Showing titles in History

Hannah Arendt’s insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of...

Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. This great venture has now all but completely...

Schopenhauer, the "philosopher of pessimism," makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. But if the world is indifferent to our fate, it doesn't thwart us on purpose. The world's fa├ºade is supported by what Schopenhauer calls the universal Will—blind...

René Descartes spent much of his life in solitude. Fortunately, these countless lonely hours helped Descartes produce the declaration that changed all philosophy: “I think, therefore I am.” Convincing himself to doubt and disregard sensory knowledge, Descartes found he could prove his...

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is...

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability...

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: he has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common...

Hegel’s dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Its most vital element was the dialectic of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This sprung from Hegel’s aim to overcome the deficiencies of logic and ascend toward Mind as the ultimate reality. His...

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense, yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live, and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being."...

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Königsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. Kant's aim was to restore metaphysics...

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates, who spent so much of his time talking about philosophy on the streets of Athens that he never got around to writing anything down. His method of aggressive questioning, called dialectic, was...

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ultimately went mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than...

Since the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, the secular intellectual has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the decline of the cleric and assumed the functions of moral mentor and critic of mankind. This fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world examines the moral...

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the...

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, a naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his contemporaries Kant and Hume may have been superior academic philosophers, the sheer power of Rousseau’s...

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a life in philosophy. In 387 BC he founded the Academy, the world's first university, and taught...

“Almost all of the philosophical truths that I have come to know and understand I have learned from Aristotle,” says Mortimer J. Adler. This easy-to-listen-to exposition of Aristotle’s thoughts about nature, human actions, and the conduct of life confirms convictions that most of us hold...

Augustine’s spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity, detailed in his Confessions, ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy: the fusion of the two doctrines of Christianity and Neoplatonism. This not only provided Christianity with a strong intellectual backing but...

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God—one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity...

During the 20th century, our understanding of the world was transformed thanks to the likes of relativity, quantum physics, molecular biology, chaos theory and computer science. Likewise, our comprehension of ourselves developed dramatically courtesy of theories such as behaviourism...