Curated category
Natural philosophers
- 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…
- AristotleAncient Greek scholars gave Aristotle a name reserved for one man: among medieval Muslim scholars he was "The First Teacher", and to Christians like Thomas…
- Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei was born in Pisa on the 15th of February 1564, the first of six children of a leading lutenist. He died on the 8th of January 1642, aged 77…
- 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…
- 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…
- Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton said his mother told him he was so small at birth that he could have fit inside a quart mug. He was born prematurely on Christmas Day, the…
- Johannes KeplerAt age six, Johannes Kepler was taken by his mother to a high place to look at the Great Comet of 1577. Three years later, in 1580, he was called outdoors to…
- 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…
- Robert HookeRobert Hooke died in London on the 3rd of March 1703, alone in his room at Gresham College, blind and bedridden. When his belongings were searched, a chest…
- LucretiusTitus Lucretius Carus lived and died in the first century BC, and yet the poem he left behind nearly vanished from the world entirely.
- John AubreyJohn Aubrey was born on the 12th of March 1626 into a prosperous gentry family in Wiltshire, and he would spend much of his adult life in a state of…
- Giovanni Pico della MirandolaGiovanni Pico della Mirandola was 23 years old when he announced a challenge to the entire intellectual world. In December 1486, he published 900 theses…