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. Apart from...

In Confucius in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Confucius’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the...

Rene Descartes spent most of his childhood in solitude, a situation that also came to characterize his adult life. Fortunately, these countless lonely hours helped Descartes produce the declaration...

García Márquez stands on the shoulders of a great Latin American literary heritage. But he is also that modern rarity, a writer with aspirations to high art who also remains hugely popular. For...

With Hegel, philosophy became very difficult indeed. His dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Even Hegel conceded that "only one man understands me, and...

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Königsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he...

Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the...

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ended up going mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific...

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. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a...

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. Yet while his...