Paul Strathern

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.

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....

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

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....

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....

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

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

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....

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

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

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....

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

Borges in 90 Minutes offers an expert account of Borges' life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man's struggle to understand his place in the world....

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....

A handsome recluse, plagued by indecision and hypochondria, Kafka nonetheless exhibited an extraordinary strength....

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

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

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