November 2023

https://youtu.be/yF2L5kzmQMo Few philosophers, save Karl Marx, have had more practical impact on government and social policy than Jeremy Bentham. The core of his social philosophy, what he himself identified as…

https://youtu.be/NizsRn5Ko4Y Professors of literature claim Walter Benjamin as one of their own, a student of literature and a critic. Philosophers see him as a great modern aesthetician but also as…

https://youtu.be/nuA3PWpLHhw Simone de Beauvoir always considered herself a writer. She disdained calling herself a philosopher, although she did take credit for acting the role of “midwife” (her term) to the…

https://youtu.be/ThmpUhacYp4 Roger Bacon was a major medieval commentator on Aristotle and, as a professor at the universities of Paris and Oxford, he taught Aristotle’s works concerning both natural philosophy and…

https://youtu.be/EMSYQrFu7HE Francis Bacon was a giant of natural philosophy and is often called the father of science—or, at least, of scientific methodology. He was also prominent in England’s Jacobean court…

https://youtu.be/itfAhidnPEg Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was born on August 23, 980, in Afshona, Persia, in what is today Uzbekistan. He rose to become the most celebrated…

https://youtu.be/AKtASpli6E0 Among the most important philosophers in the Islamic world, Ibn Rushd—better known in the West by his Romanized name, Averroes—brought the works of Aristotle before an Islamic audience. In…

https://youtu.be/uieLMzTeftw Aurelius Augustinus, canonized in 1298 as St. Augustine, was born in Thagaste, Roman Africa (Souk Ahras, Algeria), on November 13, 354. An early theologian instrumental in the evolution of…

https://youtu.be/90WWddaCODE Aristotle is second only to Plato as a towering figure in philosophy and Western civilization. His influence on the course of philosophy from his own time and through the…

https://youtu.be/0Sf9OzhIC6U A writer of great eloquence, Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political and ethical philosophers of the twentieth century. A German Jew, she was born Johanna Cohn Arendt…