Biography is a story, and a story is something that is meant to be told. It is thus quite evident that biography is the tale of a life: a life-story (Lebensgeschichte in German). But then the question arises as to what exactly is a story and how apt is it for representing life within the limits of this representation as compared to other representations of life: the painted or written portrait, the private diary, the oral or tape-recorded interview, (...) the curriculum vitae, the anthropometric file or the epitaph, which at least has the merit of being concise. (shrink)

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how (...) the ancient collective biographical tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

In these three Indian biographies dating from the 1920s, Romain Rolland introduces the French reader to Gandhi's political struggle and to the spiritual careers of Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, while revealing the deep meaning of his attraction to Hindu India at this time of his life.

Why does an object or phenomenon become the subject of scientific inquiry? Why do some of these objects remain provocative, while others fade from center stage? And why do objects sometimes return as the focus of research long after they were once abandoned? Addressing such questions, _Biographies of Scientific Objects_ is about how whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, society, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific (...) study. With examples drawn from both the natural and social sciences, and ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, these objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning—growing more "real"—as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge. Contributors are Jed Z. Buchwald, Lorraine Daston, Rivka Feldhay, Jan Goldstein, Gerard Jorland, Doris Kauffman, Bruno Latour, Theodore M. Porter, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Marshall Sahlins, and Peter Wagner. (shrink)

This biography of Jacques Derrida tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world – a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster (...) of structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. We also witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought over crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela, illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept – deconstruction – takes wing and exerts an extraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, on literary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. In writing this compelling and authoritative biography, Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew and worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to make use of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his life and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters’ book gives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhaps be seen as the major philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The Biography of God offers a personal encounter with God-one that is uplifting, instructive, and practical for every area of life. This is a very conversational-style book that inspires, encourages, and enables readers to know God better.

We are again going through a period of expansion in biographical literature. There is an ever greater number of publications, demonstrating the libido biographica of the reading public and also showing the interest of authors for a genre that is often treated with a great deal of care and rigor. This is not the first time in the history of letters, and each of us can find in his library a quantity of ancient, classic or modern works proving the constancy (...) of this production. However, the contemporary phenomenon takes on a different meaning. The appetite for the biographical seems to be directly linked to its value as testimony. We are living in an era of distrust with regard to rules and codes. Every individual is called on to organize his conduct and invent his existence, from which comes, it seems, this need for an example that also expresses a taste for history and a need for more truth than entertainment from the author of biographies. (shrink)

Ancient biographies were more than accounts of the deeds of past heroes and guides for moral living. They were also arenas for debating pressing philosophical questions and establishing intellectual credentials, as Arthur P. Urbano argues in this study of biographies composed in Late Antiquity.

Cet article a pour objet le rapport éventuel entre la biographie épicurienne, dans sa fonction de proposer des modèles de félicité humaine, et la biographie telle qu’elle est pratiquée dans le platonisme de l’Antiquité tardive, notamment dans le De vita Pythagorica de Jamblique. Il est montré que des traits du portrait de Pythagore, tel que Jamblique le représente, le mode de vie qu’il cultivait et qu’il enseignait à ses disciples, évoquent des éléments spécifiques à l’éthique d’Épicure. La manière dont la (...) biographie avait été pratiquée dans les écoles épicuriennes, servant à proposer des exemples de la vie du sage, à imiter et assimiler par les membres de l’école, fait l’objet d’une deuxième section. Enfin, plus généralement, il est noté que l’éthique épicurienne a pu trouver place dans la philosophie néoplatonicienne, chez Porphyre et chez Jamblique, au niveau de la vie pratique, de la discipline du corps et des désirs corporels. (shrink)

Biography is one of the most popular categories of books—and indeed the most popular category among nonfiction books, according to one British poll. Thus, biography offers historians of science an opportunity to reach a potentially broad audience. This essay examines approaches typical of different genres of scientific biography, including historians’ motivations in their choices of biographical subject and their decisions about strategies for reconstruction of the biographical life. While historians of science often use biography as a (...) vehicle to analyze scientific processes and scientific culture, the most compelling scientific biographies are ones that portray the ambitions, passions, disappointments, and moral choices that characterize a scientist’s life. (shrink)

