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....

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....

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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....

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....

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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

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