PHILOSOPHERS: Their Lives and Works

Arranged by Ancient including Confucious, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurius and Augustine of Hippo, Medieval including St Anselm, Hildegard of Bingen, and Ibn Rushd, Early Modern including Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke and Voltaire; Modern including David Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, Goethe, Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche; and into the 20th century with Edmund Husserl, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, Ortega y Gasset, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Simone Weil, Barthes, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag. 'The only thing I know is that I know nothing.' (Socrates). Illuminating more than 80 of the world's most important thinkers, this magnificent large fully illustrated publication by Dorling Kindersley explores the fascinating stories of their lives, loves and pioneering ideas. Thus the book provides us the means to understand ourselves and our world with wisdom from the earliest writings onwards that we now recognise as philosophical works. We are invited to revisit and interrogate their blueprints for living because Confucious, the Buddha and Plato answered that call in different ways and with different emphases. Each of the 100 constructive systems of thought, some of which endure and all share the conviction in the importance of philosophical understanding, is lavishly illustrated with photographs and paintings of philosophers, their homes, friends, studies and personal belongings together with pages from original manuscripts, first editions and correspondence. 360 large quality pages, 22 x 25.8cm.