Intellect PlusPhilosophers
1,976 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 31 of 33.
Gregory Bateson turned a New Guinea ritual into a theory of escalating feudsWatching the Iatmul people of New Guinea in the 1930s, Gregory Bateson noticed how one person's behaviour provokes a reaction that provokes more of the same, round and round. He c…
An Armenian monk's thousand-year-old prayer book is treated like a talismanAround 1002, a monk on the shores of Lake Van finished 95 chapters of anguished prayer, each addressed straight to God. Armenians have kept Gregory of Narek's Book of Lamentations…- A rival mocked Athos monks as men with souls in their navelsIn the 1330s a scholar named Barlaam met monks on Mount Athos who prayed in stillness, seeking a vision of divine light. He derided them as navel-gazers and heretics. Their defend…
Julia Domna, a Syrian priest's daughter, lived in army camps as Roman empressRoman empresses usually stayed home, but Julia Domna followed Septimius Severus on campaign and slept in camp beside his troops. Born in Emesa to a family of priest kings, she wen…
Julia Kristeva split language into a rhythmic semiotic layer and a rule-bound symbolicA Bulgarian postgraduate arrived in Paris in December 1965 on a research fellowship, aged 24. Julia Kristeva went on to publish more than 30 books, from Powers of Horror to Black …
Ortega y Gasset's philosophy in one line: I am me and my circumstanceIn 1914 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset declared that a self cannot be pulled apart from the world around it: I am me and my circumstance. That maxim anchored all his…
A Cambridge biochemist learned Chinese and rewrote the history of inventionJoseph Needham was an established Cambridge biochemist when three Chinese students arrived in 1937. One of them, Lu Gwei-djen, taught him Chinese, and the result was Science and C…
Sophie's World, a novel teaching teenagers philosophy, sold over 40 million copiesA former Bergen high school teacher wrote a novel in which a Norwegian girl receives mysterious lessons in the history of philosophy. Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, published i…
Juan Luis Vives drafted Europe's first plan for public help to the urban poorIn 1526 a Valencian humanist living in Bruges wrote On Assistance to the Poor, the first Western treatise to propose a state policy for urban poverty: public relief plus craft tra…
Sor Juana became a nun so nothing could curtail her freedom to studyBarred from Mexico City's university, a teenage prodigy chose convent life because it left her free to read. From her cell Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz built a library of more than 4…
Judah Halevi left comfortable Spain to chase the land his poems longed forA respected physician in Toledo, Judah Halevi wrote some 800 Hebrew poems, and many are still sung in synagogues today. His best-known lyric sets a heart in the East against a bod…
Jules Michelet gave the Renaissance its name as an entire historical eraGiorgio Vasari spoke of a rebirth in art back in 1550, but Jules Michelet was the first historian to apply the French word Renaissance systematically to a whole age. He did it ins…
The earliest English book known to be by a woman came from a sealed cellIn May 1373 a 30-year-old woman in Norwich, given the last rites, saw a series of visions of Christ and then recovered. She spent decades reflecting on them, much of it walled int…- A fever convinced an 18th-century doctor that thought is made of fleshWhile ill with a fever, the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie noticed his thinking change as his blood raced. He concluded the mind is simply the brain and nerves at wo…
The pagan philosophy student who shopped around schools before choosing ChristianityJustin Martyr tried a Stoic, a Peripatetic who wanted his fee too eagerly and a Pythagorean who insisted he learn geometry first. He settled on Plato, until an old man by the sea …
Kang Youwei went from daring radical to relic in under twenty yearsIn 1898 the reformer Kang Youwei had the ear of China's young Guangxu Emperor and helped drive the Hundred Days' Reform. Within weeks the Empress Dowager Cixi crushed it and order…
Martha Nussbaum asks one blunt question of every society: what can people do?The philosopher Martha Nussbaum helped build the capabilities approach, which judges a society by what each person is actually able to do and to be. Her list runs from life and bo…
A strange wedding allegory taught medieval Europe its seven liberal artsAround the early 400s, a lawyer in Roman Carthage wrote a book in which the god Mercury marries Philology and receives seven bridesmaids as gifts. Each maid is a subject, from Gra…
Rome's last pagan emperor was raised a Christian and could quote the BibleJulian, nephew of Constantine the Great, grew up Christian, served as a church reader and knew scripture well. Around age 20 he turned to the old gods and Neoplatonic philosophy, …
Julian Huxley gave grebe courtship names like penguin dance and plesiosaurus raceBefore he became UNESCO's first director, Julian Huxley spent seasons watching water birds court. His 1914 study of the great crested grebe, with rituals nicknamed the penguin dan…
