Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners Podcast
1) Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths ...Show More
2) Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven....Show More
3) Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a rural Catholic town in southwestern Germany. His upbringing was humble; his father was a sexton. Young Heidegger was initially headed for the priestho...Show More
4) Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy wool merchant. His father was stern, deeply pious, and prone to guilt and melancholy – traits he ...Show More
5) Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village in Saxony (now Germany). His father was a Lutheran pastor who died young; Nietzsche was raised in a pious household of women (mother, sister, ...Show More
6) Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, a provincial capital on the Baltic Sea (today Kaliningrad). He was raised in a modest artisanal family and educated in a pietistic Lutheran tradition that...Show More
7) David Hume
A stout, rosy-cheeked old man lies propped up in bed, greeting his visitor with a gentle smile. It is the summer of 1776 in Edinburgh, and David Hume knows he is dying. Yet there is no fear in his cle...Show More
8) Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family. Her father was a traditionalist who once ruefully said, “Simone thinks like a man!” – noticing her fierce intellect. Beauvoir was ...Show More
9) Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was an infant, so he was raised by his mother in his maternal grandfather’s home. As a child, he was small, si...Show More
10) Albert Camus
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria. His background was humble: his father was an agricultural worker who died in World War I when Camus was a baby, and his illiterate mother of S...Show More