Showing results by author "Paul Strathern" in All Categories

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Socrates in just one hour. Socrates is widely renowned as one of the founders of Western philosophy, despite the fact that his ideas survive largely through the work of his pupil Plato. Socrates’ dialectic – a...

Rise and Fall opens with the Akkadian Empire, which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia, then turns to the immense Roman Empire, where we trace back our Western and Eastern roots. Next Strathern describes how a great deal of Western classical culture was developed in the Abbasid and Umayyid Caliphates. Then, while Europe was beginning to emerge from a period of cultural stagnation, it almost fell to a whirlwind invasion from the East, at which point we meet the Emperors of the Mongol Empire....

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Kant in just one hour.

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never travelled farther than forty miles from his home in Königsberg. Appropriately, his...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Machiavelli in just one hour. Niccolò Machiavelli’s work remains misunderstood – synonymous with wicked scheming and underhand politics – nearly 350 years after his death. His philosophy of statecraft was...

The Borgia family have become a byword for evil. Corruption, incest, ruthless megalomania, avarice, and vicious cruelty - all have been associated with their name. And yet, paradoxically, this family lived when the Renaissance was coming into its full flowering in Italy. Examples of infamy flourished alongside some of the finest art produced in western history.

It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, a historical transformation of similar magnitude also took place in northern Europe at the same time. This "Other Renaissance" was initially centered on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern Belgium), but its influence was soon being felt in France, the German states, England, and even in Italy itself. Following a sequence of major figures, Paul Strathern tells the fascinating story of how this "Other Renaissance" played as significant a role as the Italian Renaissance in bringing our modern world into being.

Focusing on key characters from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Dark Brilliance is a fascinating and wide-ranging history that explores the human costs of imposing progress and modernity.

Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642 something happened that transformed the entire culture of Western civilisation. Painting, sculpture and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born or emerge in an entirely new guise. The ideas that broke this mould largely began, and continued to flourish, in the city of Florence in the province of Tuscany.

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Neitzsche in just one hour. Philosophy has always been dangerous for philosophers; Friedrich Nietzsche made it dangerous for everyone. His ideas presaged a collective madness which was to ravage Europe throughout the...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Schopenhauer in just one hour.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the ‘philosopher of pessimism,’ makes it clear that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. However, if the world is...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Wittgenstein in just one hour.

Ludwig Wittgenstein saw himself as ‘the last philosopher’. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished. A superb logician, Wittgenstein...

Philosophy for busy people who are always on the go but have always wanted to read up on certain figures in history that have shaped the way we think and live.
Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Heidegger in just one hour.

One of the two major...

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Spinoza in just one hour.

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic axioms (assumptions), by means of a series of geometric...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Foucault in just one hour.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault set about his task rather like a historian. After painstaking research, he concluded that knowledge and power were intimately...

Following on from the incredible online success of the ‘History In An Hour’ titles- now there’s a Philosophy series for busy people, on the go. Listen to a succinct account of the Philosophy of Sartre in just one hour.

Here is a concise, expert account of Jean-Paul...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Derrida in just one hour.

Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’ is nothing less than an effort to destroy all ‘writing’ by demonstrating its inevitable falsehood. The writer writes...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Aquinas in just one hour.

Thomas Aquinas remains the unacknowledged maestro of Scholasticism – the static, cumulative philosophy of the medieval period. More a method of learning than pure...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Kierkegaard in just one hour.

Although Kierkegaard was not a philosopher in the academic sense, he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn’t write about the world, he wrote...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Hume in just one hour.

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins, denying the existence of everything except our actual perceptions themselves. The world is nothing more than part of my consciousness...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Karl Marx in just one hour.

Karl Marx's philosophical critique of capitalism and his solution of communism directly led to the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. Whilst...