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....

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....

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

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....

An original, illuminating history of the northern European Renaissance in art, science, and philosophy, which often rivaled its Italian counterpart.

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

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

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....

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

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

En Spinoza en 90 minutos, Paul Strathern expone de manera clara y concisa la vida e ideas de uno de los grandes pensadores racionalistas del siglo XVII.

Great cities are complex, chaotic and colossal. These are cities that dominate the world stage and define eras; where ideas flourish, revolutions are born and history is made....

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

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense....

Confucius knew all about life and told us how to behave, but we can't find out precisely what he was up to....

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

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....

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....

Acclaimed historian Paul Strathern tells the vivid story of The Age of Reason, while also exploring the painful cost of creating the progress and modernity upon which the Western world was built.