Sayyid Qutb (1906—1966) Sayyid Qutb was one of the leading Islamist ideological thinkers of the twentieth century. Living and working in Egypt, he turned to Islamism in his early forties after about two decades as a secular educator and literary writer. As an Islamist, he held that all aspects of society should be conducted according to the Shari’a, das ist, laws of God as derived

Paul Ricoeur (1913—2005) Paul Ricoeur was among the most impressive philosophers of the 20th century continental philosophers, both in the unusual breadth and depth of his philosophical scholarship and in the innovative nature of his thought. He was a prolific writer, and his work is essentially concerned with that grand theme of philosophy: the meaning of life. Ricoeur’s “tensive” style focuses on the tensions running

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) Widely hailed as a universal genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the most important thinkers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. A polymath and one of the founders of calculus, Leibniz is best known philosophically for his metaphysical idealism; his theory that reality is composed of spiritual, non-interacting “monads,” and his oft-ridiculed thesis that we live in the

Philosophy of Dreaming According to Owen Flanagan (2000), there are four major philosophical questions about dreaming: 1. How can I be sure I am not always dreaming? 2. Can I be immoral in dreams? 3. Are dreams conscious experiences that occur during sleep? 4. Does dreaming have an evolutionary function? These interrelated questions cover philosophical domains as diverse as metaphysics, Erkenntnistheorie, Ethik, scientific methodology, und

Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon (1635—1719) The second wife of King Louis XIV of France, Madame de Maintenon has long fascinated historians and novelists by her improbable life. Born into an impoverished, criminal family, Maintenon conquered salon society as the wife of the poet Paul Scarron. During her salon years, she studied the philosophical currents of the period, notably libertinism and Cartesianism. Maintenon then conquered court society

Adam Smith (1723—1790) Adam Smith is often identified as the father of modern capitalism. While accurate to some extent, this description is both overly simplistic and dangerously misleading. Einerseits, it is true that very few individual books have had as much impact as his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. His accounts of the division of