Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams.

Confucius taught a moral wisdom that would become a predominant social force in China from the second century BCE until the mid-twentieth century.

René Descartes spent most of his childhood in solitude, a situation that also came to characterize his adult life.

With Hegel, philosophy became very difficult indeed. His dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man.

One of the two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was linguistic analysis, derived largely from Wittgenstein. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger…

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Kvnigsberg....

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense....

Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century…

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone.

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler.

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism—at the opportune moment when this set of ideas filled the spiritual gap left amidst the ruins of World War II.

If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it, Paul Strathern writes, "he is the last philosopher....