Sartre and de Beauvoir met as university students at the Sorbonne in Paris. Famous the world over as the odd couple, they never married or shared a common property. De Beauvior refused to live the conventional female role. They lived in hotels and ate in cafés. But they did share a common philosophy. Their particular […]

Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s  burning ambition was to bring an end to philosophy, and he considered that he had done so – twice. He was brilliant, charming, arrogant, rude, witty, brave, and frequently suicidal. Equally as confusing as his philosophy. in fact he seemed to be two different philosophers, the older one disowning the work of the […]

In the late 1900s the USA developed its own school of thinking known as pragmatism. The gist is that ideas only useful if they can be put into action. The Americans cleaned out the philosophy cupboard and threw out everything that had no practical value. one of the leading lights  of this new age of […]

Hegel was not a modest man. He claimed that he understood all of the philosophy and history. Like Spinoza, he thought that god and the universe were inseparable. it is difficult to describe Hegel’s philosophy simply, because it isn’t simple. It is a huge, all-embracing system that moves through history like a giant snowball, gathering […]