Curated category
Social philosophers
- 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…
- Han FeiHan Fei was born around 280 BC into the ruling family of Han, one of the warring states that carved up ancient China in its most turbulent era.
- 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…
- 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.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
- 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…
- Adam SmithAdam Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, he walked straight into a huge tanning pit.
- 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?
- XenophonXenophon of Athens was born around 430 BC, in the deme of Erchia, into an aristocratic family - and he would go on to become one of the most versatile minds…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian…
- 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.
- ConfuciusConfucius asked a single question when he came home from court and learned that the stables had burned down. He said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district.
- 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…
- Alexander HerzenAlexander Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, just weeks before Napoleon's armies marched into the city. His very name was invented by his father, a rich…
- 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.
- 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…