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Channel: Curriculum – The Book of Life
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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French 20th-century philosopher and historian who spent his career forensically critiquing the power of the modern bourgeois capitalist state, including its police,...

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Rachel Carson

There’s nothing very natural about caring for nature. The standard impulse has often been to conquer and tame the natural world: to clear the forest, hunt the animals, drain the marshes and extract...

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude 

We tend to get pretty nervous around the idea of political art. Some terrible things have been done in its name: it’s encouraged fanaticism, demonised vulnerable groups and pumped out delusional...

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Albert Camus

Albert Camus was an extremely handsome mid-20th century French-Algerian philosopher and writer, whose claim to our attention is based on three novels, The Outsider (1942), The Plague (1947), and The...

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905. His father, a navy captain, died when he was a baby – and he grew up extremely close to his mother until she remarried, much to his regret, when he was twelve. Sartre...

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

A lot of unhappiness comes about in this world because we can’t let other people know what we mean clearly enough. One of the philosophers who can help us with this is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was a...

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Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams is one of the world’s greatest designers of everyday objects. His mind, which might in other eras have been employed making sculptures for altarpieces or precision scales for diamond...

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Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was the most glamorous figure of 20th-century American art. He is famous for making prints of tins of Campbell’s soup and brightly-coloured portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and...

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Martin Heidegger

The field is not without other distinguished contestants, but in the competitive history of incomprehensible German philosophers, Martin Heidegger must, by any reckoning, emerge as the overall victor....

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Nietzsche

The challenge begins with how to pronounce his name. The first bit should sound like ‘Knee’, the second like ‘cher’: Knee – cher. Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a quiet village in the eastern...

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Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. He had a very middle-class existence: he was obsessed by his career path and his income. He was a newspaper editor and then a headmaster...

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Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German 19th century philosopher, who deserves to be remembered today for the insights contained in his great work: The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer was the...

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Matsuo Basho

In the West, we have a vague sense that poetry is good for our ‘souls’, making us sensitive and wiser. Yet we don’t always know how this should work. Poetry has a hard time finding its way into our...

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Sen no Rikyū

In the West, philosophers write long non-fiction books, often using incomprehensible words and limit their involvement with the world to lectures and committee meetings. In the East, and especially in...

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Cy Twombly

Abstract art continues to provoke annoyance and confusion in equal measure. You know the kind of thing: a large empty white canvas, with a solitary deep black line down the middle. A splodge of purple...

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Jane Jacobs

There is something compelling and exciting about cities that makes many of us love (and some of us dread) them. They are full of bright attractions, intriguing strangers and endless, unimaginable...

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Theodor Adorno

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy and cultured family. His father, a wine merchant, was of Jewish origin but had converted to Protestantism at university. Teddy...

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Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who tried to reinvent religion – moving it away from something based on superstition and ideas of direct divine intervention to being a...

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John Bowlby 

Among our deepest and seemingly most natural aspirations is the longing to form stable, satisfying relationships: to thrive in partnerships that are good for both people. It doesn’t seem much to ask. A...

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Margaret Mead

When we use ‘modern’ to describe something, it’s usually a positive. We are very appreciative and even a little smug about the miracles of modern science, the benefits of modern technology, and even...

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