by means of it the enemys fleet was fired.Eventually,the city being taken,he was found among the slain.Biography of Dante An exiled and wandering figure during his writing lifetime,Dante is now considered Italys greatest poet-so much a literary giant that he is generally known by his first name alone.The Divine Comedy,by far his most famous work,is the story of a journey through Hell,Purgatory and finally Paradise.(The journey through Hell is often referred to independently as Dantes Inferno.)In the poem the first two stages are guided by the Roman poet Virgil,and the final visit to Paradise is led by a woman named Beatrice-a girl Dante met briefly when he was nine and whom he idolized the rest of his life.The Divine Comedy is the source of many famous classical images,inspiring works by William Blake and others,and is famous for its inscription on the gates of Hell:All hope abandon,ye who enter here.Joan of Arc(1412-1431)A hero of the Hundred Years War,Joan of Arc remains a French national hero six centuries later.As a teenager she heard voices from on high urging her to save France from English domination.Despite being a young woman,she was placed at the head of an army;she attacked the English and forced them to retreat from Orl ans.Later she was captured by the English,tried for heresy,and burned at the stake.In 1920 she was canonized by the Catholic Church.Christopher Columbus Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 Calvi(Corsica),northwest of the island,200km from Ajaccio.He was the oldest of five children.As a child,he helped his father as a weaver.He always liked the sea.Genoa was an important seaport.There is no doubt that as a child he caught rides on ships.He had little schooling but was a genius with the sea.His plan was not to prove that the world was flat,but it was to find a shortcut to the Spice Islands.He wanted to establish a city there for trade,seaports,and much more.When he grew into a man he was interested in sailing to Asia by going west.First he went to the king of Italy and presented his idea before him.Italy wasnt looking for a way to Asia,they were still recieving riches from their old trade routes.His three ships were the Santa Maria,the Nina,and the Pinta.Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci is best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa(1503-1506)and The Last Supper(1495).But hes almost 2 equally famous for his astonishing multiplicity of talents:he dabbled in architecture,sculpture,engineering,geology,hydraulics and the military arts,all with success,and in his spare time doodled parachutes and flying machines that resembled inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries.He made detailed drawings of human anatomy which are still highly regarded today.Leonardo also was quirky enough to write notebook entries in mirror(backwards)script,a trick which kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death.Nicolas Copernicus Nicolas Copernicus was born into a well-to-do family,and after his father died in 1483 he was put under the guardianship of his uncle,a bishop of Warmia(Poland).He went to university in Krakow and spent a decade in Italy,studying law and mathematics.A canon of the cathedral at Frombork,Copernicus carried out administrative duties and,from his house,observed the stars and planets.For years he worked on his theory that the planets in our solar system revolved around the sun(Ptolemy of ancient Greece had explained that the universe was a closed system revolving around the earth,and the Catholic church concurred).Hesitant to publish his work for fear of being charged with heresy,Copernicus summarized it in 1530 and circulated it among Europes scholars,where it was greeted with enthusiasm.His work,titled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was finally published in 1543,apparently just a few weeks before he died Socrates Philosopher,Socrates is credited with laying the foundation for Western philosophical thought.His Socratic Method involved asking probing questions in a give-and-take which would eventually lead to the truth.Socratess iconoclastic attitude didnt sit well with everyone,and at age 70 he was charged with heresy and corruption of local youth.Convicted,he carried out the death sentence by drinking hemlock,becoming one of historys earliest martyrs of conscience.Socratess most famous pupil was Plato,who in turn instructed the philosopher Aristotle Confucius Philosopher Also Known As:Kong Fu-Zi Confucius was a teacher,scholar and minor political figure,whose commentary on Chinese literary classics developed into a pragmatic philosophy for daily life.Not strictly religious,his teachings were a utilitarian approach to social harmony and the moral obligations between individuals and social systems.Biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti Perhaps the greatest influence on western art in the last five centuries,Michelangelo was an Italian sculptor,architect,painter and poet in the period known as the High Renaissance.His great works were almost entirely in the service of the Catholic Church,and include a huge statue of the Biblical hero David(over 14 feet tall)in Florence,sculpted between 1501 and 1504,and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome(commissioned by Pope Julius II),painted between 1508 and 1512.After 1519 Michelangelo was increasingly active in architecture;he designed the dome of St.Peters Basilica,completed after his death.Along with contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael,he is considered one of the great masters of European art.Ferdinand Magellan Explorer Portuguese name:Fernao de Magalhaes Magellan was born in Portugal,but it was under the Spanish flag that he sailed in 1519 with the intention of reaching the Spice Islands by sailing west around South America.After much hardship he succeeded in reaching and then sailing across the Pacific Ocean.Soon thereafter he was killed while trying to subdue the natives on what is now the island of Mactan in the Philippines.After still more hardships,one of his original five ships,Victoria,eventually made it back to Spain.Though Magellan didnt complete the entire circumnavigation,as the expeditions leader he is usually credited with being the first man to circle the globe Miguel de Cervantes Writer 3 Full name:Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Cervantes wrote the epic satire Don Quixote,regarded as the first true modern novel.Little is known of Cervantess early life;at 