Ethics, psychology, theology, frameworks that shape how we think about ourselves and society.
In How to Cure a Fanatic (2006), Amos Oz argued that curiosity, imagination and a sense of humour are the best antidotes to fanaticism of every kind.
Read the full story →Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, published after his death in 1677, argued that God and nature are one and explored human freedom; Einstein named him his greatest influence.
Read the full story →Baruch Spinoza's 1670 Theological-Political Treatise defended the freedom to philosophise and argued that democracy is the form of government best able to keep the peace.
Read the full story →In The Demon-Haunted World (1995), Carl Sagan offered readers a toolkit for critical thinking and popularised the rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Read the full story →Daniel Kahneman urged scientists who disagree to run joint experiments instead of trading hostile rebuttals, a practice he called adversarial collaboration.
Read the full story →In 1821 David Ricardo added a chapter “On Machinery” to his Principles, openly changing his mind and accepting that machines could harm workers’ interests.
Read the full story →In his 1817 Principles, David Ricardo introduced comparative advantage, showing that two countries gain from trade even if one is better at producing everything.
Read the full story →In 1810 David Ricardo published The High Price of Bullion, arguing that the Bank of England’s excessive note issue had caused banknotes to lose value.
Read the full story →David Ricardo explained economic rent as the extra return from better land, an idea that inspired Henry George’s 1879 classic Progress and Poverty.
Read the full story →Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
Read the full story →Elias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
Read the full story →Eugene Wigner's 1960 essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences asked why abstract mathematics fits the physical world so astonishingly well.
Read the full story →Refugee philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 and later coined "the banality of evil", ideas still used to understand how ordinary people take part in atrocity.
Read the full story →In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt argued that natality, the capacity of each newborn person to begin something new, is the miracle that saves the world.
Read the full story →Hannah Arendt's legacy lives on in Hannah Arendt Centers at Bard College and the New School, an institute for totalitarianism research in Dresden, and an annual prize for political thinking.
Read the full story →Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced the roots of Nazism and Stalinism through antisemitism and imperialism, and established her as a major thinker.
Read the full story →In Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson investigated perception, memory and the brain, drawing on the medical research of his day.
Read the full story →Henri Bergson won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature for his ideas on time and creativity, and later declined to convert so as not to leave the persecuted Jews of Europe.
Read the full story →In Time and Free Will (1889), Henri Bergson distinguished lived time, or duration, from clock time; Louis de Broglie said it anticipated ideas of Bohr and Heisenberg.
Read the full story →In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Henri Bergson contrasted a closed morality of the group with an open morality of love for all.
Read the full story →After 1989 Imre Kertész lectured widely, and his talks were collected in books including The Holocaust as Culture (1993) and The Exiled Language (2001).
Read the full story →Isaac Bashevis Singer was a prominent vegetarian for the last 35 years of his life, arguing that justice must extend to animals.
Read the full story →Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by some the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, transformed philosophy of language twice, with the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.
Read the full story →In a 1967 Science editorial, Marshall Nirenberg predicted humans would one day program cells and urged society to prepare to use that power wisely.
Read the full story →Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, finished in 1190, reconciled faith with Aristotle's reason and influenced thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz and Newton.
Read the full story →In 1932, at the League of Nations' invitation, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein exchanged open letters on the causes of war, published in 1933 as Why War?
Read the full story →Between 1927 and 1933 the philosopher Walter Benjamin made about ninety radio broadcasts in Berlin and Frankfurt, many of them for children, inviting young listeners to question the world around them.
Read the full story →Written in exile in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction gave the world a way to think about how photography and film change what we see and believe.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”