Alfred William Benn

Alfred William Benn (1843–1915) was an English historian of philosophy and a rationalist critic of religion. Of independent means, he settled in Florence in his twenties and spent most of his life there, writing in English for a British audience. His books include The Greek Philosophers (1882), The Philosophy of Greece Considered in Relation to the Character and History of Its People, and The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (1906), a large survey of the movement of free thought from the Enlightenment to his own time. His work combines classical learning with the outlook of a convinced agnostic.