Curated category
Philosophers of culture
- 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…
- Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau came into the world barely breathing. "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me," he later wrote of his arrival in…
- Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges once described his blindness as a gift wrapped in cruel irony. In a poem he wrote that God, with splendid irony, granted him books and…
- 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.
- 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…
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at the age of three. By eight he had worked through Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, and six…
- 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…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive.
- ConfuciusConfucius asked a single question when he came home from court and learned that the stables had burned down. He said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about…
- 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.
- 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…