10 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Kaufmann's anthology of existentialist texts with his own introductory essay — the definitive academic introduction to existentialism for a generation of English-speaking students.
British philosopher and intellectual historian who made the distinction between positive and negative liberty central to liberal political philosophy, and who championed value pluralism against all forms of monism.
Walter Kaufmann's rehabilitation of Nietzsche for the Anglo-American philosophical world — rescuing him from the Nazi distortions of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Czech-American scholar of German and Central European literature who contributed to the anglophone reception of Walter Benjamin.
American philosopher who wrote The Passion of the Western Mind — the most widely used intellectual history of Western philosophy — and Cosmos and Psyche — an attempt to demonstrate the validity of archetypal astrology through the correlation of major historical events and planetary configurations.
Richard Tarnas's 1991 comprehensive narrative of Western intellectual history — from the ancient Greeks through postmodernism — arguing that Western thought has been characterized by a progressive bifurcation of mind and world, and that a healing synthesis may now be possible.
Will Durant's popular introduction to Western philosophy — covering major philosophers from Plato to Dewey in accessible, engaging prose.
Richard Hanania's argument that 'wokeness' is primarily a product of civil rights law and bureaucratic incentives — not cultural Marxism or campus ideology — originating in Title VII litigation and EEOC enforcement.
British historian at the Warburg Institute whose scholarship transformed the study of Renaissance thought. Her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) demonstrated that Hermeticism was a driving force of the Scientific Revolution — a thesis still debated but enormously influential.
Scholarly work by Frances Yates published 1972. Examines the Rosicrucian manifestos of 1614-1616 and the milieu of the Palatinate court of Frederick V, arguing for a Rosicrucian-Hermetic current underlying the Scientific Revolution and early Freemasonry.