Paul Strathern

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

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....

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

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

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

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

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

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

Augustine's struggles with sex and a domineering mother, followed by his spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy....

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

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

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....

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

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

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

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....

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

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....