Curated category
Enlightenment philosophers
- Voltaire"This is no time to make new enemies." Those words are attributed to Voltaire on his deathbed, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan.
- Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant lived so rigidly that his neighbors in Königsberg were said to set their watches by his daily walks. He was born Emanuel on the 22nd of April…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the…
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
- Denis DiderotDenis Diderot was born on the 5th of October 1713 in Langres, Champagne, the son of a cutler named Didier Diderot. He died on the 31st of July 1784, having…
- Friedrich SchillerFriedrich Schiller was born on the 10th of November 1759 in Marbach, in the Duchy of Württemberg, named after King Frederick the Great but called Fritz by…
- Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau came into the world barely breathing. "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me," he later wrote of his arrival in…
- René DescartesRené Descartes opened his treatise on emotions, the Passions of the Soul, with a startling promise. He would write on the topic, he said, "as if no one had…
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
- MontesquieuMontesquieu, born Charles Louis de Secondat on the 18th of January 1689, grew up in a château 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux, in southwest France.
- John LockeJohn Locke composed his own obituary in Latin, and it begins with a command to a passerby. "Stay traveller: near this place lies JOHN LOCKE." The tablet, he…
- Baruch SpinozaBaruch Spinoza was born on the 24th of November 1632 into an Amsterdam family that had survived the Portuguese Inquisition by hiding their faith for…
- David HumeDavid Hume was born on the 7th of May 1711 in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket, into a family that was, by his own account, far from…
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelOn the day before the Battle of Jena, in October 1806, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel watched Napoleon ride out of the city on horseback.
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley was born on the 24th of March 1733 in Birstall, near Batley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of English Dissenters who…
- Mary WollstonecraftOn the 10th of September 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia, eleven days after giving birth to a daughter. That daughter, also named Mary, would…
- Adam SmithAdam Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, he walked straight into a huge tanning pit.
- Christoph Martin WielandChristoph Martin Wieland was born on the 5th of September 1733 in Oberholzheim, a village split between two jurisdictions: half belonging to the Free…
- Mikhail LomonosovMikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was born in a small village on an island in the frozen north of Russia, the son of a peasant fisherman who hauled cargo to…