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Thirty-two years after his death, Karl Popper survives in two places: the science classroom, where falsifiability is a slogan the philosophy of science abandoned decades ago, and the political argument, where the open society and the paradox of tolerance are more alive, and more misquoted, than ever.
Karl Popper
Karl Popper died on 17 September 1994, John Searle on the same date in 2025, Hildegard of Bingen in 1179. Thirty-nine men signed a constitution in Philadelphia on the day in 1787. Each answered the same question differently: when someone claims to know, who or what stands behind the claim?
John Searle, Karl Popper
Pietro Pomponazzi was born on 16 September 1462, J. J. C. Smart on 16 September 1920, Susan Hurley and María Pía Lara on 16 September 1954. Four philosophers across five centuries, and one question between them: what can be demonstrated about the mind, and what has to be settled some other way.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, Saul Kripke, Pietro Pomponazzi, J. J. C. Smart, Susan Hurley
Saul Kripke died on 15 September 2022, aged 81. Rudolf Eucken, the 1908 Nobel literature laureate, died on this day in 1926 and was forgotten within a generation. Moritz Lazarus, who defined a people as those who count each other as one, was born on this day in 1824.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke
Rudolf Carnap died on 14 September 1970; Humberto Maturana was born on this day in 1928, Allan Bloom in 1930 and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1486. Three of them spent their lives fixing a boundary — of the meaningful, the cognising, the educated. The fourth refused to stand on either side of his.
Martha Nussbaum, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Humberto Maturana, Allan Bloom
Mary Midgley was born on 13 September 1919, Montaigne died on 13 September 1592 and Feuerbach on 13 September 1872. Three thinkers, one suspicion: that we manufacture gods, myths and certainties, then treat them as though they had arrived from somewhere else.
Mary Midgley, Ludwig Feuerbach
John Wisdom was born on this day in 1904, Stanislaw Lem in 1921, and four boys from Montignac walked into Lascaux in 1940. Between them they raise the same awkward question from three directions: how far can we trust the grip we think we have on what is out there?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Bataille, Stanisław Lem
Eduard Hanslick was born on this date in 1825, James Jeans in 1877, Theodor Adorno in 1903. Each spent a career on the same awkward question: how far an interpreter may go beyond what the object actually says. In 2001 the date itself became a name, and two philosophers fell out over whether it named anything.
Jürgen Habermas
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Three centuries after his death in Hanover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz survives in undergraduate memory as the man with the monads and the man Voltaire mocked. Both caricatures obscure the project that actually drove him: the conviction that reasoning could be made into a calculation, and the reasons he thought machines could never finish the job.
Timothy Williamson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
