December 2023

https://youtu.be/OCHTA6xzskE John Stuart Mill was a prolific Victorian philosopher, who wrote in the fields of logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs. He was…

https://youtu.be/wuHDMjOjCmA Considered by many the “Second Sage,” after Confucius, his intellectual progenitor, Mencius was a counselor during the Warring States period of Chinese history (475-221 BC) and is best known…

https://youtu.be/FHbselSVT8U The last of the Eleatic philosophers—Pre-Socratics active in Elea (modern Velia, Italy) early in the fifth century BC—Melissus of Samos, along with Zeno and Parmenides, argued that reality is…

https://youtu.be/ov8Czk5YrYM At the funeral of Karl Marx, who died on March 14, 1883, poor and mostly forgotten, his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, delivered…

https://youtu.be/sIdrvFZ9ALo Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, in Shaoshan, Hunan, the son of a land-owning and prosperous peasant family. At the local elementary school, he received a classical…

https://youtu.be/j9tU5_zWGFQ Maimonides codified Jewish law, shaped in the Middle Ages a large body of Jewish thought, and was a provocative philosopher, whose views on the relation of reason to revelation…

https://youtu.be/LVQMQkKeEgs Born on May 3, 1469 in Florence, Italy, Machiavelli is most famous for Il Principe (The Prince), which he wrote in 1513 and dedicated to Lorenzo di Piero de’…

https://youtu.be/_1T1MblWr4Y Born Abba Mari ibn Kaspi about 1280 in Arles, Provence, Joseph Kaspi was a rabbinical author who wrote numerous commentaries on the Old Testament. In these, he drew upon…

https://youtu.be/_ikpDMg9g2g Kant brought eighteenth-century Western philosophy to a new height of ambition. He saw his task, as a philosopher, to answer three essential questions: “What can I know? What should…

https://youtu.be/JWa4omwvH8U One of the most original and approachable of philosophers, William James was instrumental in founding and establishing Pragmatism, which embraces language and thought as the means of problem solving…