Philosopher Biography

In How to Think Like a Woman, Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy. Funny, honest, and wickedly intelligent, this is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir’s unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself.

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

How to think clearly, act purposefully, overcome any obstacle, and find peace and happiness along the way. The Meditations is a collection of Marcus' personal journal entries. They were not intended for publication but to remind Marcus himself of his principles and priorities. As a result, they are intimate, direct, and extremely useful. This new edition is rendered in contemporary English, with a foreword by Sam Torode.

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.

The first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential intellects in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. Recalling such bestsellers as David McCullough's John Adams and Walter Isaacson's Einstein, Maimonides is a biography on a grand scale, brilliantly explicating one man's life against the background of his time.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

David Hume (1711-1776) is perhaps best known for his ideas about cause and effect and his criticisms of religion, but he is rarely thought of as a philosopher with practical wisdom to offer. Yet Hume's philosophy is grounded in an honest assessment of nature - human nature in particular. The Great Guide is an engaging and eye-opening account of how Hume's thought should serve as the basis for a complete approach to life. Julian Baggini masterfully interweaves biography with intellectual history and philosophy to give us a complete vision of Hume's guide to life.

The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.

Carl Jung was the founder of analytical psychology who revolutionized the way we approached the human psyche. Drawing on Eastern mysticism, mythology and dream analysis to develop his theories, Jung proposed many ideas which are still influential today, including introversion, extroversion and the collective unconscious.

Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Machiavelli is a superb portrait of the brilliant and revolutionary political philosopher - history's most famous theorist of "warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed" - and the age he embodied. Ross King, the New York Times best-selling author of Brunelleschi's Dome, argues that the author of The Prince was a far more complex and sympathetic character than is often portrayed.

Through his fiction, essays, poems, and art, Kahlil Gibran inspired a devoted international following and transformed modern Arabic literature. In this book, Joseph P. Ghougassian brings together the philosophical elements present across Gibran’s diverse writings, including his best-selling work The Prophet, as well as other significant works such as The Broken Wings, which tells the story of doomed young lovers, and the collection of aphorisms in Sand and Foam.

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

One of the most influential philosophers and theologians in the history of Western thought, St Thomas Aquinas established the foundations for much of modern philosophy of religion, and is famous for his arguments for the existence of God. In this cogent and multifaceted introduction to the great saint's work, Edward Feser argues that you cannot fully understand Aquinas' philosophy without his theology, and vice-versa. He covers Aquinas' thoughts on the soul, natural law, metaphysics, and more.

Set in Provence, London, and New York, this is a daughter’s wonderfully evocative and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather—Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher—and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything.

A dazzling biographical study of the greatest German philosopher of the nineteenth century by one of the most widely read German-language authors of the twentieth century. In this vivid and eloquent biography, Zweig largely eschews the traditional academic discourse on the philosopher's work, instead concentrating entirely on Nietzsche as a person, his habits, his passions and his obsessions. Stefan Zweig describes the tragedy of Nietzsche's existence, his seclusion from the world, in self-imposed isolation, in a compelling and impressive way.

As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.

Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709 - 1751) war zwar Arzt, jedoch auch philosophisch außerordentlich interessiert. Er war ein Anhänger des hedonistischen Materialismus, beeinflusst unter anderem von Descartes und Locke. Sein berühmtestes Werk ist die Kampfschrift "Der Mensch eine Maschine" ("L'homme machine"), in der er die Willensfreiheit des Menschen als eine bloße Illusion erklärt. Dieses Werk schlug seinerzeit hohe Wellen, wurde in Frankreich verbrannt - und ist noch heute faszinierende Literatur!

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.

In a series of poignant vignettes, a preeminent historian makes a compelling case for Machiavelli as an unjustly maligned figure with valuable political insights that resonate as strongly today as they did in his time.