Philosophy of Religion

Clarke, Kelsen, Tschirnhaus, Zwingli and a letter on Roosevelt's desk: 11 October

Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.

Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy

Gabriel Marcel and the difference between a problem and a mystery: 8 October

Gabriel Marcel died in Paris on 8 October 1973, aged eighty-three. Philosopher, playwright and music critic, he opened the French road to existentialism and then refused the name. His distinction between a problem, which can be solved and forgotten, and a mystery, which involves the one who asks, is the day's inheritance.

Gabriel Marcel

Matteo Ricci, who carried Euclid to Beijing and Confucius to Rome: 6 October

Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata on 6 October 1552. The Jesuit who entered China dressed as a Buddhist monk and died in Beijing as a Confucian scholar translated Euclid into Chinese, argued for the Christian God in the vocabulary of the classics, and began a dispute about rites that Rome settled only in 1939. Le Corbusier shares the birthday.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Confucius, Matteo Ricci

Diderot, Jonathan Edwards and Václav Havel: three births on 5 October

Denis Diderot was born on 5 October 1713, Jonathan Edwards on the same date in 1703, Václav Havel in 1936. An encyclopaedist who lost his faith, a Calvinist who argued that necessity leaves responsibility intact, and a playwright who asked a greengrocer to take the slogan out of his window: three answers to the gap between belief and life.

Denis Diderot, Václav Havel

Tu Weiming and the case that you need not Westernise to modernise

The Chinese-American philosopher Tu Weiming has spent sixty years pressing a single claim: that to become modern a society need not become Western. This profile sets out his idea of 'cultural China', the Boston Confucians, and his attempt to revive Confucian humanism as a living philosophy, and asks whether it holds.

Tu Weiming

Unamuno, Cervantes and Mises: what it takes to convince, and what it takes to win

Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao on 29 September 1864. The sentence he is remembered for, 'you will win but you will not convince', was probably never said in that form; the truer version is better. Cervantes was born, by inference from his name, on the day in 1547; Ludwig von Mises in 1881. Zola and Auden died today.

Bossuet, Loyola's order and Vincent de Paul: the day history was given a plan

Paul III approved the Society of Jesus on 27 September 1540. Bossuet, educated by Jesuits and the last great theologian of history as God's design, was born at Dijon on 27 September 1627. Vincent de Paul, whose Tuesday conferences the young Bossuet attended, died on the date in 1660. Three institutions of providence, and the philosophers they trained.

Life has no point, and Rivka Weinberg would like you to be sad about it

Rivka Weinberg's The Meaning of It All (Oxford, March 2026) argues that a life as a whole cannot have a point, that death is overrated as a threat to meaning, and that time is the real thief. A close reading, then the autumn's other titles: Ganeri's revised Indian philosophy introduction, Han, Žižek and Habermas.

Schopenhauer, Williams and Bunge on what philosophy can do for a life

Arthur Schopenhauer died on his sofa in Frankfurt on 21 September 1860. Bernard Williams was born on the date in 1929, Mario Bunge in 1919, Peter van Inwagen in 1942; Savonarola in 1452, and Virgil died on it in 19 BC. Each had a view on how much philosophy can settle, and they do not agree.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Bernard Williams