Adam Ferguson, FRSE (Scottish Gaelic: Adhamh MacFhearghais), also known as Ferguson of Raith (1723 – 1816), was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of t…
Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid, an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aene…
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).
In 1934, scientist Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. After earning bachelor and master's degrees at Cornell, Sagan earned a double doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1960. He became profess…
Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. Hi…
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Pari…
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opp…
Camilla Townsend (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is professor of history at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Her special interest is in the relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans throug…
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He obtained his PhD in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1…
Theory of culture and advocacy of intuition over rationality of German philosopher and writer Johann Gottfried von Herder greatly influenced Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and formed the basis of German r…
Czesław Miłosz was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author of Polish-Lithuanian heritage. He memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley, and in the 1959 memoir Native …
Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg (then in the Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire) at the foot of the Harz mountains, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His family was conserv…
Ernst Benz (1907-1978) was one of the most distinguished contemporary German theologians and perhaps the leading Western authority on Eastern Orthodoxy. He studied classical philology and archeology a…
Cal Newport is Provost’s Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and the author of seven books. His ideas and writing are frequently featured in major publications and on…
Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magn…
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. H…
Gregory Halpern was born in Buffalo, New York and has published six books of photographs. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is an Associate Member of Magnum Photos. He teaches photogr…
Christopher Munro Clark FBA is an Australian historian living in the United Kingdom and Germany. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In 2015, he was kni…
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aper…
