With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ended up going mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and incisive. His major concept is the will to power, which he saw as the basic impulse for all our acts. Christianity...

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the “existing being.” In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even “the pretenses of...

"Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization."-Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. "Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading."-Richard Bernstein, New York Times. "Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise."-Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal....

Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. He follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists and scientists with whom the Medici had dealings, and traces the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success...

“If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it,” Paul Strathern writes, “he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished.” Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else—metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself—was excluded. They were all wrong, he argued. “What we cannot speak...

A meticulous account of Renaissance Italy during the turbulent decade around 1500, with emphasis on several important players: Alexander Borgia (also known as Pope Alexander VI) and his son Cesare, Machiavelli the philosopher-diplomat and author of The Prince, and Leonardo da Vinci--inventor, artist, and military engineer.

In Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Aquinas's life and ideas and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world.