If you had to draw up a list of philosophers you’d least like to get stuck next to at a dinner party, it would probably be wise to place Arthur Schopenhauer’s name at the very top. Schopenhauer did not possess, to put it mildly, a pleasant personality. He was an arrogant, paranoid and misogynistic man who slept with a loaded pistol every night and was not above pushing defenceless old ladies down long flights of stairs. Neither did he produce optimistic philosophy – quite the contrary, in fact. He believed that life is painful and that it would have been far better not to have been born. Are you won over by this charming man yet?

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, a book that presents the grand sweep of humanity’s search for philosophical understanding from Socrates to Peter Singer.

So what exactly did this pessimistic philosopher believe? Warburton breaks it down simply for us:

‘According to [Schopenhauer], we are all caught up

How could humans have committed all those atrocities that characterised the Holocaust? Were they all monsters and sadists, delighting in the pain of others? Or, more terrifyingly, were they just people like you and me, who simply didn’t recognise the gravity of their choices? Hannah Arendt, a German-American political philosopher, famously proposed that many of the Nazis of WWII Germany were not maniacal sociopaths but rather, ordinary people who didn’t question their own actions enough. In 1963, she wrote a work in which she analysed the horrific deeds of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust.

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, a book that presents the grand sweep of humanity’s search for philosophical understanding from Socrates to Peter Singer.

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) was a German Jew who moved to the United States during WWII, becoming a naturalised citizen in 1950. She reported on Eichmann’s trial for the New Yorker magazine, and her investigations yielded so much that they eventually led

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, a book that tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb in forty concise chapters. Today’s post introduces the celebration of Vesak Day and the life of the Buddha.

In many countries around the world, today is a very special day: it is Vesak Day, the most important day in the Buddhist calendar. Buddhists come together to commemorate the life and teachings of the Buddha, the ‘Enlightened One’. They celebrate in a number of ways: bringing symbolic offerings to lay at the feet of their spiritual teacher, singing hymns while the Buddhist flag is raised, and going around their community to perform good deeds. Buddhists believe that the good that you do on Vesak Day will multiply itself many times over; thus, they want to spread joy and happiness on this holy day, and they do so by helping the less fortunate such as the poor

Who discovered the atom? Nowadays it’s completely unremarkable to hear someone talk about atoms, but there was a time when they were not understood at all. In fact, before John Dalton’s pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory, little was understood about this now essential part of scientific knowledge. It is amazing to think that most of the ideas that Dalton proposed at the start of the nineteenth century are still considered accurate today. Of course, some of his hypotheses have been refined, while others have been more significantly altered, but the founding principles of his theory have survived.

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from William Bynum’s A Little History of Science, a book that examines the scientific discoveries that radically altered our understanding of the world. 
The modern ‘atom’ was the brainchild of a thoroughly respectable Quaker, John Dalton (1766 – 1844). A weaver’s son, he went to a good school near where he was born, in the English Lake District.

On this day in 1872, a boy was born in Wales who would later grow up to pose many perplexing questions to the rest of the world. His name was Bertrand Russell, and he is remembered today as an important British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Russell held a good number of controversial beliefs in his lifetime and sometimes got into trouble for them. But he was a very influential thinker, and even contributed a great deal to the field of mathematics.

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, a book that presents the grand sweep of humanity’s search for philosophical understanding from Socrates to Peter Singer.

‘Russell’s main interests as a teenager were,’ Warburton writes, ‘sex, religion and mathematics—all at a theoretical level. In his very long life (he died in 1970, aged 97) he ended up being controversial about the first, attacking the second, and making important contributions to the third.’

To put it very

If you could turn your aluminium Coca-Cola can into gold, would you? You probably would, but if everybody could do it, it wouldn’t be quite so amazing since gold would become common and not worth much. The old Greek myth of King Midas, who was granted his wish that everything he touched would turn to gold, reminds us that he wasn’t being very clever. He couldn’t even eat his breakfast, since his bread became gold as soon as he touched it! You might have heard of the Philosopher’s Stone, perhaps you have heard about it because of a famous wizard, but how does the real Philosopher’s Stone relate to King Midas and his dream of turning common things into gold? Read on to find out!

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from William Bynum’s A Little History of Science, a book that examines the scientific discoveries that radically altered our understanding of the world. Our topic today is the ancient practice of alchemy and the Renaissance alchemist and physicist, Paracelsus.

Chances are, you’ve read Harry

Have you ever wondered where names come from? Why is it that people commonly have two names? Are people with the name Armstrong always really talented weightlifters? In A Little Book of Language,  expert David Crystal delves into the history of etymology and discovers some surprising stories surrounding names we might otherwise take for granted.

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from David Crystal’s A Little Book of Language, a work that explores language’s myriad intricacies and quirks. Today, we focus on the origins of English names.

Most people we know don’t just have a one-word name: they have a first name and a last name, and sometimes a middle name too. But this wasn’t always the case, David Crystal explains in A Little Book of Language. In fact, a long time ago, people only had one name:

‘If we travelled back 1,000 years in Britain, we’d find that everyone had only a first name. Here are some Anglo-Saxon first names:

for men: Edwin, Altfrith, Osric,

There are few things more rewarding than completing a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Alfred Wegener was a prominent scientist  and geologist who solved one of the biggest puzzles on Earth, he suggested a theory called ‘Continental Drift’ which explained how the Earth’s continents once fitted together, just like a jigsaw. In A Little History of Science, author William Bynum looks at how Wegener put the Earth back together and in doing so discovered a whole new place, which he called Pangea.

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from William Bynum’s A Little History of Science, a book that examines the scientific discoveries that radically altered our understanding of the world. Today’s post introduces the theory of continental drift and its originator, Alfred Wegener.

Have you ever looked at a map of the world and thought that the edges of the continents look like they fit together, as if they were pieces from the same jigsaw puzzle? It was only 100 years ago that a scientist came to that very

‘Passionate, profound, intense and dominating’, was how Bertrand Russell described the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. If you had found yourself at one of the seminars Ludwig held in Cambridge in 1940 you might well agree. Wittgenstein was a very unusual man and most people who met him thought he was a genius. His books sometimes read more like poetry than philosophy and raised important questions about the nature of ethics and religion. Wittgenstein believed that the answers to some of our biggest questions hide beyond the limits of our understanding and if we can’t talk meaningfully about them, we should stay silent.

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, a book that presents the grand sweep of humanity’s search for philosophical understanding from Socrates to Peter Singer. Today, our focus is on Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most prominent figures in 20th-century philosophy.

Source: Christiaan Tonnis

If you’ve been keeping up with our Little Histories <span

Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, a book that tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb in forty concise chapters. Today, our focus is on Confucius, a famous teacher, philosopher and political theorist from China.

A long time ago in China, a philosopher started to develop ideas