This book traces the further development and emergence of American philosophy, particularly Naturalism and Pragmatism, against the backdrop of still-dominant Hegelian philosophy, during the third decade of the 20th century, through the addresses and biographies of the presidents of its oldest and largest philosophical society. Of special interest is the previously unpublished presidential address of Henry Walgrave Stewart, second president of the Pacific Division of The American Philosophical Association. The work contains the biographies, photographs, and addresses of 24 past presidents, (...) and photographs and addresses of others. No other publication has collected the presidential addresses of this, the largest society of philosophers, during its third decade of existence, and in no other publication are the biographies and photographs of all of its presidents available. While some histories of this period in 20th century American philosophy have been written, and while some collections of articles by philosophers exist which include writings of some of these individuals, none has concentrated on a representation of the leadership of. (shrink)

‘Books are the work of solitude, and the children of silence.’ Thus Marcel Proust. The writer is not the same person as the man. The writer, if any good, is a different person, a higher person or at least one who distils something more worthy than is evidenced in the blunderings and fumblings and inadequacies of the everyday character who shares the same skin. This was the basis of Proust's own blistering attack on Sainte-Beuve, to the effect that the critic (...) substituted gossip for criticism and, incidentally, failed to recognize the genius of Baudelaire.In philosophy we have our own Proustian tendency, in the unlikely form of Karl Popper, For Popper, the provenance of ideas is supremely unimportant—and so, by extension is the biography of their authors. A healthy corrective, one might think, to the present day culture of celebrity, even at the intellectual level, and to the flood of philosophical biographies and title-tattle. At a more serious level, it warns us that we should not treat a philosopher's ideas with suspicion because (just because he was a Nazi in his lifetime or she was a communist when she was young or the apostle of equality is a snob living high on the hoof or the advocate of open discussion anything but its practitioner. (shrink)

In this beautifully written account, Julian Young provides the most comprehensive biography available today of the life and philosophy of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Young deals with the many puzzles created by the conjunction of Nietzsche's personal history and his work: why the son of a Lutheran pastor developed into the self-styled 'Antichrist'; why this archetypical Prussian came to loath Bismarck's Prussia; and why this enemy of feminism preferred the company of feminist women. Setting Nietzsche's thought in (...) the context of his times - the rise of Prussian militarism, anti-Semitism, Darwinian science, the 'Youth' and emancipationist movements, as well as the 'death of God' - Young emphasises the decisive influence of Plato and of Richard Wagner on Nietzsche's attempted reform of Western culture. (shrink)

Da Capo -- Pforta -- Bonn -- Leipzig -- Schopenhauer -- Basel -- Richard Wagner and the birth of The birth of tragedy -- War and aftermath -- Anal philology -- Untimely meditations -- Aimez-vous Brahms? -- Auf Wiedersehen Bayreuth -- Sorrento -- Human, all-too-human -- The wanderer and his shadow -- Dawn -- The gay science -- The Salomé affair -- Zarathustra -- Nietzsche's circle of women -- Beyond good and evil -- Clearing the decks -- The genealogy of (...) morals -- 1888 -- Catastrophe -- The rise and fall of The will to power -- The end -- Nietzsche's madness. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege is one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy, whose contributions to logic, philosophical semantics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics set the agenda for future generations of theorists in these and related areas. Dale Jacquette's lively and incisive biography charts Frege's life from its beginnings in small-town north Germany, through his student days in Jena, to his development as an enduringly influential thinker. Along the way Jacquette considers Frege's ground-breaking Begriffschrift, in which he formulated his (...) 'ideal logical language', his magisterial Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, and his complex relation to thinkers including Husserl and especially Russell, whose Paradox had such drastic implications for Frege's logicism. Jacquette concludes with a thoughtful assessment of Frege's legacy. His rich and informative biography will appeal to all who are interested in Frege's philosophy. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Regarded as the father of existentialist philosophy, he was also a political critic, moralist, playwright, novelist, and author of biographies and short stories. Thomas R. Flynn provides the first book-length account of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, mapping the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, and building a narrative that is not only philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary dimensions of (...) his work. Exploring Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology, this book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and politics with an 'egoless' consciousness. It will appeal to all who are interested in Sartre's philosophy and its relation to his life. (shrink)

