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Ideas & Philosophy

1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 16 of 32.

901. Hume's fiercest early critic argued doubting the outside world is unreasonableThomas Reid, a Scottish minister turned professor, answered David Hume's scepticism by insisting that some beliefs, such as the existence of an external world, come before reasoni…
902. The economist who coined conspicuous consumption spent seven years jobless on a farmThorstein Veblen gave the world the phrase conspicuous consumption in 1899, skewering the rich for spending to be seen spending. The son of Norwegian immigrant farmers, he was an …
903. A French priest imagined a statue waking up one sense at a timeTo show that all knowledge starts with the senses, the philosopher Condillac pictured a marble statue with a human mind but no experiences, then gave it one sense after another, s…
904. A young French judge argued tyrants rule only because people keep obeyingIn the 1550s a law student from the Perigord wrote that no tyrant holds power on his own: subjects hand it over, and they can simply stop. Étienne de La Boétie died at thirty-two,…
905. He studied Russian in a prisoner-of-war camp, then remade medieval philosophyÉtienne Gilson began as a Descartes specialist, fought at Verdun, spent two years as a prisoner learning Russian and reading Bonaventure, and went on to found a medieval studies i…
906. Thomas De Quincey hid from debt collectors in a sanctuary where arrests stoppedThe author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was so chronically broke that he repeatedly took refuge in Holyrood, a debtors' sanctuary in Edinburgh where creditors could no…
907. A blacksmith's son copied the Bible four times and wrote a devotional classicThomas à Kempis spent most of his long life in a Dutch monastery copying manuscripts and teaching novices. The booklets he wrote for those beginners became The Imitation of Christ…
908. Thomas Nagel asked what being a bat feels like, and physics couldn't answerIn a 1974 essay, Thomas Nagel argued that no amount of physical description can capture what it is like to be a bat, or anyone. Consciousness, he said, is defined by that inner po…
909. A pagan money changer from Harran who measured the year to within secondsThābit ibn Qurra, a 9th-century scholar in Baghdad, is credited with putting the sidereal year at 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 12 seconds, which Copernicus judged only 2 secon…
910. Aristotle's chosen heir, nicknamed the divine speaker, became the father of botanyHis real name was Tyrtamus, but Aristotle reputedly renamed him Theophrastus, divine speaker, for the grace of his talk. While Aristotle studied animals on Lesbos, his friend stud…
911. The quiet minister whose famous theorem only appeared after he diedThomas Bayes spent years as a Presbyterian minister in Tunbridge Wells and never published the idea that made him famous. After his death in 1761, his friend Richard Price found h…
912. The Norwich doctor who gave English words like computer, electricity and hallucinationSir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century physician in Norwich, is credited in the Oxford English Dictionary with 775 first uses of words. His coinages include ambidextrous, carnivorous, …
913. Tatian stitched four gospels into one story, and churches read it for centuriesIn the 2nd century an Assyrian convert named Tatian blended Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a single continuous life of Jesus. For the 3rd and 4th centuries his Diatessaron was …
914. How a fringe theory from the I Ching fed the 2012 end-of-time crazeTerence McKenna claimed to find fractal patterns in the ancient Chinese I Ching that pointed to an end of time, and a shift in human consciousness, in 2012. His novelty theory is …
915. Strabo wrote a guide to the known world for statesmen, not stargazersStrabo boasted that perhaps no geographer before him had visited more places between Tuscany and the borders of Ethiopia. His Geographica is the only surviving work that describes…
916. Strato of Lampsacus explained the cosmos without needing a god to build itWatching water leave a spout and split into drops, Strato of Lampsacus concluded that falling things speed up. The third head of Aristotle's Lyceum pushed his master's ideas so fa…
917. The first Nobel Prize in Literature went to a would-be engineer turned poetWhen the Swedish Academy handed out its first literature prize in 1901, it chose Sully Prudhomme, a melancholy Parisian who had trained for engineering and dreamed of writing scie…
918. Sun Ra said he came from Saturn, and he played like itHerman Blount of Birmingham, Alabama, spent most of his life insisting that any name other than Ra was a pseudonym. As Sun Ra, a self-declared visitor from Saturn preaching peace,…
919. Susan Sontag worried that photographs were replacing our memoriesTourists, Susan Sontag observed, snap pictures on holiday partly because clicking a shutter feels like a friendly imitation of work. That wry insight sits inside On Photography, o…
920. Syed Ahmad Khan bet the future of India's Muslims on modern science schoolingSyed Ahmad Khan grew up among Mughal courtiers, studying the Quran alongside astronomy and algebra in Delhi. Decades later, convinced that rigid orthodoxy was holding his communit…
