.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Tag
11 stories
Philippa Foot was born on 3 October 1920 and died on 3 October 2010, her ninetieth birthday: the philosopher who devised the trolley problem and helped revive virtue ethics. The same date carries the deaths of Francis of Assisi in 1226 and William Morris in 1896, and German reunification in 1990.
Philippa Foot
Francisco Suárez died in Lisbon on 25 September 1617, having written the first metaphysics arranged in its own order rather than Aristotle's. William Faulkner was born on the day in 1897 and Glenn Gould in 1932: one took chronology apart in the novel, the other left the concert hall for the splicing block. Three refusals of the given order.
Paulo Freire was born on this day in 1921; Etienne Gilson died on it in 1978, Gianni Vattimo in 2023. On the same date in 1796 a Philadelphia printer published a letter no one had heard spoken. Four anniversaries, one argument about who is entitled to say what counts as knowledge.
Paulo Freire, Gianni Vattimo
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
He thought about time not through clocks but through memory, expectation and attention. He showed that the will can be divided against itself. And he turned the road to truth inward. To count Augustine a theologian and nothing more is to conceal his extraordinary modernity.
Foucault's will was unambiguous: no posthumous publication. But the manuscript had been delivered to his publisher in 1982. Confessions of the Flesh, which appeared in 2018, deals not with the modern period readers expected but with the early Church Fathers — and looks there for the origin of the modern subject's obligation to speak about itself.
Christian Tornau, a Latinist at Würzburg, has identified two previously unknown sermons by Augustine in a monastic manuscript held in Poland. Their subject is the Witch of Endor summoning a dead prophet — which is to say, the question of whether God is omnipotent. The sermons give no answer; they leave the congregation to think.
Augustine died on 28 August 430 in Hippo, a city then under siege. Sixteen centuries later, a discovery announced this year has brought two previously unknown sermons of his to light. Goethe was born on the same day in 1749.
Alexander of Hales, the Franciscan theologian who changed the shape of scholastic teaching at the University of Paris by making Peter Lombard's Sentences a regular textbook, died in the city on 21 August 1245.