‘Jürgen Habermas’, wrote the American philosopher Ronald Dworkin on the occasion of the great European thinker’s eightieth birthday, ‘is not only the world’s most famous living philosopher. Even his fame is famous.’ Now, after many years of intensive research and in-depth conversations with contemporaries, colleagues and Habermas himself, Stefan Müller-Doohm presents the first comprehensive biography of one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. From his political and philosophical awakening in West Germany to the formative relationships with (...) Adorno and Horkheimer, Müller-Doohm masterfully traces the major forces that shaped Habermas’s intellectual development. He shows how Habermas’s life and work were conditioned by the possibilities offered to his generation in the unique circumstances of regained freedom that characterized postwar Germany. And yet Habermas’s career is fascinating precisely because it amounts to more than a corpus of scholarly work, however original and influential that may be. For here is someone who continually left the protective space of the university in order to assume the role of a participant in controversial public debates Ð from the significance of the Holocaust to the future of Europe Ð and in this way sought to influence the development of social and political life in an arena much broader than the academy. The significance and virtuosity of Habermas’s many writings over the years are also fully and expertly documented, ranging from his early work on the public sphere to his more recent writings on communicative action, cosmopolitanism and the postnational condition. What emerges from this biography is a vivid portrait of one of the great public intellectuals of our time Ð a unique thinker who has made an immense and lasting philosophical contribution but who, when he perceives that society is not living up to its potential for creating free and just conditions for all, becomes one of its most rigorous and persistent critics. (shrink)

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine (...) animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Critical Theory's Attack on Biography The Attack from within Literary Criticism Distinguishing a Category of Relevant Biographical Information Biographical Information as an Aid to Understanding Biographical Information as an Aid to Appreciation Biographical Information as an Integral Part of Appreciation Conclusion.

This collection of essays deals with the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and his philosophy. The first two essays reflect on general problems inherent in philosophical biography itself. The essays that follow draw on recently published letters as well as recently published diaries from the 1930s to explore Wittgenstein's background as an engineer and its relation to the Tractatus, the impact of his schizoid personality on his approach to philosophy, his role as a diarist, letter-writer and polemicist, and finally the (...) complex issue of Wittgenstein as a Jew. Written by a first-rate team of Wittgenstein scholars including two published biographers of the philosopher, Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, this collection will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. (shrink)

La vie d'Empédocle par Diogène Laërce (Hippobotos).--Histoire de la tradition.--Biographie d'Empédocle.

The biographies of animal celebrities published by the historians John Simons and Eric Baratay aim to place animals in and of themselves at the center of academic narratives. Both excavate the lived experiences concealed behind official discourses and collective representations, notably by relying on cross-fertilization with ethological research. They unveil the ways in which information was reshaped in order to portray animal celebrities as benevolent members of human-animal communities, and thereby shed light on the mechanics of animal commodification. The close (...) examination of a few individual animal trajectories enlightens the condition of many historical animals living under human tutelage in the 19th and early 20th century and highlights long-term historical evolutions, such as the succession of animal cultures and generations largely determined by human actions. (shrink)

Dr. Gamow has written a view of physics which does not teach basic facts exclusively or dwell completely on biographical data, but rather, Dr. Gamow does both, for each chapter presents one or two great physicts and then discusses the nature and content of their work.

This article offers a comparative study of seven German biographies of Karl Marx (1818–1883) that were published between the two world wars. The interpretations of Marx’s theory of historical materialism presented in these biographies fall into three groups or approaches: the orthodox, the neo-Kantian, and the psychological. Some biographies place Marx the revolutionary above Marx the theorist, while others reverse this order. Similarly, some of the biographies explain the relationship between Marx’s life and thought by adopting the “experience–psychology–thought” framework. The (...) orthodox approach emphasizes the objectivity of cognition in the base–superstructure relationship. Yet both the orthodox and the neo-Kantian approach, which stresses Kant’s cognitive critique and the “is–ought” dualism, fail to grasp Marx’s subject–object dialectics, while the psychological approach undermines the theoretical significance of historical materialism. In comparing and assessing these works I argue that the biographers’ historical and scholarly horizons are dictated by their political standpoint and academic perspective and thus determine their choice of approach, which not only indicates if they will lean toward the theoretical or the revolutionary Marx, but also why they fail to adequately deal with the relationship between Marx’s life and his thought. Nevertheless, I conclude that these biographies, despite their various shortcomings, establish the basic paradigm and parameters of any biography of Marx. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Despite widespread interest in individual life histories, few biographies of scientists make use of insights derived from psychology, another discipline that studies people, their thoughts, and their actions. This essay argues that recent theoretical work in psychology and tools developed for clinical psychological practice can help biographical historians of science create and present fuller portraits of their subjects' characters and temperaments and more nuanced analyses of how these traits helped shape their subjects' scientific work. To illustrate this thesis, the (...) essay examines the early career of James McKeen Cattell—an influential late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century experimental psychologist—through a lens offered by psychology and argues that Cattell's actual laboratory practices derived from an “accommodation” to a long‐standing “cognitive deficit.” These practices in turn enabled Cattell to achieve more precise experimental results than could any of his contemporaries; and their students readily adopted them, along with their behavioral implications. The essay concludes that, in some ways, American psychology's early twentieth‐century move toward a behavioral understanding of psychological phenomena can be traced to Cattell's personal cognitive deficit. It closes by reviewing several “remaining general questions” that this thesis suggests. (shrink)

