Niccolò Machiavelli (1469—1527) Machiavelli was a 16th century Florentine philosopher known primarily for his political ideas. His two most famous philosophical books, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, were published after his death. His philosophical legacy remains enigmatic, but that result should not be surprising for a thinker who understood the necessity to work sometimes from the shadows. There is still no settled scholarly

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Confucius (551—479 B.C.E.) Better known in China as “Master Kong” (Chinois: Kongzi), Confucius was a fifth-century BCE Chinese thinker whose influence upon East Asian intellectual and social history is immeasurable. As a culturally symbolic figure, he has been alternately idealized, deified, dismissed, vilified, and rehabilitated over the millennia by both Asian and non-Asian thinkers and regimes. Given his extraordinary impact on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, et

Pudgalavada Buddhist Philosophy The Pudgalavāda was a group of five of the Early Schools of Buddhism. Le nom découle de la doctrine distinctive de leurs adhérents (mur) concernant soi-même ou la personne (poudgala). La doctrine soutient que la personne, dans un certain sens, est vrai. Aux autres bouddhistes, leur point de vue semblait contredire un principe fondamental du bouddhisme, la doctrine du non-soi. Toutefois, the Pudgalavādins were convinced

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626—1696) Madame de Sévigné was France’s preeminent writer of epistles in the seventeenth century. She appears at first glance to possess few philosophical credentials because she neither received formal philosophical instruction nor composed philosophical treatises. Yet in her extensive correspondence, De Sévigné develops a distinctive position on the philosophical disputes of her era. Rejecting the mechanistic account of nature,

Philosophy of Architecture photo of SFMOMA by David Ohmer The relation between philosophy and architecture is interrogative and propositional. It is about asking questions concerning the meaning of human habitation—what it means to live in built environs—and about evaluating plans and design projects where human flourishing and social progress can best occur—in what kinds of buildings, interior spaces and urban precincts. The following sets of