University of Amsterdam in the context of "Johannes Diderik van der Waals"

The Atlas Maior is the final version of Joan Blaeu's atlas, published in Amsterdam between 1662 and 1672, in Latin (11 volumes), French (12 volumes), Dutch (9 volumes), German (10 volumes) and Spanish (10 volumes), containing 594 maps and around 3,000 pages of text. It was the largest and most expensive book published in the seventeenth century. Earlier, much smaller versions, titled Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive, Atlas Novus, were published from 1634 onwards. Like Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the Atlas Maior is widely considered a masterpiece of the Golden Age of Dutch/Netherlandish cartography (approximately 1570s–1670s).

The Kurdish Institute of Paris (French: Institut kurde de Paris; Kurdish: ئینستیتیوتی کوردیی پاریس), founded in February 1983 by (amongst others) film producer Yılmaz Güney and poet Cigerxwîn, is an organisation focused on the Kurdish language, culture, and history. It is one of the principal academic centers of the Kurdish language in Europe. Its main publications include the linguistic journal Kurmancî, a monthly press review about Kurdish issues titled Bulletin de liaison et d'information (Bulletin of Contact and Information), and Études Kurdes, a research journal in French.

Most of the institute's activities are focused on the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish. The institute has a library preserving thousands of historical documents, pamphlets and periodicals about Kurds. Two representatives from the French Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Culture provide the link between the institute and the government of France. The institute is headed by Kendal Nezan as president, with Abbas Vali (Swansea University) and Fuad Hussein (University of Amsterdam) as vice presidents.

Frans Hendrik van Eemeren (born 7 April 1946, Helmond) is a Dutch scholar, professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. He is noted for his Pragma-dialectics theory, an argumentation theory which he developed with Rob Grootendorst from the early 1980s onwards. He has published numerous books and papers, including Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse.

Rudolph "Ruud" F. Peters (born 16 September 1943, The Hague, died 26 March 2022, Amsterdam) was a scholar of Islamic Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Rudolph Peters studied Law, Arabic and Turkish in Amsterdam and Leiden and was appointed as lecturer at the department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam in 1968. He completed his PhD in 1979, titled Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History. He served as the director of the Netherlands Institute for Archeology and Arabic Studies in Cairo from 1982 to 1987, and was appointed professor (‘bijzonder hoogleraar’) to the UvA in 1992.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as VU Amsterdam or simply VU when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The literal translation of the Dutch name Vrije Universiteit is "Free University". "Free" refers to independence of the university from both the State and the Dutch Reformed Church. Both within and outside the university, the institution is commonly referred to as "the VU". Although founded as a private institution, the VU has received government funding on a parity basis with public universities since 1970. The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern Buitenveldert neighbourhood of Amsterdam and adjacent to the modern Zuidas business district.

As of October 2021, the VU had 29,796 registered students, most of whom were full-time students. That year, the university had 2,263 faculty members and researchers, and 1,410 administrative, clerical and technical employees, based on FTE units. The university's annual endowment for 2024 was circa €798 million. About two thirds of this endowment is government funding; the remainder is made up of tuition fees, research grants, and private funding.

Pragma-dialectics (also known as the pragma-dialectical theory) is a program in argumentation theory developed since the late 1970s by Dutch scholars Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst at the University of Amsterdam. It conceives argumentation as a form of goal-directed communicative activity aimed at the reasonable resolution of differences of opinion by means of a critical discussion. Combining a pragmatic interest in how argumentative discourse is actually used with a dialectical interest in how it ought to proceed, pragma-dialectics studies argumentation as a complex speech act that occurs in natural language use and serves specific communicative purposes.

The theory is both descriptive and normative. It offers tools for reconstructing ordinary argumentative exchanges in terms of an ideal model of a critical discussion and uses that model to evaluate whether a discourse contributes to resolving a disagreement in a reasonable way. Central to pragma-dialectics is a four-stage model of critical discussion (confrontation, opening, argumentation and concluding) and a set of ten discussion rules that parties should observe; systematic violations of these rules are treated as fallacies. The approach integrates insights from critical rationalism, formal dialectics, speech act theory, Gricean language philosophy and discourse analysis, operationalized through meta-theoretical principles such as functionalization, socialization, externalization and dialectification.

Rob Grootendorst (11 February 1944 in Schiedam – 23 February 2000 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch communication and argumentation theory scholar. He was professor for Dutch speech communication at the University of Amsterdam. His contributions to the argumentation field include the co-foundation of the pragma-dialectic school in argumentation theory.

He also wrote several books on the life and works of the Dutch writer and politician Theo Thijssen.

Abram de Swaan (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈaːbrɑm də ˈsʋaːn]; born 8 January 1942) is a Dutch essayist, sociologist and professor emeritus from the University of Amsterdam.

In 1996, he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2000.

Max Carl Wilhelm Weber van Bosse or Max Wilhelm Carl Weber (5 December 1852 – 7 February 1937) was a German-Dutch zoologist and biogeographer.

Weber studied at the University of Bonn, then at the Humboldt University in Berlin with the zoologist Eduard Carl von Martens (1831–1904). He obtained his doctorate in 1877. Weber taught at the University of Utrecht then participated in an expedition to the Barents Sea. He became Professor of Zoology, Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Amsterdam in 1883. In the same year he received naturalised Dutch citizenship.