Charles Hartshorne: Biography and Psychology of Sensation Charles Hartshorne is widely regarded as having been an important figure in twentieth century metaphysics and philosophy of religion. His contributions are wide-ranging. He championed the aspirations of metaphysics when it was unfashionable, and the metaphysic he championed helped change some of the fashions of philosophy. He counted … Continue reading Hartshorne: Biography and Psychology of Sensation →.

From the 1990s onwards there has been growing interest in the study of biography. As opposed to those who are skeptical of the biographical method, we defend the historiographical importance of collective biographies by contrasting them with biographical collections. By discussing the historical background of biography as a branch of history, and by focusing on the aims, methodology and outcomes of collective biographies, we attempt to show how they both extend and deepen our concept of historical research.

Short biographies of twenty world famous philosophers.

In the last years, a series of automated self-representational social media sites have emerged that shed light on the information ethics associated with participation in Web 2.0. Sites like Zoominfo.com, Pipl.com, 123People.com and Yasni.com not only continually mine and aggregate personal information and biographic data from the web and beyond to automatically represent the lives of people, but they also engage algorithmic networking logics to represent connections between them; capturing not only who people are, but whom they are connected to. (...) Indeed, these processes of 'auto-biography' are 'secret' ones that for the most part escape the user's attention. This article explores how these sites of auto-biography reveal the complexities of the political economy of Web 2.0, as well as implicate an ethics of exposure concerning how these processes at once participate in the erosion of privacy, and at the same time, in the reinforcement of commodification and surveillance regimes. (shrink)

This collection of essays deals with the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and his philosophy. The first two essays reflect on general problems inherent in philosophical biography itself. The essays that follow draw on recently published letters as well as recently published diaries from the 1930s to explore Wittgenstein's background as an engineer and its relation to the Tractatus, the impact of his schizoid personality on his approach to philosophy, his role as a diarist, letter-writer and polemicist, and finally the (...) complex issue of Wittgenstein as a Jew. Written by a first-rate team of Wittgenstein scholars including two published biographers of the philosopher, Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, this collection will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill hatte ein außergewöhnliches Leben. Einige biographische Besonderheiten sind weithin bekannt: Seine Erziehung durch den strengen VaterMill, James ist legendär, seine komplizierte Beziehung zu seiner späteren Ehefrau Harriet TaylorTaylor, Harriet schon immer Anlass lebhafter Spekulationen. Etwas überraschend mag bei der ersten Beschäftigung mit Mills Leben sein, dass er weder studiert hat noch einer wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit nachgegangen ist, zumindest nicht als Brotberuf; sein Lebenswerk erschuf er im Privatleben. Bekannt ist auch Mills Autobiography, die 1873 nach seinem Tod veröffentlicht wurde, (...) die er aber bereits ab 1853 zusammen mit seiner Ehefrau Harriet Taylor Mill verfasste. (shrink)

This book is a foundational text for our understanding of François Laruelle, one of France's leading thinkers, whose ideas have emerged as an important touchstone for contemporary theoretical discussions across multiple disciplines. One of Laruelle’s first systematic elaborations of his ethical and "non-philosophical" thought, this critical dialogue with some of the dominant voices of continental philosophy offers a rigorous science of individuals as minorities or as separated from the World, History, and Philosophy. Through novel theorizations of finitude and determination in (...) the last instance, Laruelle develops a thought "of the One" as a "minoritarian" paradigm that resists those paradigms that foreground difference as the conceptual matrix for understanding the status of the minority. The critique of the "unitary illusion" of philosophy developed here stands at the foundation of Laruelle’s approach to "uni-lateralizing" the power of philosophy and the universals with which it has always thought, and thereby acts as a basis for his subsequent investigations of victims, mysticism, and Gnosticism. This book will appeal to students and scholars of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and cultural theory. (shrink)

