Curated category
Philosophers of mind
- 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…
- 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…
- Marcus AureliusMarcus Aurelius was born in Rome on the 26th of April 121, in the grand villa on the Caelian Hill that his mother had inherited along with a fortune that…
- The BuddhaNo written record of Siddhartha Gautama survives from his lifetime, nor from the century or two that followed. Yet from the middle of the 3rd century BCE…
- 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?
- LaoziLaozi has no birth certificate, no agreed-upon grave, and possibly no single body at all. Yet Chinese tradition credits this figure with writing the Tao Te…
- Adi ShankaraAdi Shankara is today often called the most important Indian philosopher, yet reliable information on his actual life is scant.
- 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.
- Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow in 1853, the second son of one of Russia's most prominent historians, yet he spent his final days as what witnesses…