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Ideas & Philosophy

1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 32.

661. 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…
662. 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…
663. 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…
664. 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 …
665. 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…
666. 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…
667. 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 …
668. 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…
669. 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…
670. 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,…
671. 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…
672. 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…
673. 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…
674. 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…
675. 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…
676. 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,…
677. 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…
678. 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…
679. 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…
680. 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 …
681. 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…
682. 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…
683. 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…
684. 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 …
685. 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…
686. 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…
687. 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 …
688. 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…
689. 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…
690. 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.…
691. 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…
692. 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…
693. 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…
694. 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…
695. 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…
696. 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…
697. 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 …
698. 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…
699. 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…
700. 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…
701. 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…
702. 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 …
703. 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…
704. 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…
705. C. S. Lewis insisted Aslan was not an allegory of ChristMost readers take Aslan as a stand-in for Jesus. Lewis disagreed with the word allegory. He described the lion as an imaginative answer to a question: what might Christ be like if…
706. A macaque took the selfie, but the law says nobody authored itIn the 2010s a crested macaque grabbed a nature photographer's camera and snapped pictures of itself. The photographer claimed them as his work. The United States Copyright Office…
707. Bard College began as a parish school for children on a Hudson estateIn 1854 John and Margaret Bard opened a small school in a wooden cottage on their Hudson Valley estate, teaching local children on weekdays and holding chapel services at weekends…
708. Virginia Woolf invented Shakespeare's sister to prove a point about geniusWhat if Shakespeare had a sister just as gifted? In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines Judith: kept home from school, scolded for reading, pushed into marriage, mocked w…
709. Arabic has two words for nationalism, and they pull in opposite directionsIn Arabic, qawmiyya means loyalty to one Arab nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea. Wataniyya means loyalty to your own country, such as Egypt or Syria. For much…
710. The arabesque was designed to run on past its frameLook closely at an Islamic arabesque and the stems don't stop at the border. They slip under the frame as if the pattern carries on forever. That endless quality, rare in earlier …
711. Calling someone named Abdul-Rahman Abdul is like calling them TheAbdul is not a name. It means servant of the, and it only makes sense joined to one of God's epithets, as in Abdul-Rahman, servant of the Most Merciful. Shortening it to Abdul, or…
712. Napoleon's arch took thirty years to build and he never saw it finishedNapoleon ordered the Arc de Triomphe in 1806, fresh from victory at Austerlitz. The foundations alone took two years, so for his 1810 wedding entry into Paris he had a full-size w…
713. Arnold Rothstein ran crime like a corporation, then refused to pay a poker debtArnold Rothstein, nicknamed The Brain, was a New York gambler who saw what Prohibition could offer before almost anyone else. He is credited with turning organised crime into a bu…
714. Asghar Farhadi turns ordinary family quarrels into moral thrillersAsghar Farhadi's films rarely involve villains. A couple argues over a divorce, a holiday trip goes wrong, a stranger's attack unsettles a marriage, and the audience is left unsur…
715. Annie Ernaux turned a Normandy grocer's daughter's life into sociology and won the NobelAnnie Ernaux grew up behind the counter of her parents' café and grocery in a working-class corner of Yvetot. Across fifty years she wrote that life, and her marriage, her abortio…
716. Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels while holding down a full-time Post Office jobA bullied schoolboy and hopeless junior clerk, Anthony Trollope was rescued by a posting nobody wanted: postal surveyor in rural Ireland. There he found prosperity, fox hunting, a…
717. Agatha Christie called And Then There Were None her hardest book to writeTen strangers, an island off Devon, a nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom and ten little figurines that vanish one by one. With more than 100 million copies sold by 2007, Agatha…
718. André Gide's trip to the Congo helped turn French opinion against colonial exploitationIn 1926 the celebrated novelist André Gide set off through French Equatorial Africa and came back with a journal describing villagers forced into the forest for weeks to gather ru…
719. Angers, once the Black City of slate roofs, now calls itself the City of FlowersSlate from a nearby quarry once darkened so many roofs in Angers that people called it the Black City. Today the old Plantagenet stronghold on the edge of the Loire Valley leads E…
720. The shy woman who invented the Gothic thriller then vanished from public lifeAnn Radcliffe was the most popular novelist of her day, among the best paid of the eighteenth century, and so private that one reviewer said nothing was known of her except the na…

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