Curated playlist

Atheist philosophers

George OrwellGeorge Orwell was a pen name, chosen from a shortlist in 1932. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in British India.
Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche's sister edited his writings to fit her own ultranationalist views.
Denis DiderotJailed writer Denis Diderot annotated Paradise Lost with a toothpick and ink made from slate and wine.
Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre asked to be dropped as a Nobel nominee, then won anyway. His 1964 letter went unread.
Karl MarxKarl Marx left an estate valued at just 250 pounds when he died in 1883. He died stateless in London at 64.
Albert CamusAlbert Camus thanked his old schoolteacher right after his mother when he won the Nobel Prize.
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault's surgeon father expected him to become a surgeon too. He became a leading thinker on power instead.
Ayn RandWhen Ayn Rand died in New York City on the 6th of March 1982, her funeral included a six-foot floral arrangement shaped like a dollar sign. The tribute suited a woman who had turned self-interest into a moral code. She was born Alisa…
Marquis de SadeOn the 2nd of July 1789, the Marquis de Sade stood at a window of the Bastille and shouted through a megaphone he had improvised himself. He told the people in the street below that the warders were murdering the prisoners. That evening he…
Gilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze never trimmed his fingernails. He once explained that he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and so could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain". It is a…
Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap argued that most deep philosophical questions were meaningless.
Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels rode with an aristocratic fox hunt while funding Karl Marx.
Arthur SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who, in 1820, asked the University of Berlin to schedule his lectures for the very hour when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught. Hegel was the celebrated name of the day. Only five students…
Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir's partnership with Sartre began on a bench outside the Louvre.
Vladimir LeninLenin's name came from no person, and the N in N. Lenin stood for nothing. One theory points to the Lena River.
Mikhail BakuninKarl Marx had the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin expelled from the First International in 1872.
Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832, is on public display at the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London. Visitors find a seated figure in a glass case,…
George SorosAt 14, George Soros posed as the Christian godson of a government official to survive the Nazi occupation of Hungary.
DharmakirtiDharmakirti wrote that no one would grasp his work and it would soon be forgotten. Tibetan monks still study it.
Alexandre KojèveAlexandre Kojève wrote a 900-page manuscript for Stalin. Whether it ever reached Moscow remains unknown.
Bertrand RussellAt 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell went to jail for an anti-nuclear protest. Asked to behave, he said, "No, I won't."
Vinayak Damodar SavarkarVinayak Savarkar jumped from a ship's window at Marseille and swam to shore.
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…
Max StirnerMax Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt, and the name history remembers began as a joke about the size of his forehead. He later adopted that nickname as his pen name, and it outlasted the man himself. Almost everything we know about…
John RawlsJohn Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000…
A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer once told Mike Tyson to talk like a rational man. The philosopher stepped in at a 1987 party.
Ernst MachEinstein called Ernst Mach a precursor of general relativity, yet Mach apparently rejected the theory.
Alexander ZinovievSoviet writer Alexander Zinoviev was expelled from his country, then returned by choice 21 years later.
Slavoj ŽižekSlavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher whom one admirer called the Elvis of cultural theory and whom another label dubbed the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He was born on the 21st of March 1949 and has written over 50 books. He…
John DeweyJohn Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and over his lifetime he published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and roughly 40 books. In 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, he wrote a line that would organize all that…
Peter SingerPeter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who holds the title of Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Fellow philosopher Helga Kuhse judged him almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of…