Intellect PlusPhilosophers
1,976 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 32 of 33.
Pope Gregory VIII reigned just 57 days but launched the Third CrusadeAlberto di Morra spent decades as a papal diplomat before being elected pope in October 1187. Within weeks he had patched up relations with the Holy Roman Emperor and issued the b…
The Dominican scholar accused of heresy who became the first conclave popeIn 1264 critics branded 108 statements in Pierre de Tarentaise's theology commentary heretical, and Thomas Aquinas was assigned to defend them. Twelve years later his fellow cardi…- The only Portuguese pope was killed when his private study's ceiling collapsedJohn XXI wanted peace and quiet for his medical studies, so he had a private apartment added to the papal palace at Viterbo. In May 1277, while he worked there alone, the ceiling …
The scholar pope who brought the abacus and Arabic digits back to EuropeAround the year 1000, Gerbert of Aurillac could run calculations on his abacus that left contemporaries struggling with Roman numerals far behind. He had learned from Arabic schol…
Porphyry's slim logic primer taught medieval scholars from Paris to BaghdadA Phoenician philosopher born around 234 wrote a short introduction to logic that became the standard textbook for more than a thousand years, in Latin schools and across the Musl…
Wittgenstein admired Otto Weininger's book most for how wrong it wasOtto Weininger published one book, Sex and Character, and died by suicide months later at 23 in the Vienna house where Beethoven had died. The dramatic death made the book famous.…
Pak Chungyang served Japan's rule of Korea and never apologised for itPak Chungyang rose from a poor family to govern province after province under Japanese colonial rule in Korea, tearing down Daegu's old city walls along the way. Arrested as a tra…
The Italian communist who turned down Stalin to stay in democratic politicsIn 1951 Stalin offered Palmiro Togliatti the top job at the Cominform. He said no, preferring to keep leading Italy's Communist Party, by then the largest in Western Europe. His s…
Cicero's famous book on duty was largely borrowed from a Greek StoicCicero's On Duties shaped European ethics for centuries, but its first two books took their substance from a lost treatise by Panaetius of Rhodes. This Stoic softened his school's…
Parmenides argued that change is impossible, and philosophy never quite recoveredIn a poem written in epic verse, Parmenides of Elea claimed that reality is a single, timeless, unchanging whole, and that the shifting world our senses report is illusion. That a…
Paul Feyerabend argued science has no single method, and packed lecture hallsIn Against Method, published in 1975, Paul Feyerabend claimed there are no universally valid rules for doing science. The provocation made him one of the most talked-about philoso…
The monk called the teacher of Germany wrote a hymn Mahler later setRabanus Maurus ran one of Europe's great monastic schools, compiled an encyclopedia, rewrote a Roman military manual for Frankish armies and became Archbishop of Mainz. He is also…
Posidonius measured tides, the Sun and the Earth, and told pain it was no evilCalled the most learned man of his age, the Stoic Posidonius tried to calculate the size of the Earth, the distance of the Sun and how the Moon drives the tides. Every one of his …
Primo Levi's chemistry degree was stamped with the words of Jewish racePrimo Levi was a Turin chemist who survived eleven months in Auschwitz and turned the experience into If This Is a Man. Decades later he wrote The Periodic Table, stories each nam…
Proclus gave up a legal career and wrote seven hundred lines a dayProclus, one of the last great philosophers of the ancient world, quit a successful law practice to study philosophy and ended up running Plato's school in Athens for nearly fifty…
Socrates joked he could not afford Prodicus's fifty-drachma lecture on the right wordMost Sophists taught people to win arguments. Prodicus of Ceos was obsessed with using exactly the right word, separating courage from boldness and rashness. Plato treated him mor…
Protagoras was supposedly discovered as a porter who tied firewood with perfect geometryLegend says the philosopher Democritus spotted a young porter in Abdera whose bundle of sticks was bound with such precise geometry that he must be a genius, and took him in. That…
A sixth-century monk posed as Saint Paul's convert and fooled Christendom for centuriesThe author signed himself Dionysios, implying he was the Athenian whom Paul converted in the Book of Acts. For roughly a thousand years many readers believed it, and his writings …
The Rolling Stones owe their name, indirectly, to a freed Roman slaveA rolling stone gathers no moss is a Latin maxim from Publilius Syrus, a Syrian brought to Rome as a slave. Muddy Waters named a 1950 song after the saying, and a young British ba…
Pyrrho, the first Greek sceptic, marched to India with Alexander the GreatPyrrho of Elis wrote nothing at all, yet a whole school of doubt carries his name. He travelled with Alexander's army as far as India, and later taught that peace of mind comes fr…
