Curated category
Philosophers of history
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal…
- 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…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- 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…
- 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.
- Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory.
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous.
- 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…
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
- 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…
- William JamesWilliam James was born at the Astor House in New York City on the 11th of January 1842, and by the time he died in Chocorua, New Hampshire on the 26th of…
- 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…
- 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.
- Geoffrey EltonGeoffrey Elton arrived in Britain in February 1939 as a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, a teenage boy named Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg.
- Ibn KhaldunIn the year 1400, an elderly scholar was lowered by ropes over the wall of a besieged city to meet the man who had surrounded it. The city was Damascus.
- Karl JaspersKarl Jaspers died on the 26th of February 1969 -- his wife Gertrud's 90th birthday. That detail is small, but it says something.
- Alexandre KojèveAleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov entered the world on the 28th of April 1902 within the borders of the Russian Empire.
- Mulla SadraMulla Sadra moved through three successive Safavid capitals before he ever wrote the work that would define him. Born around 1571 or 1572 in Shiraz, he went…
- 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.
- James BurnhamJames Burnham was born in Chicago on the 22nd of November 1905, the son of an English railroad executive, and he died on the 28th of July 1987 in Kent…