December 2023

https://youtu.be/yjKVQiY_iiU Trained as a physicist, Thomas Kuhn became a philosopher of science, producing his best known work in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which, among other things, put the…

https://youtu.be/_b13EypmsZg Saul Aaron Kripke was born on November 13, 1940, in Bay Shore, New York. His father was a rabbi, and his mother a writer of Jewish educational books for…

https://youtu.be/X4j6Pq_PlbQ Born in Málága, Andalusia, in 1021 or 1022, Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a poet and Neoplatonic Jewish philosopher. Until well into the nineteenth century, he was known only by…

https://youtu.be/9WhSI-AW_IM A Spanish Jew, Judah Halevi (Yehuda Halevi) was a physician, poet, and philosopher. His most enduring fame is as Hebrew poet, and much of what he composed in the…

https://youtu.be/mddgVe1TVuc Gorgias, with Protagoras, represents the first generation of Sophists, Pre-Socratic philosophers who used philosophy and rhetoric to acquire valid knowledge. Gorgias was born about 483 BC in Leontinoi, an…

https://youtu.be/iGcA7a-sfZo A polymath active in the realms of literature—including poetry, fiction, and drama —diplomacy, government administration, and science (“natural philosophy”), Goethe created a career not easily categorized. By volume and…

https://youtu.be/i2J2tdNlyt0 Mathematician and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel stands as the third in a triumvirate of history’s great logicians, alongside Aristotle and Gottlob Frege. Among twentieth-century analytical philosophers, his peers in…

https://youtu.be/8N8gLsHb3HU A controversial figure in the history of Jewish philosophy, Gersonides is best known for his Milhamot Ha-Shem (The Wars of the Lord), written in 1329, which likely exerted an…

https://youtu.be/INlypB330ug Gottlob Frege was a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who may be deemed the father of modern logic and analytic philosophy. More than any other figure of the late nineteenth…

https://youtu.be/jLxTywVOoeE Educated primarily as a philosopher, Michel Foucault produced work so broadly trans disciplinary that perhaps its most controversial aspect is the debate over whether it even is philosophy. He…