Curated category
Epistemologists
- Augustine of HippoAugustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa that today is Souk Ahras, Algeria.
- AvicennaBy the age of ten, Avicenna had memorized the entire Quran. He was born around 980 in the village of Afshana in Transoxiana, into a Persian family, and his…
- Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life on a train, preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers, before pneumonia stopped him at a…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes.
- 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…
- Jean PiagetJean Piaget was born on the 9th of August 1896 in Neuchâtel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland, and by the age of 15 he had already published several…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and…
- Francis BaconFrancis Bacon dictated his last letter from a borrowed bed in Highgate, his fingers, he wrote, so disjointed with sickness that he could not steadily hold a…
- MenciusMencius, born Meng Ke in the state of Zou, carried a question that would define his life's work: are people fundamentally good, or are they something worse?
- Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner.
- AverroesAverroes was born in Córdoba on the 14th of April 1126, into a family whose name was synonymous with legal authority. His grandfather had been the city's…
- José Ortega y GassetJosé Ortega y Gasset was born on the 9th of May 1883 in Madrid, into a family that sat at the center of Spanish public life.
- Michel WeberMichel Weber, born in 1963, arrived at philosophy by way of applied economics. He began at Saint-Louis University in Brussels, earning a degree in commercial…
- Nick BostromNick Bostrom was born Niklas Boström on the 10th of March 1973 in Helsingborg, Sweden, and he grew up disliking school so much that he spent his final year…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl entered the world on the 4th of September 1936 in Tel Aviv. This city sat within the British Mandate for Palestine at that time.