Curated playlist
Jewish philosophers
- 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. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- Lev VygotskyLev Vygotsky died on the 11th of June 1934, at the age of 37, leaving behind a final notebook entry that read: "This is the final thing I have done in psychology - and I will like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land…
- 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 generations. By the time he was twenty-three, he had been expelled from his own community…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- 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. He would go on to found phenomenology, one of the most far-reaching philosophical…
- Martin BuberMartin Buber was born in Vienna on the 8th of February 1878, into an Orthodox Jewish family with deep rabbinic roots stretching back to the 16th century. By the time he died on the 13th of June 1965 at his home in Jerusalem's Talbiya…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- Georg SimmelGeorg Simmel was born on the 1st of March 1858 in Berlin, the youngest of seven children in an assimilated Jewish family. His father, a prosperous businessman, had founded a confectionery store called "Felix & Sarotti." His mother came…
- Viktor FranklViktor Emil Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning in nine days. That single fact, more than any biography could, captures the urgency driving the man. He had already lost the first manuscript of his life's work when guards at Auschwitz…
- Hans JonasHans Jonas died at his home in New Rochelle, New York, on the 5th of February 1993, at the age of 89. He was a philosopher born in Germany who later became an American citizen. His career moved between two subjects that seem to share…
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)Walter Kaufmann arrived at Princeton University in 1947 as a young philosopher with a freshly minted Harvard doctorate, a dissertation completed in under a year, and a singular mission: to rescue Friedrich Nietzsche from decades of…
- Rosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg was shot in the head, her body weighted with stones and dropped into a Berlin canal. It was the night of the 15th of January 1919, and she had spent most of the preceding four years in prison. She was 47. Her killers were…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- Semyon FrankSemyon Lyudvigovich Frank was born in Russia on the 28th of January 1877. He entered the world within a Jewish family in Moscow. His father worked as a doctor but died when Semyon was still young. The boy grew up under the care of his…
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer was 26 years old when he published a book that told most of philosophy to sit down and be quiet. Language, Truth, and Logic, which appeared in 1936, declared that any statement unable to pass a test of logical or empirical…
- Lev ShestovLev Shestov died in a Paris clinic on the 19th of November 1938, still writing. He was seventy-one years old and in the final weeks of his life had been studying Indian philosophy and the recent work of his friend Edmund Husserl. A…
- Jean WahlJean André Wahl was born on the 25th of May 1888, and for most of the twentieth century he stood at the center of French philosophical life as a teacher, editor, poet, and institutional builder. He died on the 19th of June 1974, having…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…
- Eric GutkindEric Gutkind sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt" sometime before January 1954. Einstein wrote back from Princeton on the 3rd of January 1954, and what he said was blunt. God, Einstein wrote,…