Curated playlist
Phenomenologists
- Steven CrowellWhat makes something count as a reason? Philosopher Steven Crowell built a career around that question.
- Jean BeaufretJean Beaufret's 1946 challenge to Heidegger produced the Letter on Humanism.
- Martin HeideggerPhilosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. He did so while admired as a leading thinker of being.
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre asked to be dropped as a Nobel nominee, then won anyway. His 1964 letter went unread.
- Pope John Paul IIPope John Paul II visited the man who shot him in 1981 and called him a brother.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- Theodor W. AdornoTheodor W. Adorno opened his first lecture of the summer semester in 1969 by inviting students to ask questions whenever they arose. A student wrote on the blackboard: "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease." Three women…
- Alexandre KojèveAlexandre Kojève wrote a 900-page manuscript for Stalin. Whether it ever reached Moscow remains unknown.
- Eugène MinkowskiPsychiatrist Eugène Minkowski paid for a thousand copies of his own book. No publisher would take it at first.
- Hubert DreyfusIn 1964, the RAND Corporation hired philosopher Hubert Dreyfus to review artificial intelligence.
- Gabriel MarcelGabriel Marcel wrote at least thirty plays, but readers kept turning to his philosophy.
- José Ortega y GassetJosé Ortega y Gasset answered Descartes with "I live therefore I think." He put lived experience before abstract reason.
- Colin WilsonColin Wilson finished his book The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath.