University of California, Berkeley in the context of "Free Speech Movement"

Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, with most of his influence lying in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.

Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography. Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as an academic study first emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early 20th century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying predetermined regions based on environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by the "father of cultural geography" Carl O. Sauer of the University of California, Berkeley. As a result, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.

Geographers drawing on this tradition see cultures and societies as developing out of their local landscapes but also shaping those landscapes. This interaction between the natural landscape and humans creates the cultural landscape. This understanding is a foundation of cultural geography but has been augmented over the past forty years with more nuanced and complex concepts of culture, drawn from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, literary theory, and feminism. No single definition of culture dominates within cultural geography. Regardless of their particular interpretation of culture, however, geographers wholeheartedly reject theories that treat culture as if it took place "on the head of a pin".

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams FBA (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English moral philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.

As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks. Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist," he was skeptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it "come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life."

John Rogers Searle (/sɜːrl/ ; July 31, 1932 – September 17, 2025) was an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959 and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement. In the late 1980s, Searle challenged the restrictions of Berkeley's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. Following what came to be known as the California Supreme Court's "Searle Decision" of 1990, Berkeley changed its rent control policy, leading to large rent increases between 1991 and 1994.

Edward Kennard Rand FBA (December 20, 1871 – October 28, 1945), known widely as E.K. Rand or to his peers as EKR, was an American classicist and medievalist. He served as the Pope Professor of Latin at Harvard University from 1901 until 1942, during which period he was also the Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for two terms. Rand is best known for his 1928 work, Founders of the Middle Ages.

Rand founded the Mediaeval Academy of America, its journal Speculum, and served as the president of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies) and the Classical Association of New England. At the end of his career, he was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks.

Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the United States. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux, beginning with Central Park in New York City, which led to numerous other urban park designs including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and Forest Park in Portland, Oregon.

Olmsted's projects encompassed comprehensive park systems, planned communities, and institutional campuses across North America. His major works included the country's first coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, the Grand Necklace of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and parks for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He designed one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois, and created master plans for universities including University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Notable individual projects included the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec, and landscape work for the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Mount Thourion or Thurium Mons was the name of a conical hill in Ancient Greece. A temple to the cult of the Muses may have been situated here.

The location of the hill was gradually forgotten and was rediscovered in February 1990 by an archaeologist and four graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley.In Plutarch's “Life of Sulla”, the hill is noted as having been the site of a monument to two townsmen of Chaeronea named Homoloichos and Anaxidamos, for their assistance to Sulla during the Battle of Chaeronea. The two showed Sulla's troops a back way up Thourion, enabling them to surprise the invading Pontic soldiers.

Osmund Bopearachchi (born 1949) is a Sri Lankan historian and numismatist who has specialized notably standardized the coinage of the Indo-Greek and Greco-Bactrian kingdoms. He is currently Emeritus Director of the CNRS at the École normale supérieure and Adjunct Professor of Central and South Asian Art, Archaeology, and Numismatics, University of California, Berkeley.

Oliver Eaton Williamson (September 27, 1932 – May 21, 2020) was an American economist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Elinor Ostrom.

His contributions to transaction cost economics and the theory of the firm have been influential in the social sciences, law and economics. Williamson described his work as "a blend of soft social science and abstract economic theory".