- Lived:
- 1781–1848 · Prague and the Bohemian countryside, in the Austrian Empire
- Tradition:
- Catholic priest, mathematician, and logician — the great counter-current to German idealism
- The Big Idea:
- Truths exist in themselves. A proposition is true or false whether or not any mind ever thinks it — and logic is the science of these mind-independent truths, not of how humans happen to reason.
- In their words:
- "By a truth in itself I mean any proposition which states something as it is, regardless of whether or not it has ever been thought or expressed by anyone." — Theory of Science
- If you remember one thing:
- While all of Germany decided that reality was made of mind, a silenced priest in a Bohemian farmhouse quietly built the mind-independent logic that the modern world — from set theory to computer science — actually runs on.