Curated playlist
Philosophers of religion
- 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,…
- Augustine of HippoAugustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa that today is Souk Ahras, Algeria. He died on the 28th of August 430 as the Vandals were laying siege to his city. In the seventy-five…
- 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. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" - and for much of his life, he seemed to be asking the world to practice it on his behalf. Born on the 21st of October 1772 in the small Devon town of Ottery St Mary, he…
- 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 generations. By the time he was twenty-three, he had been expelled from his own community…
- 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, the Edicts of Ashoka name a man called the Buddha. One of those edicts, carved on a…
- Paul TillichPaul Tillich arrived in the United States in 1933 at age 47, without fluent English, his university post stripped by the Nazi regime, his first marriage long collapsed, his nerves still frayed from years of burying soldiers in the mud of…
- 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,…
- Søren KierkegaardSøren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on the 5th of May 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children in a family that was both prosperous and haunted. His niece Henriette Lund remembered him as a boy in "a coat the color of red cabbage",…
- Adi ShankaraAdi Shankara is today often called the most important Indian philosopher, yet reliable information on his actual life is scant. He was an Indian Vedic scholar-monk and teacher of Advaita Vedanta in the eighth century. The strange thing is…
- 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…