The plant scientist who quit his lab to practise do-nothing farmingA bout of pneumonia at 24 convinced Masanobu Fukuoka that modern agricultural science had it wrong. He left his job as a plant pathologist, went home to his family's orchards, and…
Linnaeus borrowed 240 bird species from a French curator who then quit zoologyWhen Carl Linnaeus expanded his catalogue of birds in 1766, most of the new species came straight from one French book. Its author, Mathurin Jacques Brisson, had by then walked aw…
A failed lawyer turned botanist helped establish that every plant is built from cellsMatthias Schleiden trained in law and opened a practice before a deep personal crisis pushed him toward plants. Peering through a microscope, he declared in 1838 that every plant …
Maurice Blanchot shaped French theory while almost never appearing in publicIn June 1944 Maurice Blanchot came within moments of being shot by a Nazi firing squad, an episode he retold half a century later. The surviving writer then withdrew from view for…
A Nobel playwright wrote a termite book about insects he had never seenMaurice Maeterlinck was hailed across Europe as a sage and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fifteen years later he published a book on termites so close to a South African …
Merleau-Ponty argued we know the world first with our bodies, not our thoughtsDescartes began philosophy with a thinking mind doubting everything. Maurice Merleau-Ponty started somewhere else: a living body already reaching for, gripping and moving through …
Martin Buber split all human relating into two words: I–Thou and I–ItIn 1923 Martin Buber argued that we meet the world in two basic ways. Treat a person as an object to use or analyse, and you live in I–It. Meet them wholly, as a presence rather t…
The man called mathematics' best friend never took a maths class after schoolMartin Gardner struggled with calculus and stopped studying mathematics after high school. Yet for twenty-five years his Scientific American column turned puzzles into a gateway f…
An AI pioneer once designed a machine whose only job was switching itself offIn 1952 Marvin Minsky sketched the ultimate machine: flip its switch and a mechanical hand pops out to flip it back. His mentor Claude Shannon built one, and Arthur C. Clarke foun…
Mary Daly went from reforming the Catholic Church to leaving theology entirelyMary Daly began as a Catholic scholar asking her church for equality and ended as a self-described post-Christian feminist inventing her own vocabulary. Along the way she collecte…
Moses Mendelssohn beat Immanuel Kant in a Berlin Academy essay contestHe walked into Berlin at 14 through the one gate open to Jews and cattle, a poor scribe's son with a curved spine. Within two decades Moses Mendelssohn had outscored Kant for an a…
A Byzantine monk was condemned for insisting Christ had two willsMaximus gave up a powerful post at the court of Emperor Heraclius to become a monk, then spent his last decades defying emperors over a single theological point: whether Jesus had…
Mircea Eliade split human experience into sacred and profaneMircea Eliade argued that religion begins with hierophanies, moments when the sacred breaks into ordinary life, dividing space and time into sacred and profane. The Romanian schol…- The 'Azerbaijani Molière' was nearly trained as a Shia clericMirza Fatali Akhundov was being groomed for the clergy until a poet and calligrapher asked him whether he wanted to become a hypocrite. He changed course, moved to Tiflis as a Rus…
Monique Wittig argued that 'woman' is a political category, not a natural oneFor the French writer Monique Wittig, sex did not produce oppression; oppression produced the categories of sex. She treated heterosexuality as a political regime rather than a pr…- Moritz Schlick gathered the Vienna Circle on Thursday nights in a chemistry buildingA physicist trained under Max Planck, Moritz Schlick came to distrust any claim that could be neither defined nor tested. In Vienna he hosted weekly meetings that drew Kurt Gödel,…
Mortimer Adler never got his bachelor's degree because he skipped a swimming testMortimer Adler dropped out of school at 14 to run copy for a New York newspaper, refused Columbia's compulsory swimming test, and still became one of America's best-known philosop…
The man who converted Friedrich Engels to communismBefore Marx and Engels were household names, a self-taught Rhineland writer named Moses Hess had already published Germany's first book of socialist theory. He introduced both men…
Max Frisch took revenge on a difficult client by putting him in a playBefore he was famous as a playwright, Max Frisch was a Zurich architect. A shampoo magnate sued him over a staircase in the country house Frisch designed, and the writer later use…
The Frankfurt School's leader was a factory owner's son groomed for textilesMax Horkheimer was pulled out of school at fifteen to learn his father's textile business in Stuttgart. Instead he became the director who turned Frankfurt's Institute for Social …
