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....

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....

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

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

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....

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

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....

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....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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....

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