Paul Strathern

Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family....

Death in Florence illuminates one of the defining moments in Western history - the bloody and dramatic story of the battle for the soul of Renaissance Florence....

The Borgia family have become a byword for evil. Corruption, incest, ruthless megalomania, avarice, and vicious cruelty - all have been associated with their name. And yet, paradoxically, this family lived when the Renaissance was coming into its full flowering in Italy....

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates....

David Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything, except our actual perceptions themselves....

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Kvnigsberg....

Heidegger needed to develop an entire new form of philosophy....

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone....

The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world....

A handsome recluse, plagued by indecision and hypochondria, Kafka nonetheless exhibited an extraordinary strength....

Spinoza's system and conclusions have compelling beauty unequaled in the history of philosophy....

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....

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism at the opportune moment....

"If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it," Paul Strathern writes, "he is the last philosopher....

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....

Rene Descartes spent most of his childhood in solitude, a situation that also came to characterize his adult life....

From a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious and original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny....

This audiobook offers a concise, expert account of Beckett's life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man's struggle to understand his place in the world....

Schopenhauer, the "philosopher of pessimism", makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke....

After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years old, Dostoevsky never took things lightly....