Biographies L

 

Jacques Lacan (1901-81) French psychoanalyst—the so-called "French Freud." His writings and lectures (collected in Ecrits [1966] and The Language of the Self [1973]), greatly influenced by linguistics and structuralism, were a powerful force in other areas such as philosophy and literary and film criticism.

 

R. D. Laing (1927- ) Scottish-born psychiatrist who drew on existential philosophy to interpret family dynamics and schizophrenia in The Divided Self (1959), The Self and Others (1962), The Politics of Experience (1967), The Politics of the Family (1969), and Knots (1971), poems.

 

George Lakoff (1941- ) American professor of linguistics at UC-Berkeley and author, with Mark Johnson, of Metaphors We Live By (1983) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999).

 

Edwin Land (1909-1991) American inventor of the Goethe-influenced Polaroid process for color photography.

 

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) Scottish classical scholar and folklorist.

 

Suzanne Langer (1895-1985) American philosopher, author of Philosophy in a New Key (1942).

 

Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) French Enlightenment astronomer and mathematician.

 

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) Widely praised anti-Romantic British poet.

 

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) French chemist, often called the father of modern chemistry.

 

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) Controversial English novelist and poet, author of Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Barfield addresses his work at some length in Unancestral Voice.

 

Richard Leakey (1944-) Kenyan paleontologist and conservationist, son of the famous paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey.

 

F. R. Leavis (1895-1978) Conservative British critic and literary theorist best known for The Great Tradition (1948).

 

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) French social critic, known for pioneering studies of everyday life in such works as Everyday Life in the Modern Word, Critique of Everyday Life, and The Production of Space.

 

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) German philosopher, inventor of calculus and author of such works as Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) and The Monodology (1714).

 

Vladimir Lenin (187-1924) Russian Communist political theoretician, the major force in the foundation of the U.S.S.R.

 

Frank Lentricchia (1940- ) American literary critic, author of The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, After the New Criticism, and other works.

 

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Great Florentine painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist, and "Renaissance Man."

 

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- ) Belgian-born French anthropologist, one of the major figures in the development of structuralist thought, and author of such books as The Savage Mind (1966).

 

Warren Hamilton Lewis (1895-1973) Older brother of C. S. Lewis; an active member of The Inklings, he was the author of The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV (1953) and other works.

 

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) Experimental British painter, novelist, and critic.

 

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) Swedish naturalist who developed a system for classifying plants and animals.

 

John Locke (1632-1704) English empirical philosopher, author of Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

 

Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962) German-born American philosopher who taught at Johns Hopkins. Founder of the Journal of the History of Ideas, he is best known for books like The Revolt Against Dualism (1930) and The Great Chain of Being (1936).

 

Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) Spanish Catholic religious leader, founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).

 

Charles Lyell (1797-1875) Scottish geologist, whose Principles of Geology had a profound influence on the development of Darwin's conception of evolution.