Curated playlist
Philosophers of psychology
- 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 Aquinas he was simply "The Philosopher". He lived from 384 to 322 BC, and according…
- AvicennaBy the age of ten, Avicenna had memorized the entire Quran. He was born around 980 in the village of Afshana in Transoxiana, into a Persian family, and his curiosity would carry him through the libraries of Balkh, Khwarazm, Gorgan, Rey,…
- René DescartesRené Descartes opened his treatise on emotions, the Passions of the Soul, with a startling promise. He would write on the topic, he said, "as if no one had written on these matters before." That refusal to bow to earlier authorities runs…
- 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. That detail carries a kind of compressed prophecy: here was a child in Philadelphia,…
- 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 dialogues of Plato. This was not an accident. His father, James Mill, set out with…
- 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…
- 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 chief judge and imam of the Great Mosque. His father held the same office. And yet,…
- Jacques LacanJacques Marie Émile Lacan, born on the 13th of April 1901 in Paris, became the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. He held seminars in Paris nearly every year from 1952 until 1980, attracting philosophers, artists, and clinical…
- Jerry FodorJerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best left to biologists. He disagreed with both camps. Born in New York City on the…
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré was born on the 29th of April 1854 in the Cité Ducale neighborhood of Nancy, and by the time he died on the 17th of July 1912, he had touched nearly every branch of mathematics that existed in his lifetime. His peers called…
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner died on the 18th of August 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just ten days after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association and delivering what amounted to a final lecture on his life's…
- Karl JaspersKarl Jaspers died on the 26th of February 1969 -- his wife Gertrud's 90th birthday. That detail is small, but it says something. The two of them had survived the Nazi years together, hiding in Heidelberg while friends quietly kept them…
- 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…
- Wilhelm ReichWilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of November 1957 in a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Between those two dates he published…
- 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 to Qazvin in 1591, then to Isfahan in 1597, chasing teachers who could feed an…
- Michel WeberMichel Weber, born in 1963, arrived at philosophy by way of applied economics. He began at Saint-Louis University in Brussels, earning a degree in commercial engineering in 1986, before crossing the city's intellectual landscape to the…