His book on fascism was pulled in three weeks; he became presidentIn 1982 the Bulgarian philosopher Zhelyu Zhelev published a study of fascism that looked uncomfortably like a portrait of communism. Authorities stripped it from shops and librari…- The sociologist who argued nationality comes from upbringing, not bloodZiya Gökalp, often called the true founder of Turkish sociology, helped move the late Ottoman elite away from Islamic and imperial identities toward Turkish nationalism. His ideas…
Habermas taught Zoran Đinđić that thinkers must act; he became prime ministerConvicted as a student for trying to organise an independent political movement, Zoran Đinđić was spared prison when Willy Brandt persuaded Yugoslavia to let him go to West German…
Zygmunt Bauman built his fame writing in his third languageForced out of Poland in 1968 and made to surrender his citizenship, Zygmunt Bauman restarted his career abroad, settling at the University of Leeds. Writing almost entirely in Eng…
Napoleon attended his christening; Poland remembers him as the Anonymous PoetZygmunt Krasiński was born in Paris in 1812 and baptised with Napoleon himself in attendance. He grew into one of Poland's Three Bards, the Romantic poets who kept national identi…- Xenocrates led Plato's Academy yet refused to become an Athenian citizenOffered Athenian citizenship as thanks for negotiating peace with Macedon, Xenocrates turned it down: the deal had stripped thousands of poor Athenians of their vote. As head of P…
Xenophanes mocked Homer's gods as human projections and wandered Greece for 67 yearsAround the sixth century BC a travelling poet from Ionia started asking awkward questions. Why did Homer's gods lie, steal and squabble like people? Why should a wrestling champio…
Yun Ch'iho kept his diaries in English while Korea fell to JapanA Korean aristocrat who studied in Shanghai, Tennessee and Georgia, Yun Ch'iho wrote his private diary mostly in English. Those pages trace a long and uncomfortable arc: from refo…
Zeami turned Noh from village entertainment into Japan's classical stage artA teenage actor from a travelling troupe caught the eye of a 17-year-old shogun, and Japanese theatre changed course. Zeami Motokiyo went on to write around 50 Noh plays and the f…
A shipwrecked merchant from Cyprus founded Stoicism in an Athenian colonnadeZeno of Citium lost a cargo to the sea, wandered into an Athenian bookshop and fell for a portrait of Socrates. When he asked where such men could be found, the bookseller pointed…
Zeno of Elea argued that swift Achilles could never overtake a tortoiseGive a tortoise a head start and fleet-footed Achilles should pass it in seconds. Yet each time he reaches where it was, it has crept a little further on. Zeno of Elea used puzzle…
William Stanley Jevons warned that efficient engines make Britain burn more coalIn 1865 a young Manchester tutor argued that squeezing more work from each lump of coal would not save Britain's reserves but drain them faster. That counterintuitive idea now bea…- The man who coined 'scientist' also found a spot where the sea stands stillBefore 1833 there were natural philosophers and men of science, but no scientists. William Whewell supplied that word, handed Faraday 'anode' and 'cathode', and in between marshal…
- Wolfgang Köhler watched chimpanzees stack crates and saw insight, not trial and errorOn Tenerife during the First World War, a German psychologist hung bananas out of reach and watched chimpanzees pile up wooden boxes to climb to them. Wolfgang Köhler concluded th…
A university dropout designed the model for modern public educationWilhelm von Humboldt was schooled at home and never completed his brief university studies, yet he reshaped Prussian schooling, founded the university in Berlin that now bears his…- Will Durant's history of civilisation began as church lectures paid five dollarsTo support his new wife, a former trainee priest turned radical schoolteacher gave talks in a Presbyterian church for 5 or 10 dollars a night. Those lectures grew into The Story o…
- The philosopher who said science is philosophy enough also decoded U-boat messagesWillard Van Orman Quine could lecture in six languages, cracked German submarine signals for the US Navy, and helped rescue the logician Alfred Tarski on the last ship out of Danz…
The first modern anarchist wanted marriage abolished, then married Mary WollstonecraftWilliam Godwin argued in print that marriage should be done away with. A few years later he wed the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the couple lived in two adjoining houses so e…
How one sermon by Coleridge turned a stalled young philosopher into a great essayistIn January 1798 a twenty-year-old William Hazlitt walked to a chapel in Shrewsbury and heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge preach. He said it was like hearing the music of the spheres. …
The Victorian who guessed gravity was geometry and made belief a moral issueDecades before Einstein, the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford suggested that gravity might be space itself bending. He also told a story about a shipowner who sincerely trus…
