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....

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

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

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

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

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....

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....

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

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

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....

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

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....

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....

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....

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

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

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

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