921. Synesius of Cyrene became a bishop on condition he could keep his doubtsSynesius studied philosophy under Hypatia in Alexandria, wrote a playful essay in praise of baldness, and gave the first known description of a hydrometer. When the people of Ptol…
922. Witkacy ran a portrait company whose paintings listed the drugs behind themThe Polish painter and playwright Witkacy sold portraits in graded styles, from plain likeness to narcotic-fuelled expressionism, and scribbled on each canvas what he had taken wh…
923. Stanisław Lem kept imagining minds so alien that humans could never understand themStanisław Lem sold more than 45 million books in over 50 languages, yet his most famous novel, Solaris, is about failure: scientists orbiting a living ocean they cannot comprehend…
924. Why toddlers say goed: Steven Pinker's case that language is an evolved instinctA child who says goed instead of went is not failing at English but applying a rule too eagerly. Steven Pinker built a career on such slips, arguing with Alan Prince that grammar …
925. A doctor who quit medicine became the yoga guru nicknamed Swami PropagandanandaKuppuswami spent ten years as a physician in British Malaya, treating poor patients for free, before deciding medicine healed only the surface. Renamed Sivananda, he settled by th…
926. For centuries Christian scholars studied Avicebron without realising he was a Jewish poetMedieval Christian thinkers admired a philosopher called Avicebron, author of the Fons Vitae, and assumed he was a Christian or Muslim. Only in 1846 did Solomon Munk prove that Av…
927. Sophie Germain posed as Monsieur Le Blanc to trade mathematics with GaussLocked indoors as a teenager while revolution raged through Paris, Sophie Germain read how Archimedes died absorbed in geometry and decided the subject deserved her life. Barred f…
928. The astronomer behind the Julian calendar is known from only a few lines of PlinyWhen Julius Caesar reformed Rome's chaotic calendar, he consulted a Greek astronomer named Sosigenes. Almost everything known about him comes from Pliny the Elder's Natural Histor…
929. A Bengali ashram monk turned consulate clerk built a global meditation movementSri Chinmoy arrived in New York in 1964 with little formal schooling and took a job as a junior clerk at the Indian consulate. Within a decade he was lecturing in all 50 states, g…
930. The wandering dervish whose disappearance turned Rumi into a poet of longingIn November 1244 a stranger dressed in black checked into a Konya inn, looking for someone. He found the scholar Rumi, and their friendship upended Rumi's life. When Shams Tabrizi…
931. Nalanda's laziest monk may have stated utilitarianism a thousand years earlyLegend says the monks of Nalanda mocked Shantideva as an idler and set him up to humiliate himself before the whole university. Instead he recited a long poem on the bodhisattva p…
932. The Murdered Master who rebuilt philosophy out of lightSuhrawardi lived fewer than forty years, finished his masterwork at thirty-two and was put to death in Aleppo on a heresy charge. In that short span he founded Illuminationism, a …
933. At 25 she argued technology should free women from childbirth itselfShulamith Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex in 1970, claiming women's oppression was rooted in pregnancy and that artificial reproduction could end it. Fellow feminists rec…
934. The philosopher who took factory jobs to understand what work does to peopleSimone Weil beat Simone de Beauvoir in a philosophy exam, then left the classroom to spend a year on assembly lines at Alstom and Renault. She died at 34 in England, having eaten …
935. The teenage logician who proved some necessary truths are learned by lookingSaul Kripke published a completeness theorem in modal logic at 18, then spent six decades reshaping how philosophers think about names, necessity and possible worlds. His 1970 Pri…
936. A Basel lawyer loaded a ship with fools and sailed it across EuropeIn 1494 Sebastian Brant, a Strasbourg innkeeper's son trained in canon and civil law, published Das Narrenschiff, an allegory of a vessel crewed and steered by fools bound for a p…
937. Rome's star orators survive mostly because one old man remembered themSeneca the Elder never pursued a public career, yet in old age he wrote down, reportedly from memory, the best lines of the declaimers he had heard in Augustan Rome. That antholog…
938. A second-century doctor doubted induction centuries before David Hume didAlmost nothing is known about Sextus Empiricus except that he practised medicine and wrote the fullest surviving case for ancient Pyrrhonist scepticism. His advice was radical: st…
939. Samuel von Pufendorf designed a system of universal law while held prisoner in CopenhagenIn 1658 a young Saxon tutor was caught in the middle when Sweden suddenly attacked Denmark mid-negotiation, and he sat in a Danish cell for eight months. With no books, Samuel Puf…
940. India's Teachers' Day falls on the birthday of a president who studied philosophy by accidentWhen Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan became India's president, students asked to celebrate his birthday. He suggested they mark the date as a day for teachers instead, and 5 September ha…
