Showing titles in Philosophers

In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller.

In 1957, four years before his death, Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, began writing his life story. But what started as an exercise in autobiography soon morphed into an altogether more profound undertaking. The result is an absorbing piece of self-analysis: a frank statement of faith, philosophy, and principles from one of the great explorers of the human mind.

This novel biography brings Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) to life for a new generation by exploring the emperor’s fascinating psychological journey. Donald J. Robertson examines Marcus’s relationships with key figures in his life, such as his mother, Domitia Lucilla, and the emperor Hadrian, as well as his Stoic tutors. He draws extensively on Marcus’s own Meditations and correspondence, and he examines the emperor’s actions as detailed in the Augustan History and other ancient texts.

The Story of Philosophy: Plato by Will Durant is a captivating exploration of the life and philosophical ideas of the ancient Greek thinker, Plato. In this edition, Durant brings Plato's philosophy to life with vivid imagery that enhances the reader's understanding and engagement. Durant provides readers with a comprehensive overview of Plato's life, from his upbringing in ancient Athens to his establishment of the Academy, one of the earliest institutions of higher learning in the Western world.

Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific task. Through, for instance, Heraclitus's enigmatic sayings, the poetry of Parmenides and Empedocles, and Zeno's paradoxes, the Western world was introduced to metaphysics, rationalist theology, ethics, and logic.

Once upon a time, philosophy was a dangerous business-and for no one more so than for Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher vilified by theologians and political authorities everywhere as "the atheist Jew." As his inflammatory manuscripts circulated underground, Spinoza lived a humble existence in The Hague, grinding optical lenses to make ends meet. Meanwhile, in the glittering salons of Paris, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was climbing the ladder of courtly success.

With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger." (George Kateb, The New Republic)

In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, doctors, scientists, geographers, travellers and theologians.

The Greek word sumposion means a drinking party (a fact shamefully ignored by the organizers of modern symposia), and the party described in Plato's Symposium is one supposedly given in the year 416 BC by the playwright Agathon to celebrate his victory in the dramatic festival of the Lenaea. He has already given one party, the previous evening; this second party is for a select group of friends, and host and guests alike are feeling a little frail.

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. His presence and ideas rippled through the lives of many prominent leaders and authors, such as John Ortberg, Richard Foster, James Bryan Smith, Paula Huston, and J. P. Moreland. As a result of these relationships and the books he wrote, he fundamentally altered the way tens of thousands of Christians have understood and experienced the spiritual life.

Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment. Eventually, he returned to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily.

Uma das maiores intelectuais públicas do Brasil, referência histórica do movimento negro, biografada por uma das mais promissoras vozes da nova geração. Sueli Carneiro é uma das principais intelectuais públicas brasileiras. Em mais de quarenta anos de ativismo, ela vem combinando escrita, academia e intelectualidade para qualificar uma luta política que enegreceu o feminismo no Brasil e, ao mesmo tempo, colocou as mulheres como protagonistas do movimento negro.

Diogenes Laertios, der im 3. Jahrhundert nach Christus lebte, war ein antiker Philosophiehistoriker, der das Leben und die Lehren der antiken Philosophen beschrieb - aus heutiger Sicht sehr kurz nach deren Tod! Seine Texte beanspruchen nicht wissenschaftliche Exaktheit; vielmehr erzählt er in Anekdoten - und zwar äußerst unterhaltsam! In diesem knappen Hörstück erörtert er die Philosophie von Epikur, der den Hedonismus lehrte.

Friedrich Nietzsche sagte: "Er ist der Nachtwächter der griechischen Philosophiegeschichte, man kann nicht in sie hinein, ohne dass einem nicht von ihm der Schlüssel gegeben wird." Die Rede ist von Diogenes Laertios, der im 3. Jahrhundert nach Christus lebte. Er war ein antiker Philosophiehistoriker, der das Leben und die Lehren der antiken Philosophen beschrieb - aus heutiger Sicht sehr kurz nach deren Tod! Seine Texte beanspruchen nicht wissenschaftliche Exaktheit; vielmehr erzählt er in Anekdoten - und zwar äußerst unterhaltsam!

Friedrich Nietzsche sagte: "Er ist der Nachtwächter der griechischen Philosophiegeschichte, man kann nicht in sie hinein, ohne dass einem nicht von ihm der Schlüssel gegeben wird." Die Rede ist von Diogenes Laertios, der im 3. Jahrhundert nach Christus lebte. Er war ein antiker Philosophiehistoriker, der das Leben und die Lehren der antiken Philosophen beschrieb - aus heutiger Sicht sehr kurz nach deren Tod! Seine Texte beanspruchen nicht wissenschaftliche Exaktheit; vielmehr erzählt er in Anekdoten - und zwar äußerst unterhaltsam!

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.

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"

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

Among the most famous visionaries of our times, J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) continues to transform thought, lifestyles and education across continents more than three decades after his death. In this new biography, tracing the nine long decades of his life, from his growing-up years, his relationships to his writings and talks, Roshen Dalal provides a much-needed corrective–an objective and balanced view of his legacy.

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.