Intellect Plus
Ideas & Philosophy
1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 18 of 32.
- The father of liberalism published his key political books anonymouslyJohn Locke argued that governments rule only with the consent of the governed, and that people may rise against tyrants who lose it. Those ideas are thought to echo in Jefferson's…
- Keynes argued markets would not fix mass unemployment on their ownIn the Great Depression, orthodox economists said free markets would restore full employment if workers accepted lower wages. John Maynard Keynes disagreed: total spending drives …
- Rawls asked what society you'd pick without knowing your place in itJohn Rawls imagined people designing a society from behind a veil, unaware whether they would be rich or poor. He argued they would choose equal basic liberties, fair opportunity,…
- John Stuart Mill learned Greek at three and hit a breakdown at twentyJames Mill set out to manufacture a genius who would carry utilitarianism forward, and his son John Stuart was reading Herodotus in Greek by eight. At twenty the experiment cracke…
- Josephus led Jewish rebels against Rome, then became Rome's historianYosef ben Mattityahu commanded Jewish forces in Galilee during the revolt against Rome. After surrendering to Vespasian, he predicted the general would become emperor. When that c…
- An ancient Indian sage nicknamed eater of atoms proposed indivisible particlesCenturies before modern chemistry, the Indian philosopher Kaṇāda argued that matter cannot be divided forever. Somewhere the splitting must stop at tiny, eternal particles he call…
- Karl Marx's exile in London leaned on loans from the Philips familyThe theorist who predicted capitalism would destroy itself had a surprising relative: his mother's sister was grandmother to the founders of Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. …
- Karl Popper said no scientific theory can be proven, only testedKarl Popper argued that science does not advance by piling up confirmations. A theory can never be proved true, but a decisive experiment can show it false, and a claim that could…
- A chat with a waiter launched Kurt Lewin's study of unfinished tasksKurt Lewin, often called the founder of social psychology, had a knack for turning everyday moments into experiments. Watching a waiter who remembered orders until they were paid,…
- Froissart attended a wedding in Milan where Chaucer and Petrarch were also guestsJean Froissart spent his life chasing stories of knights and kings across England, Scotland, Wales, France, Flanders and Spain. His Chronicles became the classic voice of 14th-cen…
- Sartre tried to turn down the Nobel Prize and got it anywayIn 1964 the Nobel committee awarded Jean-Paul Sartre its literature prize. He refused, explaining that a writer should never let himself become an institution, but he is still lis…
- Piaget vividly remembered a kidnapping attempt that never happenedFor years Jean Piaget carried a clear memory of his nanny fighting off a kidnapper beside his pram. When he was 15 she confessed she had invented the whole thing. The false memory…
- Jeremy Bentham still sits in a London university, by his own requestThe founder of modern utilitarianism asked that after his death his body be preserved and displayed as an auto-icon. It now greets visitors at University College London's Student …
- Fichte's first book was mistaken for a new work by KantIn 1792 an anonymous essay on revelation appeared and readers assumed Immanuel Kant had written it. The real author was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a struggling tutor who had dashed i…
- The father of behaviourism burned his papers, leaving historians in the darkJohn B. Watson turned psychology towards observable behaviour with a single 1913 lecture at Columbia and became one of the most cited psychologists of the century. Late in life he…
- John Dewey was born forty weeks after his brother of the same name diedAmerica's great philosopher of democracy and schooling carried a dead sibling's name: the first John Dewey died in an accident in January 1859, and the second was born that Octobe…
- The economist who set America's wartime prices trained in animal husbandryJohn Kenneth Galbraith, a 6-foot-9 farm boy from Ontario, studied livestock before becoming one of the best-selling economists of the century. In the Second World War he helped ru…
- Thoreau quit teaching after weeks rather than beat his pupilsHenry David Thoreau is remembered for Walden and for Civil Disobedience, the essay arguing that citizens may refuse an unjust state. That idea later shaped Tolstoy, Gandhi and Mar…
- The weeping philosopher who said you never step in the same river twiceAround 500 BC, Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote a single book, now surviving only in scraps, so cryptic that ancient readers nicknamed him the dark. His core claim was bold: the world …
- Survival of the fittest was coined by Herbert Spencer, not DarwinThe phrase everyone pins on Darwin came from Herbert Spencer, who wrote it in 1864 after reading On the Origin of Species. Spencer went much further than biology, claiming a singl…
