14 articles
Kierkegaard lived only 42 years and most of his contemporaries saw him as a strange figure of Copenhagen. Today he is regarded as a forerunner of existentialism and one of the deepest thinkers on anxiety and choice.
In 1784 a Berlin journal asked: what is enlightenment? The answer of a professor from Königsberg took up only a few pages, but it contained one of the best-known sayings of modern philosophy.
At 23 Spinoza was expelled from his community with a ban of rare severity. He lived simply, grinding lenses, and wrote one of the boldest books in European philosophy.
The ancient Greeks placed the saying "Know thyself" at the entrance to one of the most important temples of their world. Two and a half thousand years later, science is showing why this task is so hard.
"You cannot step into the same river twice." This is perhaps Heraclitus’s best-known saying, but the form we know is not exactly his. Its history teaches us something about change and about quotations.
About 2,400 years ago Plato described a scene that almost every philosophy student knows: people chained in a cave, who take the shadows on the wall for reality.
Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a mountain for ever. For Camus he is not a symbol of failure but of a man who accepts his fate and still chooses to live fully.
Confucius left no book written in his own hand. Yet his words, recorded by his students, have shaped how hundreds of millions of people have lived, learned and governed.
Today “epicurean” means someone who likes expensive food and luxury. Epicurus himself taught something quite different: that happiness comes from few things and from the absence of fear.
She taught philosophy and astronomy in one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, and its most powerful men respected her. Her violent death made her a symbol, but it also covered her in legends.
We know Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius well. But Stoicism began centuries earlier, with a man who lost his cargo at sea and found philosophy in a bookshop.
He walked through Athens in daylight with a lit lantern and said he was looking for a human being. When Alexander the Great asked what he wanted, he told him to step out of his sunlight. Who was Diogenes really?
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