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The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fate of God in the Modern World
Matthew Stewart · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
Will Durant · 543 pages
Originally published in 1926, ‘The Story of Philosophy’ profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, written by Will Durant, an American writer, historian, philosopher, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In this enlightening and eminently readable book, Will Durant accounts the lives, ideas and views of various critical philosophical thinkers throughout history. Starting with
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Sarah Bakewell · 448 pages
Paris, 1933. Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse-- and ignite a movement, creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism: Existentialism. Interweaving biography and philosophy, Bakewell provides an investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us to
Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
James Miller · 422 pages
Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
David Edmonds, John Eidinow · 340 pages
On October 25, 1946, in Cambridge, England, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face-to-face for the first and only time. The encounter lasted just ten minutes, and did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend. Almost immediately, rumors spread around the world that the two great philosophers had come to blows, armed with red-hot pokers. Twenty y
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography
Christopher Hitchens · 158 pages
Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed,
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment
Isaiah Berlin · 290 pages
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson
Jennifer Michael Hecht · 551 pages
Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
Jonathan Sperber · 648 pages
Karl Marx is a magisterial and defining biography that vividly explores not only the man himself but also the revolutionary times in which he lived. Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization's most influential political philosophers. Two centuries on, he is still revered as a prophet of the modern world, yet he is also blamed for t
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson Jr. · 684 pages
Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero
James Romm · 290 pages
Explores the moral struggles, political intrigues and violent vendettas that enmeshed Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and philosopher, in the brutal daily lives of the imperial family and the regime of his student, Nero.
The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought
Susan Jacoby · 256 pages
This book is a biography that restores America's foremost nineteenth-century champion of reason and secularism to our still contested twenty-first-century public square. From the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism comes a provocative portrait of Robert Green Ingersoll, known as "the Great Agnostic" and the foremost spokesman during America's Gilded Age for secularism and the
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas · 615 pages
From the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace, a groundbreaking biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, the man who stood up to Hitler. A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism. After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoef
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
Arthur Koestler · 624 pages
Passionate Minds
David Bodanis · 373 pages
"It was 1733 when the poet and philosopher Voltaire met Emilie du Chatelet, a beguiling - and married - aristocrat who would one day popularize Newton's arcane ideas and pave the way for Einstein's theories. In an era when women were rarely permitted any serious schooling, this twenty-seven-year-old's nimble conversation and unusual brilliance led Voltaire, then in his late thirties, to wonder, "W
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
Alexander Waugh · 320 pages
A portrait of the Wittgenstein family of Vienna traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a star-crossed dynasty held together by a love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty, and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars.
Jonathan Edwards
George M. Marsden · 640 pages
"Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is a towering figure in American history. A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the eighteenth century." "In this biography, Jonathan Edwards emerges as both a great American and a brilliant Christian. George M. Marsden evokes the world of colonial New England in
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
Rebecca Goldstein · 287 pages
In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty--three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from s
Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science
David Lindley · 272 pages
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.--Werner HeisenbergThat God would choose to play dice with the world is something I cannot believe.--Albert EinsteinNothing exists until it is measured.--Neils BohrThe remarkable story of a startling scientific idea that ignited a battle among the greatest minds of the twentieth
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
Gitta Sereny · 757 pages
Gitta Sereny first saw Albert Speer on trial at Nuremberg. Over the last years of his life she came to know him - through hundreds of hours of conversations - as no other biographer has known a Nazi leader. She interviewed as well the people around him - the celebrated, the notorious and the ordinary. Speer gave Sereny, for her use, a number of unpublished manuscripts, and after his death she obta