Philosophers

Is good character something that can be taught? In 430 BCE, Socrates set out to teach the vain, power-seeking Athenian statesman Alcibiades how to be a good person—and failed spectacularly. Massimo Pigliucci tells this famous story and asks what we can learn from it....

A contrarian argues that modern physicists' obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science....

Macmillan Audio presents In My Own Way, Alan Watts' acclaimed autobiography, published for the first time in audio....

The author Sri "M" is an extraordinary individual. At the young age of 19 and a half, he travelled to snow-clad Himalayas from Kerala, and there he met and lived for several years with a "real-time" yogi, Babaji....

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse - Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron....

From Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert to psychedelic and spiritual icon, Ram Dass tells here, for the first time, the full arc of his remarkable life....

This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, perhaps the first recognizably modern individual....

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history....

Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship of two towering Enlightenment thinkers that had great consequences for modern thought....

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence....

Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work....

The Greek word sumposion means a drinking party, and the party described in Plato's Symposium is one supposedly given in the year 416 BC by the playwright Agathon....

The first major biography of the logician and mathematician whose incompleteness theorems helped launch a modern scientific revolution....

This anthology is a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes that generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as entertainment ever since Lives of the Eminent Philosophers came to prominence in Renaissance Italy....

Exact Thinking in Demented Times tells the often outrageous, sometimes tragic, and never boring stories of the men who transformed scientific thought. A revealing work of history, this landmark book pays tribute to those who dared to reinvent knowledge from the ground up....

Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves....

Exactly a month has elapsed since I finished the first series of my writings—just that period of the flow of time which I intended to devote exclusively to resting the parts of my common presence subordinate to my pure reason....

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. His presence and ideas rippled through the lives of many prominent leaders and authors....

Thomas Paine was one of the greatest political propagandists in history....

This first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential intellects in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver....

For centuries, Augustine's writings have moved and fascinated readers. With a keen eye, Gary Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker....

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and philosopher....

How to think clearly, act purposefully, overcome any obstacle, and find peace and happiness along the way....

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe....

Plato recorded the final days of his mentor, Socrates, who was tried and condemned in Athens in 399 B.C. on trumped-up charges of being a heretic and corrupter of the young....