The sea-diver's son who staked everything on a single Buddhist sutraNichiren, a Japanese monk of the Kamakura period, proudly called himself the son of a sea-diver from a remote shore. He preached that chanting the title of the Lotus Sutra was the…- Columbia's longest-serving president won a Nobel and blocked Hemingway's PulitzerNicholas Murray Butler ran Columbia University for 43 years, the longest tenure in its history, shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize and even stood in as a vice-presidential candidat…
The cardinal who exposed the Donation of Constantine as a forgeryIn 1433 the German churchman Nicholas of Cusa identified the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, a verdict Lorenzo Valla confirmed a few years later. The same polymath wrote on …
Mozi walked ten days to talk a king out of war, and wonIn China's Warring States era, the carpenter-philosopher Mozi preached universal love and practised it by rushing to crisis zones. Hearing that Chu planned to attack Song, he walk…
The Sufi-trained reformer who tried to marry Islam with reasonMuhammad Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt, helped found Islamic Modernism, a movement sometimes called Neo-Muʿtazilism after a medieval school of rationalist theology. He believed reli…
A self-taught foundry worker warned about chemicals in food before Silent SpringMurray Bookchin never went to college, yet he is considered one of the twentieth century's most important left-wing theorists. His first book, published under a pseudonym in 1962,…
Murray Rothbard called the state organised robbery and built anarcho-capitalismMurray Rothbard, an economist of the Austrian School, argued that every service the state provides, including armies, police and courts, could be delivered more efficiently by pri…
The Danish pastor banned from preaching who inspired the folk high schoolN. F. S. Grundtvig wrote or translated around 1,500 hymns, helped draft Denmark's first constitution and shaped modern Danish national identity. He is also regarded as the ideolog…
A Persian official's dreamlike awakening sent him on a seven-year journeyAround the age of 41, Nasir Khusraw, a financial administrator in Khurasan, had a sudden spiritual awakening he likened to a dream. He quit his post, converted to Isma'ili Islam a…
The trader who profited from crashes and wrote the book on black swansNassim Nicholas Taleb warned that finance badly underestimates rare, extreme events, and then made money when they happened, first in the 1987 crash and again in 2008. His book Th…
Olympe de Gouges rewrote the Rights of Man to include women, two years inIn 1791, when revolutionary France proclaimed equal rights and quietly left women out, a playwright from Montauban answered with her own declaration. If a woman could be sent to t…
Oswald Spengler treated civilisations like organisms with a fixed lifespanA lonely Munich scholar who owned no books wrote the bestseller of defeated Germany. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West claimed cultures are born, mature and die on a schedule,…
Otto Bauer tried to steer Austrian socialism between reform and revolutionAt 26, Otto Bauer published a 600-page answer to the problem tearing at Austria-Hungary: how can dozens of nationalities share one state? He went on to write roughly 4,000 newspap…
A Danish linguist helped kill grammar drills and asked his wife to enforce retirementOtto Jespersen hated compulsory Latin so much that he later got it dropped from Copenhagen's English degree. He campaigned for teaching languages by ear rather than by translation…- The Vienna philosopher behind the little people icons in modern infographicsRows of identical stick figures standing for thousands of workers or homes now feel like an ordinary part of charts. They trace back to Otto Neurath, a Vienna Circle philosopher w…
Novalis ran salt mines by day and helped invent German RomanticismFriedrich von Hardenberg studied law, mineralogy, chemistry and mathematics, worked as a director of salt mines, and died at 28. Under the pen name Novalis he also wrote Hymns to …
Octavio Paz quit as ambassador to protest a massacre, then won the NobelIn 1968 Mexico's ambassador to India resigned after his government's forces killed student protesters at Tlatelolco. The diplomat was Octavio Paz, a poet who had already written a…
The novel that most shaped independent Ukraine's first fifteen years was a feminist provocationWhen philosopher Oksana Zabuzhko published Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex in 1996, critics and readers erupted. A decade later a poll named it the book that had most influenced Ukrain…
Freeman Dyson said Dyson spheres should really be named after Olaf StapledonA Liverpool philosophy lecturer imagined, in a 1937 novel, civilisations wrapping their stars in shells to capture all their energy. The physicist Freeman Dyson later credited Sta…
The thrice-wounded soldier who taught America that law grows from experienceOliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was shot at Ball's Bluff, Antietam and Chancellorsville before he ever opened a law book. He went on to argue that judges follow the needs of their time …