Curated category
Writers about religion and science
- Voltaire"This is no time to make new enemies." Those words are attributed to Voltaire on his deathbed, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan.
- Thomas AquinasThomas Aquinas was the youngest of nine children, and his family had a plan for him. His brothers would be soldiers. He would follow his uncle Sinibald…
- Stephen KingStephen King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 on the 19th of June 1999 when a minivan struck him and sent him into a depression in the…
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound…
- C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm on the 22nd of November 1963, and died a few minutes later at age 64. That same afternoon, approximately 55…
- Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant lived so rigidly that his neighbors in Königsberg were said to set their watches by his daily walks. He was born Emanuel on the 22nd of April…
- Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei was born in Pisa on the 15th of February 1564, the first of six children of a leading lutenist. He died on the 8th of January 1642, aged 77…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- 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…
- 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.
- Leonhard EulerPierre-Simon Laplace told his colleagues to read Leonhard Euler, calling him the master of us all. The man he was describing was a Swiss polymath born in…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those…
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelOn the day before the Battle of Jena, in October 1806, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel watched Napoleon ride out of the city on horseback.
- Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton said his mother told him he was so small at birth that he could have fit inside a quart mug. He was born prematurely on Christmas Day, the…
- Francis BaconFrancis Bacon dictated his last letter from a borrowed bed in Highgate, his fingers, he wrote, so disjointed with sickness that he could not steadily hold a…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about…
- TaixuTaixu was born on the 8th of January 1890 in Haining, a county within Zhejiang province. His parents died while he remained very young.
- Pierre GassendiPierre Gassendi was born on the 22nd of January 1592 in a village called Champtercier, near Digne, in the south of France.
- David AttenboroughDavid Attenborough turned 100 years old on the 8th of May 2026, and the Royal Albert Hall filled with singers, filmmakers, composers, and royalty to mark the…
- Al-KhwarizmiAl-Khwarizmi gave the world two words it still uses every day, and most people who say them have no idea. The word algebra comes from the title of one of his…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned…
- James George FrazerJames George Frazer was born on the 1st of January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a chemist named Daniel F. Frazer.
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra was born on the 1st of February 1939 in Vienna, Austria. He pursued his doctoral studies at the University of Vienna and earned a PhD in…
- 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…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his…