Curated playlist
Phenomenologists
- Steven CrowellSteven Crowell has spent his career asking questions that most people never think to ask: what does it mean for something to count as a reason? How does meaning arise at all in human experience? Crowell is an American philosopher and…
- Jean BeaufretJean Beaufret was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Auzances, a small town in central France, and he would spend his life building a bridge between French philosophy and one of Germany's most contested thinkers. He died on the 7th of August…
- Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was born on the 26th of September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of a village church sexton. He died in his sleep in Freiburg on the 26th of May 1976, and was buried two days later in his birthplace, beside his…
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. The prize was announced on the 22nd of October 1964. Nine days earlier, on the…
- Pope John Paul IIPope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła on the 18th of May 1920, in the small Polish town of Wadowice. By the time he died on the 2nd of April 2005, an estimated four million people had gathered in and around Vatican City to mourn…
- 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…
- Alexandre KojèveAlexandre Kojève died on the 4th of June 1968, shortly after giving a talk in Brussels. He had appeared before European Economic Community officials as a representative of the French government. That double life, philosopher by training…
- Eugène MinkowskiEugène Minkowski was born on the 17th of April 1885 in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish Polish family. He would go on to fight in two world battles, fund the publication of his own major book after failing…
- Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus walked into the RAND Corporation in 1964 with a commission that seemed routine: review the latest work in artificial intelligence. What he produced instead was a document described as "famously combative" that would make him…
- Gabriel MarcelGabriel Honoré Marcel was born on the 7th of December 1889 in Paris, and by the time he died on the 8th of October 1973 he had written more than a dozen philosophical books and at least thirty plays. Yet he spent much of his life…
- 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. His father ran the newspaper El Imparcial, which belonged to the family of his mother, Dolores Gasset. That…
- Colin WilsonColin Henry Wilson spent a winter sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag, working by day at the British Museum's Reading Room on a novel he had been rewriting for years. He was in his early twenties, broke, and so determined…