A philosophical biography challenges its author to do justice to both the philosophical and the biographical. In this book, Julian Young's level of detail and investigative rigor in exploring Nietzsche's life is such that from very early on one begins to have doubts about how he is going to connect these details with Nietzsche's philosophical positions. Would Young use the biographical reductively to explain Nietzsche's philosophy, or would he simply allow the two dimensions of his book to coexist without (...) effectively interacting? The primary success of this book is that at its high points it transcends the division between biography and philosophy, and thus avoids both of these clumsy alternatives.Young accomplishes this feat by tracking a single, dominant line of argument through Nietzsche's thought that also allows us to see his life as a whole. The unifying philosophical claim is that Nietzsche's final stance is "the fundamental position of The Birth of Tragedy, minus metaphysics" . For Young, The Birth of Tragedy explores the need for a creative and socially vibrant culture to respond to the fundamental question of how human beings can live meaningful and happy lives in spite of the inevitability of suffering and death. Young contends. (shrink)

Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev was born on January 16, 1853, into the highly educated family of the outstanding Russian historian Sergei Mikhailovich Solov'ev. Solov'ev received his secondary education in the Fifth Moscow Gymnasium, and his higher education at Moscow University. At first Solov'ev studied in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. After three years and eight months there he left the university, but a few months later he stood his candidate's examination for the full university course in the Faculty of History (...) and Philology. At the same time as he was preparing his candidate's examination he audited lectures on theological and philosophical issues at the Moscow Spiritual Academy. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 72, Issue 1, Page 109-117, February 2022.

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.

Volume 41, Issue 2, May 2020, Page 199-202.

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

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)

How is a philosophical tradition created? What role does literary biography play in the formation of intellectual reception history? Through a detailed analysis of the lives and works of post-Avicennan philosophers, this monograph traces the intellectual history and development of the Avicennan tradition from the fifth/eleventh to the eighth/fourteenth century. Section 1 investigates the genres of Arabo-Islamic biobibliographical and prosopographical writings as a source for the history of Arabic philosophy, delineating their literary topoi, the construction of philosophical authority, (...) and the relationship of Sunnī and Twelver-Šīī Islam to Aristotelian logic and philosophy. Section 2 presents fourteen discrete biobibliographical studies with a critical inventory of the works, including those written in the neglected exegetical genres of commentary, supercommentary, gloss, and supergloss, of Avicenna's immediate disciples and the following generations of philosophers who created the Avicennan philosophical heritage in the Islamicate world.--Provided by Publisher. (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)

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)

Short biographies of twenty world famous philosophers.

The life, times, and work of Herbert Marcuse, one of the 20th century's most remarkable cultural figures.

How do we write history of philosophy? What models and methods do we use when engaging with the philosophical past and where did they come from? One influential mode of writing history of philosophy is the biographical account, found famously in Diogenes Laertius's De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum. The impact of Diogenes Laertius, especially during the early modern period, is clearly documented by the volume under review. However, this volume is not dedicated to biographical writing on philosophers exclusively, but (...) to "collective biography" as such, although philosophers and history of philosophy play a certain role in the majority of the volume's seven parts. The aim of the volume is, in the words of the editor... (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche was immensely influential and, counter to most expectations, also very well read. An essential new reference tool for those interested in his thinking, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context identifies the chronology and huge range of philosophical books that engaged him. Rigorously examining the scope of this reading, Thomas H. Brobjer consulted over two thousand volumes in Nietzsche’s personal library, as well as his book bills, library records, journals, letters, and publications. This meticulous investigation also considers many of the annotations in (...) his books. In arguing that Nietzsche’s reading often constituted the starting point for, or counterpoint to, much of his own thinking and writing, Brobjer’s study provides scholars with fresh insight into how Nietzsche worked and thought; to which questions and thinkers he responded; and by which of them he was influenced. The result is a new and much more contextual understanding of Nietzsche's life and thinking. (shrink)

In trying to estimate the work of a particular philosopher it seems natural enough to begin with a description of the history and circumstances of the man himself. And yet it is almost invariably the case that most, if not all, of these biographical items are gradually lost sight of as the main business of interpreting and criticizing advances. We include our knowledge of the man in an introductory chapter, and rarely, if ever, refer to it. As a result, the (...) philosopher and his work seem to be things apart. The work becomes a contribution to philosophy, distinguished, in a personal sense, from other contributions by little more than the convenient symbol of its author's name. (shrink)