Paul Strathern

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....

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

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras....

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

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....

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

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....

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

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

Acclaimed historian Paul Strathern tells the vivid story of The Age of Reason, while also exploring the painful cost of creating the progress and modernity upon which the Western world was built.

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

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

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

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

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....

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....

An original, illuminating history of the northern European Renaissance in art, science, and philosophy, which often rivaled its Italian counterpart.

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

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

Confucius knew all about life and told us how to behave, but we can't find out precisely what he was up to....