A shipwrecked cabin boy who invented political arithmetic and mapped IrelandWilliam Petty began as a teenage cabin boy whose captain beat him for missing a landmark he was too short-sighted to see. He ended up a knight, a founding member of the Royal Soci…
Wilhelm Weber helped build the first electromagnetic telegraph and give light its letter cIn 1833 two Göttingen scientists strung a wire between an observatory and a physics lab and sent signals along it electrically. One was Carl Friedrich Gauss; the other was Wilhelm…
A night in the Colosseum turned a Russian classicist into a Symbolist firebrandVyacheslav Ivanov meant to be a respectable scholar and family man. Then, fired up by Nietzsche, he spent a stormy night in Rome's Colosseum with a married poet, left his wife, an…
Was Walter Benjamin a philosopher? His closest friends could never agreeGershom Scholem declared flatly that Walter Benjamin was a philosopher. Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno insisted he was not. Benjamin mixed Marxism, Jewish mysticism and German i…
A penniless Han scholar argued that ghosts would outnumber the livingIn first-century China, omens, ghosts and deified sages were everywhere. Wang Chong, too poor to buy books, read them standing at market stalls and then took the whole system apar…
Wilhelm Dilthey argued that science explains nature, but only understanding grasps peoplePhysics can explain a falling stone, but can it explain a poem, a revolution or a grieving friend? Wilhelm Dilthey, who sat in Hegel's old chair in Berlin, spent his career insist…
A naval officer turned doctor built Russia's great dictionary of living speechSolzhenitsyn carried one book into the Ekibastuz prison camp: a volume of Vladimir Dal's dictionary. Nabokov, as a Cambridge student, read ten pages of it every night. The man beh…- Vladimir Solovyov wanted to fuse every idea into one, and died a pauperVladimir Solovyov was Dostoevsky's confidant, a likely model for two of the Karamazov brothers, and a thinker who dreamed of fusing every philosophy, and even Eastern and Western …
Vladimir Vernadsky argued that life itself is a force reshaping the planetIn 1926 the mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky proposed that living things are a geological force, as capable of remaking a planet as any volcano or glacier. He was among the first s…
Named after Voltaire, sent to a convent, Voltairine de Cleyre became an anarchistHer socialist father named her after Voltaire, then shipped her to a Catholic convent in Canada to curb her love of books. She called the three years a prison sentence, tried to r…
Vinoba Bhave walked India for thirteen years asking landowners to adopt himVinoba Bhave had a simple request for every landowner he met: count me as one of your sons, and give me a son's share of your fields, one-sixth. Starting in a Telangana village in…
The Russian critic whose angry letter nearly got Dostoevsky executedIn 1849 Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, later commuted to four years in Siberian prison camps, partly for reading aloud a letter by someone else. Its author, the critic …
Italy's founder of tragedy began writing to impress a sick marchesaVittorio Alfieri spent his youth on horses, scandals and restless travel, and his first try at drama was a scene left at a lover's house in Turin. When they quarrelled she sent it…- A philosophy professor talked a new country into existence from exileWhen the First World War began, Tomáš Masaryk was a Prague philosophy professor who had long wanted Austria-Hungary reformed, not broken up. By 1918 he had lobbied across Europe, …
- Campanella wrote his utopia from a Naples prison and later guarded a pope from eclipsesTommaso Campanella spent 27 years in Neapolitan fortresses after a failed plot against Spanish rule, escaping execution by feigning madness. In prison he wrote The City of the Sun…
Todorov defined the fantastic as a story's moment of hesitation before choosing realityIs the woman Alvaro loves real, or is she the devil? Tzvetan Todorov argued that a tale is truly fantastic only while a reader cannot decide. The Bulgarian-born scholar also read …
Ľudovít Štúr turned central Slovak dialects into the written language Slovaks use todayWhen Czech speakers refused to meet Slovaks halfway on a shared written tongue, Ľudovít Štúr and a few friends built a new standard from central Slovak dialects in 1843. His dismi…
Ulrich von Hutten, the knight whose satire helped clear a path for LutherA sickly boy sent to a monastery at ten, Ulrich von Hutten fled at seventeen and spent his life wandering, feuding and writing. He mocked scholastic theologians in fake letters, a…
Bryusov invented a crowd of Symbolist poets under pen names to launch a movementIn the mid-1890s Russian Symbolism had theories but almost no poets, so Valery Bryusov wrote three anthologies himself under a string of invented names. The hoax worked: young wri…
Vandana Shiva trained in quantum physics before becoming a champion of saved seedsBefore she became known as the Gandhi of grain, Vandana Shiva wrote a doctoral thesis on hidden variables in quantum theory. She later founded Navdanya, set up dozens of Indian se…