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Ideas & Philosophy

1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 32.

  1. Hitler's failed 1923 coup in a Munich beer hall ended with nine months in prisonOn a November evening in 1923, Adolf Hitler burst into a packed Munich beer hall, fired a pistol into the ceiling and announced that a national revolution had begun. Within a day …
  2. Krishna Bhanji became Ben Kingsley, and the work arrived almost immediatelyBorn Krishna Pandit Bhanji in a Yorkshire village, the future Oscar winner found casting directors unsure where to place an actor with his name. After switching to Ben Kingsley in…
  3. English courts judged blasphemy by tone of voice, not by what was saidUnder English common law you could attack Christianity or deny that God exists and stay out of court, so long as you did it in decent and temperate language. What the law punished…
  4. London's first blue plaque honoured Lord Byron, and it was not even blue for longThe world's oldest scheme for marking famous people's homes started in London in 1867 with a plaque at Lord Byron's birthplace. That house was torn down in 1889, the maker switche…
  5. A sugar merchant's son put the word nihilism on the philosophical mapFriedrich Heinrich Jacobi trained for business, not scholarship. Yet this Düsseldorf merchant's son sparked one of German philosophy's great quarrels, accused Enlightenment reason…
  6. Friedrich Schlegel went from scandalous Romantic rebel to Metternich's Catholic propagandistIn 1799 Friedrich Schlegel scandalised German letters with Lucinde, a novel widely read as the story of his affair with Moses Mendelssohn's married daughter. A decade later the fo…
  7. Giorgio Agamben played the apostle Philip in a Pasolini filmBefore becoming one of the most discussed political philosophers alive, Giorgio Agamben attended Heidegger's seminars, advised the publisher Einaudi alongside Italo Calvino, and a…
  8. A Jesuit timed falling objects with a choir chanting to a pendulumIn seventeenth-century Bologna, Giovanni Battista Riccioli dropped balls from the Asinelli tower while fellow Jesuits chanted in time with a pendulum to mark the seconds. The resu…
  9. Giovanni Papini swung from atheist provocateur to bestselling Catholic to FascistFew writers changed sides as often as Giovanni Papini. The Florentine iconoclast declared philosophy dead, cheered Italy into the First World War, converted to Catholicism, wrote …
  10. At 23, Pico offered to debate 900 theses and pay his rivals' travelIn December 1486 a young nobleman published 900 propositions on theology, philosophy and magic and invited scholars from anywhere to Rome to argue with him, travel costs on him. T…
  11. Florentines first disliked Savonarola's preaching for his accent and shrill voiceWhen Girolamo Savonarola began preaching in Florence, audiences were put off by his Ferrara accent, strident voice and clumsy style. Within a decade the friar effectively controll…
  12. Mazzini dreamed of a federal Europe while plotting Italian revolutions from exileSentenced to death in his absence, expelled from Switzerland and jailed in Paris, Giuseppe Mazzini spent years in poverty in London firing off letters to agents across Europe and …
  13. Savigny argued Germany was not ready for a single law codeIn 1814, as Germans debated a unified legal code, a young Berlin professor pushed back. Law, Friedrich Carl von Savigny insisted, grows out of a nation's history and spirit, not f…
  14. Hölderlin shared a student room with Hegel and spent 35 years in a carpenter's towerAt the Tübingen seminary, Friedrich Hölderlin studied alongside Hegel and Schelling and may have handed Hegel the ancient idea of the unity of opposites. He went on to become one …
  15. A priest-mathematician built stone domes that seem to float on lightGuarino Guarini was a Theatine priest who taught philosophy and theology, yet he designed domes in Turin so daring that they look like lace held up by nothing. He wanted buildings…
  16. Staring at the sun cost Gustav Fechner his eyes and gave psychology numbersIn 1839 a Leipzig physics professor damaged his eyes by gazing at the Sun through coloured glass to study afterimages. Forced to resign, Gustav Fechner turned to a question Kant h…
  17. The doctor who never practised wrote the book on crowds and foresaw atomic blastsGustave Le Bon called himself Doctor all his life without ever treating patients. Instead he wrote a best-seller arguing that people in a crowd become a new creature, translated i…
  18. A Lima priest asked how to tell the poor that God loves themConfined to a wheelchair from age 12 to 18 by a bone infection, Gustavo Gutierrez said those years taught him hope. He grew into a Peruvian priest whose 1971 book A Theology of Li…
  19. Guy Debord bound his first book in sandpaper to wreck its shelf neighboursGuy Debord's debut film had no pictures at all, just a white screen during speech, black during silence, and a closing 24 minutes of dark nothing. Audiences walked out. Fifteen ye…
  20. The psychologist who named teenage storm and stress also branded only children misfitsG. Stanley Hall earned America's first psychology doctorate, opened one of its first labs and brought Freud to the United States. He also popularised the idea that adolescence mea…
  21. Giuseppe Peano gave a lecture that slowly turned Latin into his own languageOn 3 January 1908, the mathematician Giuseppe Peano began addressing the Turin Academy of Sciences in Latin. With each grammar simplification he described, he dropped that feature…
  22. When a Congress session erupted in 1907, Gokhale shielded his chief rivalAt Surat in 1907, India's nationalist movement split in chaos, with chairs broken and shoes thrown at the platform. As a crowd surged toward Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leader of the…
  23. 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…
  24. 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…
  25. 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…
  26. 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…
  27. 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 …
  28. 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…
  29. 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…
  30. 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…
  31. 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…
  32. 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…
  33. 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…
  34. Judith Butler argued that gender is something repeatedly done rather than simply possessedA teenager handed rabbinical ethics lessons as punishment for talking too much in Hebrew school went on to write Gender Trouble. Published in 1990, Judith Butler's book sold over …
  35. 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…
  36. 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…
  37. 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…
  38. Poland's great Romantic poet paid his own way by playing the Paris stock marketJuliusz Słowacki, one of the Three Bards of Polish literature, spent most of his adult life in exile after the November Uprising failed. Around 1839 he put his money into Parisian…
  39. 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 …
  40. 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…
  41. 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…
  42. 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…
  43. 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, …
  44. 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…
  45. 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…
  46. 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…
  47. 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 …
  48. 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…
  49. 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 …
  50. 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 …
  51. 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…
  52. 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…
  53. 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…
  54. 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…
  55. 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…
  56. 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…
  57. 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…
  58. 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…
  59. 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…
  60. 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,…

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