23 he enlisted in the Spanish militia and then fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto(1571)where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand.He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates.Ransomed by his family,he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him;it was in debtors prison that he began to write Don Quixote.The title character,a dreamy middle-aged nobleman,sets out through Spain on a makeshift quest to fight injustice through acts of chivalry.Cervantes wrote many other works,including poems and plays,but none had the impact or popularity of his masterpiece.Shakespeare 1564?616,English dramatist and poet,b.Stratford-on-Avon.He is considered the greatest playwright who ever lived.Life His father,John Shakespeare,was successful in the leather business during Shakespeares early childhood but later met with financial difficulties.During his prosperous years his father was also involved in municipal affairs,holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s.While little is known of Shakespeares boyhood,he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford,where he would have been educated in the classics,particularly Latin grammar and literature.Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonsons famous comment that Shakespeare had small Latine,and less Greeke,much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy,ancient history,and classical mythology.Bacon Francis Bacon was the son of Nicolas Bacon,the Lord Keeper of the Seal of Elisabeth I.He entered Trinity College Cambridge at age 12.Bacon later described his tutors as Men of sharp wits,shut up in their cells of a few authors,chiefly Aristotle,their Dictator.This is likely the beginning of Bacons rejection of Aristotelianism and Scholasticism and the new Renaissance Humanism.His father died when he was 18,and being the youngest son this left him virtually penniless.He turned to the law and at 23 he was already in the House of Commons.His rich relatives did little to advance his career and Elisabeth apparently distrusted him.It was not until James I became King that Bacons career advanced.He rose to become Baron Verulam,Viscount St.Albans and Lord Chancellor of England.His fall came about in the course of a struggle between King and Parliament.He was accused of having taken a bribe while a judge,tried and found guilty.He thus lost his personal honour,his fortune and his place at court.Loren Eiseley in his beautifully written book about Bacon The Man Who Saw Through Time remarks that Bacon:.more fully than any man of his time,entertained the idea of the universe as a problem to be solved,examined,meditated upon,rather than as an eternally fixed stage,upon which man walked.Descartes Descartes is often called the father of modern science.He established a new,clear way of thinking about philosophy and science by rejecting all ideas based on assumptions or emotional beliefs and accepting only those ideas which could be proved by or systematically deduced from direct observation.He took as his philosophical starting point the statement Cogito ergo sum-I think,therefore I am.Descartes made major contributions to modern mathematics,especially in developing the Cartesian coordinate system and advancing the theory of equations.Newton Isaac Newtons discoveries were so numerous and varied that many consider him to be the father of modern science.A graduate of Trinity College,Cambridge,Newton developed an intense interest in mathematics and the laws of nature which ultimately led to his two most famous works:Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica(1687)and Opticks(1704).Newton helped define the laws of gravity and planetary motion,co-founded the field of calculus,and explained laws of light and color,among many other discoveries.A famous story suggests Newton discovered the laws of gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree,though theres no proof that this is true.Newton was knighted in 1705.Extra credit:Newton was the first scientist given the honor of burial in Westminster Abbey.He is often ranked 1-2 with Albert Einstein among historys leading physicists.Newton held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge-a post later held by 4 Stephen Hawking.Newton was good friends with astronomer Edmond Halley,of Halleys Comet fame.Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Europe.His first major philosophical work,A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,was the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy of Dijon in 1750.In this work,Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality.This discourse won Rousseau fame and recognition,and it laid much of the philosophical groundwork for a second,longer work,The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.The second discourse did not win the Academys prize,but like the first,it was widely read and further solidified Rousseaus place as a significant intellectual figure.The central claim of the work is that human beings are basically good by nature,but were corrupted by the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society.Rousseaus praise of nature is a theme that continues throughout his later works as well,the most significant of which include his comprehensive work on the philosophy of education,the Emile,and his major work on political philosophy,The Social Contract:both published in 1762.These works caused great controversy in France and were immediately banned by Paris authorities.Rousseau fled France and settled in Switzerland,but he continued to find difficulties with authorities and quarrel with friends.The end of Rousseaus life was marked in large part by his growing paranoia and his continued attempts to justify his life and his work.This is especially evident in his later books,The Confessions,The Reveries of the Solitary Walker,and Rousseau:Judge of Jean-Jacques.Kant Immanuel Kant was born in the East Prussian city of K nigsberg,studied at its university,and worked there as a tutor and professor for more than forty years,never travelling more than fifty miles from home.Although his outward life was one of legendary calm and regularity,Kants intellectual work easily justified his own claim to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy.Beginning with his Inaugural Dissertation(1770)on the difference between right-and left-handed spatial orientations,Kant patiently worked out the most comprehensive and influential philosophical