- The father of international law escaped prison inside a chest of booksHugo Grotius was jailed in Loevestein Castle over a religious feud tearing the Dutch Republic apart. He got out by hiding in the chest that regularly ferried books to his cell, an…
- Ibn Khaldun wrote his masterpiece on the rise and fall of states in six monthsA 14th-century scholar from Tunis produced the Muqaddimah, an introduction to history so penetrating that later Ottoman historians used it to diagnose their own empire's decline. …
- Kant flipped philosophy: the mind shapes the world it experiencesImmanuel Kant proposed his own Copernican revolution. Instead of asking how the mind copies reality, he argued that objects must conform to the mind: space and time are built-in f…
- Isaiah Berlin's hatred of violence began with a scene outside his windowAs a boy of seven in revolutionary Petrograd, Isaiah Berlin watched a crowd drag away a policeman who had been firing from the rooftops. He said the sight left him with a lifelong…
- Pavlov's Nobel Prize was for digestion, not for drooling dogsIvan Pavlov is famous for classical conditioning, the discovery that dogs could learn to respond to a signal. But the Nobel committee honoured him in 1904 for something else: a de…
- A cleft palate helped Jürgen Habermas see why communication mattersJürgen Habermas built a philosophy around a simple conviction: reason lives in how people talk to each other, not just in calculating how to get what they want. Born with a cleft …
- Derrida may have been named Jackie after a Charlie Chaplin child starThe philosopher behind deconstruction began life as Jackie Derrida in French Algeria, possibly named after Jackie Coogan of Chaplin's The Kid. He was thrown out of school at twelv…
- The man who found Troy may have dug straight through itHeinrich Schliemann, a grocer's apprentice turned rich merchant, set out to prove Homer's Troy was real and excavated the mound at Hisarlik. His work boosted the case that the Ili…
- A philosopher won the Nobel for literature, with Proust as his best manHenri Bergson argued that lived experience and intuition reveal more about reality than abstract reasoning or science. The idea made him a celebrity: crowds packed his Paris lectu…
- The magical number seven started life as a talk on military voice communicationGeorge Miller spent the Second World War researching army voice communication, and his doctoral thesis on jamming signals was classified top secret. That work on what makes speech…
- Berkeley argued tables exist only when perceived, and a university took his nameAn Irish bishop claimed that chairs, tables and the whole physical world are collections of ideas that exist only while someone perceives them. Few accepted it, yet George Berkele…
- A 16th-century friar pictured every star as a sun with its own planetsA runaway Dominican friar proposed that the stars are distant suns with planets of their own, perhaps inhabited, in a universe with no edge and no centre. Giordano Bruno was execu…
- We call it the Renaissance partly because of Giorgio Vasari's word rinascitaGiorgio Vasari described Giotto's new way of painting as a rinascita, a rebirth. Three centuries later the historian Jules Michelet borrowed the idea, in French, to name an entire…
- Gordon Allport grew up in a home that doubled as his father's hospitalPatients, nurses and medical equipment filled the Allport household in Ohio, and the boys washed bottles and tended the office. Gordon Allport later became a founding figure of pe…
- Lessing invented the job of dramaturg and found a lost Archimedes puzzleHired to critique plays and acting at Germany's first national theatre, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing became, by most accounts, the first dramaturg, and gave us the word. Later, as a d…
- China's great Legalist had a stutter and a former classmate who destroyed himHan Fei, a prince of the state of Han, could not argue his case well at court because of a stutter, so he wrote instead, in one of ancient China's most brilliant styles. His ideas…
- Hannah Arendt was jailed by the Gestapo for researching antisemitismIn 1933 a young German philosopher was arrested for illegally gathering evidence of antisemitism. Released, Hannah Arendt fled to Paris, escaped internment in France, and reached …
- Fernand Braudel kept researching his masterpiece from a German prison campCaptured in 1940, Fernand Braudel became rector of his prison camp's university in Mainz, borrowed from the city library and spent his pay on Max Weber. Research for his vast stud…
- Francis Galton gave us correlation, fingerprint files and weather maps, plus eugenicsOne Victorian produced the first weather map, a fingerprint classification police could use, the statistical idea of correlation and a whistle for testing hearing. He even studied…
- Frantz Fanon won a Croix de Guerre, then watched France sideline its black soldiersAt 17 Frantz Fanon slipped away from his brother's wedding in Martinique to join the Free French. Wounded near Montbéliard and decorated for bravery, he was later pulled from the …
