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....

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....

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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....

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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

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....

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....

Rene Descartes spent most of his childhood in solitude, a situation that also came to characterize his adult life....