Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Philosophers

In the Louvre museum hangs a portrait that is considered the iconic image of Rene Descartes, the great seventeenth-century French philosopher. And the painter of the work? The Dutch master Frans Hals--or so it was long believed, until the work was downgraded to a copy of an original. But where is the authentic version, and who painted it? Is the man in the painting--and in its original--really Descartes?

A unique combination of philosophy, biography, and art history, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter investigates the remarkable individuals and circumstances...

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was the greatest intellectual historian of the twentieth century. But his work also made an original and important contribution to moral and political philosophy and to liberal theory.

In 1921, at the age of eleven, Isaiah Berlin arrived in England from Riga, Latvia. By the time he was thirty he was at the heart of British intellectual life. He has remained its commanding presence ever since, and few would dispute that he was one of Britain's greatest thinkers. His reputation extends worldwide--as a great conversationalist, intellectual historian, and...

A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his magnificent mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, and died in the midst of a violent quarrel with...

Maimonides was the greatest Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the medieval period, a towering figure who has had a profound and lasting influence on Jewish law, philosophy, and religious consciousness. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to his life and work, revealing how his philosophical sensibility and outlook informed his interpretation of Jewish tradition.

Moshe Halbertal vividly describes Maimonides's childhood in Muslim Spain, his family's flight to North Africa to escape persecution, and their eventual resettling in Egypt. He draws on...

Thomas Aquinas is the most widely read and arguably most influential of the medieval philosophers. He is famous for his impressive and coherent synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology and his magisterial Summa Theologiae is a hugely important, and enduring, text in the history of philosophy. Yet he is also a very difficult thinker and his ideas present a number of challenges to his readers.

Aquinas: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of Aquinas's thought, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex...

Jane Cobbald takes a biographical approach and teases out the different strands of his thinking, presenting them in his own words. She shows how his approach developed over the course of his eventful life (which included both world wars) and takes the reader on a journey through his discoveries, interspersed with lively anecdotes which illustrate how his mind...

Like the first Hackett edition of the Augustine's "Confessions," the second edition features F. J. Sheed's remarkable translation of this classic spiritual autobiography with an Introduction by noted historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. New to this edition are a wealth of notes on literary, philosophical, biblical, historical, and liturgical topics by Michael P. Foley, an Editor's Preface, a map, a timeline, paragraph numbers in the text, a glossary, and a thorough index. The text itself has been completely reset, with textual and explanatory notes placed at the foot of the page for...

In 1958, the US director John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a scenario for a film about Sigmund Freud. Huston wanted Sartre to concentrate on the conflict-ridden period of Freud's life when he abandoned hypnosis and invented psychoanalysis. The Freud Scenario, discovered in Sartre's papers after his death, is the result--a deft portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that would prove a turning point in twentieth-century thought.

Sartre did not regard this script as a diversion from his larger intellectual project. Freud's preoccupations with female...

Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) lived through what he described as 'the two great catastrophes of the twentieth century: the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945', and yet the keynote of his astonishingly rich and varied life and work was an enduring optimism. Bronowski was a professional scientist, scientific administrator, poet, philosopher, dramatist and television and radio personality, possessing an energy and versatility that make him a rare figure in our cultural history. His final achievement, the groundbreaking television series The Ascent of...

That Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov was always classified by his contemporaries as a "conservative" gives his life a special significance in Russian intellectual history. The myth of radical historiography has made him a victim of purposeful historical forgetfulness. In this respect he shares the fate of men like Aksakov, Danilevsky, and Katkov, indeed, of most Russian conservatives. Yet it is misleading to place him in such politically conservative company.

Strakhov was born in 1828, the same year as his great friend Leo Tolstoy and his great opponent Nikolai Chernyshevsky....