- Franz Boas measured skulls to prove head shape was not a racial constantRace scientists of the late 19th century treated skull shape as a fixed racial marker. Franz Boas, a physicist turned anthropologist, measured skeletons and showed that head size …
- One short essay on the frontier reshaped how Americans told their historyFrederick Jackson Turner published remarkably little, yet by his death in 1932 about 60 percent of major American history departments taught frontier courses in line with his idea…
- Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek once failed Latin, Greek and maths at schoolAs a Viennese schoolboy, Friedrich Hayek languished near the bottom of his class and flunked three core subjects. He preferred theatre, botany and adult company. Decades later he …
- A tanner's son without a degree became a professor and dreamed up Germany's common marketFriedrich List hated manual work in his father's tannery, trained as a clerk, and ended up a professor at Tübingen by patronage, to the fury of established academics. In 1819 he r…
- Nietzsche opposed antisemitism; his sister's edits tied him to the Nazis anywayAfter Friedrich Nietzsche's death, his sister Elisabeth controlled his manuscripts and reshaped them to suit her ultranationalist views, contradicting his explicit rejection of an…
- Edward Said argued Western scholarship invented the Orient it claimed to studyIn 1978 a Columbia literature professor published Orientalism, claiming that centuries of Western writing about Asia and the Middle East served empire more than truth. The book he…
- Cats in wooden puzzle boxes taught psychology how learning actually happensEdward Thorndike shut cats in boxes that opened only when a lever or switch was pressed. Watching other cats escape did not help them, nor did guiding their paws. They stumbled on…
- Epicurus preached simple meals and friendship, yet got remembered as a gluttonThe Garden in Athens served plain food and long conversation, and its founder taught that happiness comes from taming desire and banishing fear. Medieval Europe nonetheless recall…
- MI5 watched Eric Hobsbawm for decades and blocked him from the BBCIn 1945 the BBC judged a young historian a most suitable candidate for its educational broadcasts to returning servicemen. MI5 vetoed him, fearing he would recruit for the Communi…
- The man who coined identity crisis invented his own surnameErik Erikson was born Erik Salomonsen, grew up as Erik Homburger, and was told for years that his stepfather was his real father. He never learned who his biological father was. S…
- The father of Church history left a life we barely knowEusebius of Caesarea wrote the first great history of Christianity and a biography of Constantine, whom he once glimpsed marching with Diocletian's army. Yet the Life of Eusebius …
- Linguistics' most quoted founder never wrote his most famous bookFerdinand de Saussure barely published anything, yet he is one of the most cited linguists in history. His landmark Course in General Linguistics appeared in 1916, three years aft…
- Catherine the Great bought Diderot's library and paid him to keep itBy 1766 the chief editor of the Encyclopédie was broke and unrecognised. Russia's empress heard, bought his 3,000 books for 15,000 livres, left them with him as paid custodian and…
- Duns Scotus gave philosophy a word for what makes you uniquely you: thisnessThe medieval friar known as the Subtle Doctor proposed that every individual thing carries a property called haecceity, its thisness, that makes it that one thing and no other. Sc…
- Edmund Burke's first book was a satire so convincing that readers missed the jokeIn 1756 a young Irish writer imitated the late Lord Bolingbroke so perfectly that Lord Chesterfield and others assumed the essay was Bolingbroke's own. Burke had to add a preface …
- Phenomenology's founder began as a mathematician writing on the calculus of variationsEdmund Husserl earned his doctorate in mathematics and worked as assistant to the great Karl Weierstrass. Then Franz Brentano's lectures in Vienna convinced him to give his life t…
- A former bank clerk told Marxists capitalism was not about to collapseEduard Bernstein, once Friedrich Engels's close associate, watched Victorian capitalism stay stubbornly stable from London and concluded Marx's predictions were wrong. His answer,…
- Freud's nephew used his uncle's ideas to sell bacon and eggsEdward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew twice over, and he applied psychoanalysis and crowd psychology to persuasion. He rebranded cigarettes as feminist Torches of Freedom in 1…
- Edward Gibbon converted to Catholicism at sixteen, and his father exiled him for itThe future historian of Rome's decline was pulled from Oxford within weeks of becoming a Catholic in 1753 and sent to a Protestant pastor in Lausanne. Under threat of disinheritan…
- American psychologists once rated Carl Rogers above Freud as a therapistIn a 1982 survey of 422 American and Canadian psychologists, Carl Rogers came out as the most influential psychotherapist in history, with Freud in third. Rogers had trained for t…