philopapers

Michael Psellus (born 1018, Constantinople—died c. 1078) was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and statesman whose advocacy of Platonic philosophy as ideally integrable with Christian doctrine initiated a renewal of Byzantine classical learning that later influenced the Italian Renaissance. Psellus served in the Byzantine state secretariat under the emperors Michael V (1041–42) and Constantine IX (1042–54). […]

George Gemistus Plethon (born c. 1355, Constantinople—died 1450/52, Mistra, Morea) was a Byzantine philosopher and humanist scholar whose clarification of the distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian thought proved to be a seminal influence in determining the philosophic orientation of the Italian Renaissance. Plethon studied in Constantinople and at the Ottoman Muslim court in nearby Adrianople.

Xu Heng (born 1209, China—died 1281, China) was a Chinese neo-Confucian thinker who became the leading scholar in the court of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan (1215–94). The Mongols reunited China after the fall of the Southern Song dynasty in 1279. After this event the intellectual dynamism of the South profoundly affected intellectual discourse and

Karl Popper (born July 28, 1902, Vienna, Austria—died September 17, 1994, Croydon, Greater London, England) was an Austrian-born British philosopher of natural and social science who subscribed to anti-determinist metaphysics, believing that knowledge evolves from experience of the mind. Although his first book, Logik der Forschung (1934; The Logic of Scientific Discovery), was published by

Eugen Dühring (born Jan. 12, 1833, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]—died Sept. 21, 1921, Nowawes, Ger.) was a philosopher, political economist, prolific writer, and a leading German adherent of positivism, the philosophical view that positive knowledge is gained through observation of natural phenomena. Dühring practiced law from 1856 to 1859 and lectured on philosophy at the University

Selected Political Writings of Ghassan Kanafani is a long overdue edition in English, offering a small glimpse into the non-fiction writings Kanafani produced in his lifetime, a life tragically cut short by a targeted Israeli assassination. While Kanafani’s novels have been translated into English, his non-fiction works are only recently receiving attention in the Anglophone

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the projected horizon of Marx’s philosophy of history, and the utopian belief that life might be lived otherwise, has been put on trial on a global scale. Inherited in part from the work of such sceptics as Hayek and Popper, and seemingly demonstrated in the previous

Were Nancy Fraser an anthropologist, she might have titled her most recent book Endo-Cannibal Capitalism or Auto-Cannibal Capitalism since the main idea of this succinct, thoughtful and eminently readable analysis of late capitalism is that the system we live under is devouring the very conditions of its own existence, rather than consuming some unidentified other.

‘You can measure the honesty of a contemporary philosopher’, the sociologist Max Weber once told a group of students, ‘by his attitude toward Nietzsche and Marx’. Marx revealed the subordination of the individual to a dynamic system of impersonal domination that incubates its own destructive elements; Nietzsche disclosed the weak psychological constitution of the ‘last