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....

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....

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia - three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history....

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

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....

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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....

Borges in 90 Minutes offers an expert account of Borges' life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man's struggle to understand his place in the world....

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates....

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

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....

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

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....