Mary Astell Mary Astell's backstory Unlike the slightly older Masham, and most other Enlightenment philosophers, Mary Astell was not from a really rich family. Who was Damaris Masham? Enlightenment philosophers European philosophers [...]
Reproduction of a press from Gutenberg's time The invention of the European printing press with moveable type in northern Europe in the late 1400s AD was no accident: publishers had set out to find [...]
A book in Thomas Aquinas' handwriting For many years before Thomas Aquinas was born, men like Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd in the Abbasid Empire had been reading the Quran, and reading Aristotle, and trying to find ways to [...]
Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background Like Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas was a great thinke who tried to figure out the relationship between science and religion. But unlike Ibn Rushd [...]
Clerks in the Manessa Codex threatening students with sticks (1300 AD) - Medieval schools Who went to school? In medieval Europe, even fewer kids went to school than in the Roman Empire. [...]
Dante Alighieri, painted by Giotto about 1320 AD Dante wrote in Italian, not Latin Since the time of the Romans, writers who lived in Italy had always written in Latin. Virgil wrote in Latin, Ovid wrote in Latin, [...]
Ibn Rushd prayed and studied in this Cordoba mosque Can science and religion work together? Since the time of Socrates - or before - many people have tried to figure out [...]
Maimonides studied in this Cordoba synagogue in Spain (1315 AD, rebuilt from Maimonides' time) What did Maimonides study? When Maimonides was a child, in the 1100s AD, he studied Jewish religious law in the Cordoba synagogue, [...]
Alexander the Great Did Alexander the Great really conquer India? In 326 BC, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian part of northern India. Alexander was a Macedonian king. So he was an Indo-European, like the Persians. [...]
A short biography of Socrates Socrates was the first of the three great Athenian philosophers (the other two are Plato and Aristotle). He was born in Athens in 469 BC, so he [...]