941. Rudolf Otto coined the numinous, the eerie awe at the heart of religionA German theologian visiting a Moroccan synagogue in 1911 felt something he spent years trying to name. He called it the numinous: an overwhelming sense of something wholly other,…
942. Before founding Waldorf schools, Rudolf Steiner edited Goethe's science and scorned religionRudolf Steiner is remembered for Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming and anthroposophy, much of it judged pseudoscience. Yet he started out as a freethinking young editor of Goeth…
943. A 35-minute calendar dispute nearly split the Jewish world, until Saadia Gaon intervenedIn 922 a rabbi in Palestine claimed the Jewish calendar's noon cutoff for dating new years was really about 35 minutes later. It sounded trivial, but it would have put Passover on…
944. Said Nursi split his own life into an Old Said and a New SaidSaid Nursi, the Kurdish scholar whose Qur'anic commentary runs past six thousand pages, looked back on his life as three different men. The first chased politics, the second renou…
945. The New Atheist who spent eleven years abroad studying meditationSam Harris made his name as a Four Horseman of the New Atheist movement, sharing that label with Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett. Less well known is that he dropped out of Stanford …
946. Routledge rejected Self-Help, so Samuel Smiles published it himself and sold a quarter millionIn 1855 a young London publisher turned down a manuscript about ordinary people bettering themselves. Samuel Smiles paid to print it himself in 1859, kept the copyright, and sold …
947. An 18th-century Jesuit imagined atoms as points of pure forceRoger Joseph Boscovich, a priest from Dubrovnik, stripped matter out of atoms altogether and described them as points surrounded by forces. The same man helped save the cracked do…
948. The mathematician who proved black holes must form also inspired EscherAs a student in 1954, Roger Penrose wandered into an Escher exhibition in Amsterdam and started drawing impossible objects. His triangle and endless staircase, sent to Escher, ins…
949. Roger Scruton turned conservative while watching Paris students overturn carsIn May 1968, a young Cambridge philosopher visiting Paris saw students tearing up cobblestones in the Latin Quarter and felt, for the first time, political anger on the other side…
950. Roland Barthes read soap powder and wrestling as hidden messagesWhy would a French philosopher dissect professional wrestling, detergent adverts and a new Citroen? Roland Barthes believed everyday things quietly carry a society's values, and t…
951. Ronald Dworkin insisted even the hardest legal cases have a right answerImagine a law banning sacrilegious contracts, and two men arguing over a deal signed on a Sunday. Most legal theorists would say the judge simply has to choose. Ronald Dworkin dis…
952. Rudolf Bultmann wanted to strip the myth out of the New TestamentA German Lutheran scholar argued that faith needs almost nothing from history about Jesus: only that he lived, preached and was crucified. Rudolf Bultmann called his method demyth…
953. Bertrand Russell hand-copied pages of Principia so Rudolf Carnap could read themA young German student could not afford Principia Mathematica, and neither could his university. So he wrote to Bertrand Russell, who replied by copying out long passages by hand.…
954. The philosopher who beat Nietzsche to a job and won a literature NobelIn 1871 the Swiss University of Basel needed a new philosophy professor, and one of the candidates who lost out was Friedrich Nietzsche. The winner, a former schoolteacher named R…
955. Zhu Xi's commentaries shaped China's civil service exams for nearly six centuriesA rival prime minister had Zhu Xi's teachings attacked and even called for his execution, yet almost a thousand people braved official disfavour to attend his funeral in 1200. Wit…
956. Hobbes said fear was his twin, born alongside him as the Armada approachedThomas Hobbes arrived early, in April 1588, reportedly because his mother panicked at news of the approaching Spanish Armada. He later joked that she bore twins, himself and fear.…
957. Thomas Paine helped spark two revolutions, yet only six mourners attended his funeralCommon Sense, a 47-page pamphlet published anonymously in January 1776, was read aloud in taverns across the colonies and pushed Americans toward independence. Its author, Thomas …
958. Malthus warned that every gain in food would be swallowed by more mouthsIn 1798 an English curate named Thomas Malthus argued that whenever harvests improve, populations grow until living standards sink back again. The grim idea, later called the Malt…
959. Thucydides lost a city, got exiled, and used the exile to write historyIn the winter of 424 BC the Athenian general Thucydides arrived too late to save Amphipolis from Sparta. Athens banished him for twenty years. He turned the punishment into an adv…
960. The 80–20 rule began with an engineer counting who owned ItalyIn 1906 Vilfredo Pareto noted that about a fifth of Italians owned roughly four fifths of the country's property. Decades later the management thinker Joseph Juran generalised the…

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