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....

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

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

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 Hegel, philosophy became very difficult indeed. His dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man....

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

En Wittgenstein en 90 minutos, Paul Strathern expone de manera clara y concisa la vida e ideas del torturado genio vienés.

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

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....

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

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent....

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

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

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

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....

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