Curated playlist
20th-century English philosophers
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell was a pen name, chosen from a shortlist in 1932. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in British India.
- Herbert SpencerIn 1937 the American sociologist Talcott Parsons asked a pointed question about Herbert Spencer: "Who now reads Spencer?" The question carried a sting. Spencer had once been called "the single most famous European intellectual in the…
- Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley died the same day as John F. Kennedy, and almost nobody noticed. C. S. Lewis died that afternoon too.
- Nick LandNick Land, the English philosopher, once spent part of a conference session lying on the ground and croaking into a microphone. The event was Virtual Futures 96. Robin Mackay later recalled that he played jungle records in the background…
- Alan TuringAlan Turing once chained his tea mug to a radiator pipe at Bletchley Park so it could not be stolen.
- Alfred North WhiteheadAlfred North Whitehead walked into his Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1927 and lost his audience within a week. The astronomer Arthur Eddington had given the series the year before, and he had held a crowd of 600 people…
- Christopher HitchensOn the 8th of October 2011, Christopher Hitchens collected the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention. It was his final public appearance. Christopher Eric Hitchens, a British and American author and journalist, had been…
- Colin WilsonColin Wilson finished his book The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath.
- John Maynard KeynesAt Bretton Woods in 1944, Keynes proposed a world currency called the bancor, and the United States rejected it.
- Roger ScrutonRoger Scruton was standing in the Latin Quarter of Paris in May 1968, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones. The English philosopher later said that for the first time in his life he "felt a surge of…