Curated playlist
Philosophers of psychology
- AristotleOnly around a third of Aristotle's original writings survive, and none was meant to be published.
- AvicennaIn a fortress prison, Avicenna imagined a man falling through air. It became known as the Floating Man.
- René DescartesRené Descartes had three dreams in a heated room in 1619. He believed they revealed a new philosophy to him.
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at age 10, about the fall of Barcelona.
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at age three. His father was deliberately raising a genius.
- Gilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze never trimmed his fingernails. He once explained that he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and so could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain". It is a…
- Arthur SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who, in 1820, asked the University of Berlin to schedule his lectures for the very hour when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught. Hegel was the celebrated name of the day. Only five students…
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- AverroesIn 1169, a caliph asked the philosopher Averroes if the heavens had a beginning.
- Jacques LacanIn 1963, psychoanalysts stripped Jacques Lacan of the right to train new analysts.
- Jerry FodorPhilosopher Jerry Fodor argued that thinking works like a language inside the brain. He called it Mentalese.
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
- Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein, the Austro-British philosopher, published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime, and it ran to just 75 pages. He was born in Vienna on the 26th of April 1889 and died on the 29th of April 1951. Nearly…
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner proposed steering missiles with pigeons. The birds pecked at a screen showing the target.
- Karl JaspersKarl Jaspers hid in Heidelberg through the Nazi years because his wife was Jewish.
- 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.
- Wilhelm ReichIn 1956, a United States court ordered six tons of Wilhelm Reich's books and papers burned.
- Mulla SadraMulla Sadra turned down governing Fars to live as a hermit. He was the only child of a wealthy ruler.
- Michel WeberMichel Weber opened Belgium's first philosophical counseling service. He champions process philosophy.
- Slavoj ŽižekSlavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher whom one admirer called the Elvis of cultural theory and whom another label dubbed the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He was born on the 21st of March 1949 and has written over 50 books. He…