Intro William Faulkner was a novelist from Mississippi and a major figure in American literature. He wrote 13 novels and a number of short stories, mainly set in the American South in the early 20th century. His work helped define the genre of Southern Gothic, in which the traditional tropes of Gothic literature (isolation, decay, madness, death, disease) are set against the backdrop of the southe... »
Intro Euripides was a playwright who lived during the golden age of Athenian culture. He is one of the most well-known tragedians of Ancient Greece, having written dozens of highly-regarded tragic plays. An eccentric artist and a student of some of the greatest philosophers of his age, Euripides wrote plays that challenged the expectations of his Athenian audience and stirred them to rethink tradi... »
Intro Greek philosophy has given us a lot of easily misunderstood terms: words like hedonism, cynicism, and stoicism that have a popular meaning very different from their philosophical meaning. But probably no Greek philosopher is more widely misunderstood than Epicurus. Most people associate his name with one thing: pleasure, especially the pleasures of food and wine. So you have the cooking webs... »
Intro Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the titans of American Romanticism. Obsessed with freedom, he developed a conception of political democracy that motivated generations of political philosophers. Equally obsessed with the inherent value of nature, he laid the intellectual groundwork for the conservation movements that would blossom in the late 19th century with the establishment of America’s Na... »
Intro Although his name isn’t well known, John Dewey had a deep impact on American thought. He was the last of the great classical pragmatists, the generation of thinkers who developed a distinctly American school of thought rooted in practicality and personal commitment. Appropriately for a philosophical pragmatist, Dewey brought his ideas to the public in an effort to reform American society. He... »
Intro Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and philosopher of the 14th century. He is most famous as the author of The Divine Comedy, a three-part epic poem narrating a pilgrim’s journey through hell, purgatory, and ultimately on to heaven. The first book of the set, the Inferno, is probably the most widely-read work of Medieval literature. With its powerful imagery and incisive moral-political com... »
Intro No single philosopher has had as profound an influence on any civilization as K’ung Fu Zi has had on China. More than an academic figure, he became a cultural and spiritual icon whose effect on Chinese culture was so profound that he is still seen as one of the nation’s ideological founders, more than two thousand years after his death. As K’ung Fu Zi’s ideas traveled from China to Europe, f... »
Intro His full name was Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Xavier Comte, but let’s just stick with “Comte.” He was an optimistic thinker and one of the founders of positivism (a movement that, despite its name, has nothing to do with optimistic or positive thinking). Like modern positivists, Comte argued that the only valid truths were objective, measurable, and verifiable observations. Although that ... »
Intro Friedrich Nietzsche (NEE-chuh, not NEE-chee) was a German philosopher of the 19th century who today is one of the Western tradition’s most controversial figures. He launched blistering attacks on Christian morality and the stultifying way of life that he saw as its logical consequence. He befriended, then turned against, the superstar composer Richard Wagner, whose operas inspired both J.R.R... »
Intro Albert Camus (caMOO) was a French author and essayist, as much a literary figure as a philosopher. Though he never accepted the label himself, he was a major figure in 20th-century existentialism, a literary-philosophical movement that accepts and even embraces the fundamental meaninglessness of life. Existentialism consists of two insights: first, nothing means anything. Life is pointless. ... »