This book constitutes the first volume of a projected two-volume intellectual biography of Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology and a philosophical movement called positivism. Volume One offers a reinterpretation of Comte's "first career," (1798-1842) when he completed the scientific foundation of his philosophy. It describes the interplay between Comte's ideas and the historical context of postrevolutionary France, his struggles with poverty and mental illness, and his volatile relationships with friends, family, and colleagues, including such famous contemporaries as (...) Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simonians, Guizot, and John Stuart Mill. Pickering shows that the man who called for a new social philosophy based on the sciences was not only ill at ease in the most basic human relationships, but also profoundly questioned the ability of the purely scientific spirit to regenerate the political and social world. (shrink)

In referring to biographies of Edison as examples, the following are shown: the image of a scientist or an engineer in biographies has dramatically changed over time; the images produced anew in each period fitted well to the social milieu of the day; biographies therefore acquired a large readership and contributed to informing to the public of the value of science and technology and the necessity of promoting them. It is also pointed out that a new image of scientist or (...) engineer is to be created which is surely attractive to people today if we expect biographies to remain effective in promoting public understanding of science as before. (shrink)

Why does an object or phenomenon become the subject of scientific inquiry? Why do some of these objects remain provocative, while others fade from center stage? And why do objects sometimes return as the focus of research long after they were once abandoned? Addressing such questions, _Biographies of Scientific Objects_ is about how whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, society, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific (...) study. With examples drawn from both the natural and social sciences, and ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, these objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning—growing more "real"—as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge. Contributors are Jed Z. Buchwald, Lorraine Daston, Rivka Feldhay, Jan Goldstein, Gerard Jorland, Doris Kauffman, Bruno Latour, Theodore M. Porter, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Marshall Sahlins, and Peter Wagner. (shrink)

Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by Juliane Schober. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 1997. xi, 366 pp. ISBN 0-8248-1699-4; Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 2002. Rs 495. ISBN 81-208-1812-1.

Kelly Dean Jolley - Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 552-554 Book Review Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy James C. Klagge, editor. Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 272. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $19.95. Collected in this volume are papers from the 1999 conference "Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy," along with a few other relevant papers. Ray Monk's and James (...) Conant's papers frame the others and provide terms of criticism appropriate to them. Both authors investigate the relationship between philosophy and biography. Each finds in Wittgenstein an elucidation of a variety of understanding needful for appreciating the variety of understanding at which biography aims. Monk argues that the variety of understanding that consists in seeing connections (between the life and work of the.. (shrink)

Friedrich von Hayek’s Unfinished Draft of a Sketch of a Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein was the first attempt at the task of assembling a comprehensible picture of the life of his pre-eminent cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As the title might suggest, von Hayek never finished this task, his efforts being stymied by both Wittgenstein’s literary executors and Wittgenstein’s sister, Margaret Stonborough. Here, and for the first time, Christian Erbacher presents the first real publication of this draft, with accompanying commentary, and (...) an afterword by Allan Janik. Perhaps the best way to describe Erbacher’s work here is as a ‘biography of a biography’. His introduction to von Hayek’s manuscript details the story behind its creation, beginning with an outline of von Hayek’s own relationship with Wittgenstein, and the parallels between their academic careers. In doing so, Erbacher not only also describes the history of von Hayek’s sketch, but also the history of Wittgenstein-biography as a genre in itself. For what emerges from Erbacher’s extensive work in researching the von Hayek sketch is that, despite never coming to fruition itself, the work that von Hayek put into collecting the materials for writing a biography of Wittgenstein was hugely influential in all future endeavours of chronicling Wittgenstein’s life. (shrink)

The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as opportunities for policy and other actors to intervene to change how individuals use energy, taking advantage of such disruptive transitions to encourage individuals to be reflexive toward their lifestyles and how they use the technological infrastructures on which they (...) rely. Such identifications, however, employ narratives of voluntary change that take an overly optimistic view of how individuals experience lifecourse transitions and ignore effects of experiences of unresolved or unsuccessful transitions. Drawing on interview data from the Energy Biographies project at Cardiff University, we explore three case studies where the effects of such unresolved transitions are significant. Using the concept of liminal transition as developed by Victor Turner, we examine instances where “progressive” narratives of energy use reduction clash with other “narrative genres” used to make sense of change. Such clashes show how narratives that view lifecourse transitions as opportunities ignore the challenges that such transitions may pose to efforts to construct or sustain identities. (shrink)