Intellect PlusPhilosophers, historians, political and social scientists
206 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 4.
In 1886 Charles Peirce saw that electrical switches could do logicDecades before digital computers, the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce realised electric switching circuits could carry out logical operations. Bertrand Russell called him…
Cicero's name means chickpea, and he refused to change itMarcus Tullius Cicero inherited a family nickname from an ancestor whose nose had a chickpea-like cleft. Urged to drop it on entering politics, he vowed to make it glorious instea…
The father of structural anthropology did only one stint of fieldworkClaude Lévi-Strauss insisted that so-called savage and civilised minds share the same structures. Yet his only ethnographic fieldwork came during a few years in Brazil in the 1930…
Clifford Geertz read cockfights and bazaars the way critics read novelsFor thirty years no American cultural anthropologist was judged more influential than Clifford Geertz. He built that reputation on patient fieldwork in Javanese towns, Balinese vi…
Confucius is a name invented by Jesuit missionaries two thousand years laterThe sage Chinese people call Kongzi, Master Kong, became Confucius only in the late sixteenth century, when Jesuits Latinised a grander title meaning roughly Great Master Kong. Bo…
The laughing philosopher imagined atoms and countless worlds 2,400 years agoDemocritus pictured everything, from water to people, as clumps of tiny indivisible bodies moving through empty space. He guessed there were many worlds, some without a sun, other…
The most influential psychologist of the century first wanted to be a novelistB. F. Skinner graduated in English literature and spent a miserable stretch trying to write fiction, despite encouragement from Robert Frost. He gave up, discovered John B. Watson…
Bertrand Russell's secular godfather was John Stuart Mill, who died a year laterBorn into a Whig dynasty, Bertrand Russell was orphaned at four and raised by a Presbyterian grandmother who overturned his father's wish that he grow up agnostic. He became a fou…
Reading The Golden Bough turned a sickly Polish philosopher into anthropology's great fieldworkerBronisław Malinowski started out studying mathematics and physics in Kraków. Illness, travel and one book by James Frazer sent him to the Trobriand Islands, where years of living …
Freud picked Carl Jung as his heir, then lost himSigmund Freud hoped the young Swiss psychiatrist would carry psychoanalysis forward and lend it credibility beyond its largely Jewish founders. He made Jung president of the new I…
Asked if the heavens were eternal, Averroes wisely said nothing at firstIn 1169 the Almohad caliph asked Ibn Rushd whether the heavens had always existed. Fearing a dangerous answer, he stayed silent until the ruler showed he knew Plato and Aristotle …
Before his heresy trial, Spinoza had himself declared an orphan to escape debtIn March 1656 a young Amsterdam merchant asked city officials to rule him a legal orphan, freeing him from his late father's crushing debts. It worked, but it broke synagogue rule…
Drunken monks accused Bede of heresy for doing his own arithmeticBede worked out for himself how old the world was and put the birth of Christ 3,952 years after creation, well short of the accepted figure of over 5,000. At a feast in 708, some …
Children copied the adults who hit Bobo, and psychology changed courseIn 1961 Albert Bandura let children watch an adult either attack an inflatable doll or ignore it. Those who saw the violence were more likely to pummel the doll themselves. The fi…
Albert Ellis cured his own shyness by approaching 100 strangers in a monthAt 19, terrified of rejection, Albert Ellis made himself start conversations with 100 women in the Bronx Botanical Garden over a single month. Not one agreed to a date, but his fe…
Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic to inspect prisons and came back with DemocracyIn 1831 the French government sent a young aristocrat to report on American penitentiaries. Alexis de Tocqueville did tour some jails, then spent nine months roaming from Michigan…
At 63, a mathematician with no philosophy training became a Harvard philosopherAlfred North Whitehead spent decades on algebra and co-wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Then, with no formal grounding in philosophy, he accepted a Harvard philo…
Locked up by Mussolini, Gramsci filled 3,000 pages that outlived fascismAntonio Gramsci stood under five feet tall, was jailed by the fascist regime in 1926, and wrote more than thirty notebooks behind bars. To slip past the censors he sometimes calle…
Everything we read by Aristotle was never meant for the publicAristotle wrote polished dialogues for a general audience, and almost all of them are lost. What survives, about a third of his output, is essentially teaching material for studen…
The philosopher of pessimism lived comfortably on government bond interestArthur Schopenhauer taught that the world is driven by a blind, irrational will and praised the denial of self. He could afford to think so freely because his inheritance, parked …- Comte named sociology only after someone else took social physicsAuguste Comte first called his science of society social physics. When the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet adopted that phrase, Comte coined sociologie in 1838, unaware that…
The Oxford historian so popular his lectures were moved to 8:30 a.m.A. J. P. Taylor packed Oxford lecture halls so tightly that he was scheduled at half past eight in the morning to thin the crowds. Millions more knew him from television, and Rich…
Maslow was so embarrassed by his master's thesis that he hid itBefore he mapped human needs into a famous hierarchy, Abraham Maslow wrote a thesis on memorising verbal material, judged it trivial, and tore its listing out of the library catal…- The father of economics tried to refund his students, and they refusedWhen Adam Smith quit his Glasgow chair halfway through a term in 1764 to tutor a young duke, he offered his students their fees back. They would not take the money. The same scrup…
Why medieval thinkers ranked al-Farabi second only to AristotleLater writers gave al-Farabi a remarkable nickname: the Second Master, with Aristotle as the first. He built the earliest full philosophical system in the Islamic world, wrote a v…
A ninth-century Baghdad philosopher invented the codebreaker's favourite trickCounting how often each letter appears in a secret message, then matching the commonest symbols to the commonest letters, is called frequency analysis. Al-Kindi described it in Ba…