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More than a hundred books, running from hedonism to atheism and from readings of Nietzsche to political polemic. Onfray has now begun a four-volume series that sets out to rewrite the history of Western thought. What makes him contentious is not only what he argues but where he chooses to argue it.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France has bought the Camus archive for nine million euros, the largest acquisition of literary heritage the French state has ever made. It holds the only known working manuscript of The Outsider and the draft of The First Man, found in the car in which Camus died.
Cast out of his congregation at twenty-three under the heaviest curse its elders could pronounce, he ground lenses for a living and left his masterwork unpublished. But Spinoza's real radicalism was never his atheism: he did not deny God, he stripped God of personhood.
The ethicist Kathryn Lawson calls Arendt, Levinas and Weil as witnesses against Nolan's Odyssey: Homer's Odysseus feels no guilt for his violence, and that is not a defect but a warning. Fitting the hero with a conscience cuts away the story's ethical depth.
John Locke was born at Wrington on 29 August 1632. A theory of knowledge that made the mind a blank sheet, a political philosophy that tied property to labour and a defence of toleration place him among the founding writers of the modern world.
The Albanian-born philosopher has been awarded this year's Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. The jury singled out the way she turns a childhood spent in socialist Albania into philosophical analysis, and the fresh urgency her account of freedom acquires as authoritarianism rises.
The philosopher who carries the Frankfurt School's inheritance argues that behind social conflict lies an invisible demand: recognition. In his recent work he has taken that framework into working life, asking whether democracy can be learnt on the job.
Axel Honneth
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770, 256 years ago today. The system that read history as the unfolding of reason has spent two centuries being both the most closely followed and the most flatly rejected philosophy there is.
A professor was stopped from teaching Plato's Symposium, a course on 'Ethics and Public Policy' was cancelled and the Women's and Gender Studies programme was closed. Faculty members and the ACLU have taken the university to court.
