December 2023

https://youtu.be/4pBr55OhfDg Philosopher, historian, poet, dramatist, novelist, wit, and advocate of freedom of speech and religion, Voltaire was the embodiment of the Enlightenment. He was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris on…

https://youtu.be/DjM0KVQhPRI Born on August 4, 1834 in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, John Venn was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He is most widely remembered for developing the Venn diagram,…

https://youtu.be/zg9FXrx7Jec Alan Mathison Turing framed the theory of modern computing with both his “Turing machine” thought experiment and his pioneering work on artificial intelligence. The paradigm-shifting technological impact of this…

https://youtu.be/KZKd-yQwiNA Second only to his friend and quasi-patron Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau was a founding figure in the Transcendentalist movement, the American translation of the German Romanticism of…

https://youtu.be/JzNT7NNFWQ4 Throughout centuries of Western letters, science, and philosophy, the name of Thales appears with astounding persistence. He is seen as having innovated thought itself, essentially beginning the replacement of…

https://youtu.be/ie8vBFbQtsM The most radical philosopher of the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza strikes modern readers as almost stunningly modern. In his own day, his philosophy was sometimes labeled “Spinozism” and described…

As a historical and cultural presence, no philosopher is more important than Socrates. Sufficient sources exist, especially Plato, to give us confidence that there was, in fact, a Greek philosopher…

https://youtu.be/Hy7GWQZm9JE Although economists claim him as their own, Adam Smith was an important social and moral philosopher, the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which articulated the methodological,…

https://youtu.be/ox6itCQPVXM Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born about 4 BC in Cordoba, Hispania (modern Spain) and was a dramatist as well as a Roman Stoic philosopher. The son of a rhetorician,…