Søren Kierkegaard was born #onthisday in 1813. He was a philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 May 1469
Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince, written about 1513. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science. Lots of memorable quotations (none of them pleasant) of which this is my favourite “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
Read MoreFriedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche , the German philosopher, was born #onthisday in 1844.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born 15 October 1844 and was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
Nietzsche resigned his chair at the University of Basel in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. The Übermensch represents a shift from otherworldly Christian values and manifests the grounded human ideal.
In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.