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Popper in 60 Minutes
Karl Popper (1902-1994) is one of the great thinkers of the modern age. He developed his key idea, the "open society" already at age 17. Popper at the time believed passionately in Newton's theory of gravitation, by which the science of the day explained the motion of all bodies on earth and in the heavens. But during the great eclipse of 1919 observations were made that confirmed for the first time Einstein's theory of relativity. The London Times wrote: "Scientific Revolution; New Theory of the Universe; Newton's Conception Overthrown." If this is so, concluded Popper, and if a genius like Newton can prove to have been wrong and his knowledge, after two hundred years, can be replaced by a ...
Rawls in 60 Minutes
John Rawls's masterpiece A Theory of Justice was discussed all over the world already during the author's lifetime. Its very title is provocative since it is generally believed that there can be no general theory of justice: what is just for one man is unjust for another. But Rawls succeeds nonetheless in giving a definition of a just society. To do this he develops a brilliant procedure: choice from behind a "veil of ignorance". If we are to choose, absolutely fairly and objectively, how property, income and education are to be justly distributed, then the people choosing must not know in advance whether, in the society they choose, they will be rich or poor, male or female, worker or emplo...
Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes - Volume 1
"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 1" comprises the five books, already published as separate volumes, "Plato in 60 Minutes", "Rousseau in 60 Minutes", "Smith in 60 Minutes", "Kant in 60 Minutes", and "Hegel in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the...
Kafka in 60 Minutes
Kafka is surely the most widely read, worldwide, of all German-language authors. We owe to him not just a compelling part of the global literary heritage but also a profound philosophical discovery. He has succeeded in grasping like no other writer the radical dependency, for his very being, of Man upon Man: "(We) are tied together by ropes," writes Kafka, "and it's bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space; ghastly when the ropes break and he falls." His stories allow us profound insight into the abysmal depths of interpersonal relations and into their fundamental structure: an insight from which no one can turn away. ...
Sartre in 60 Minutes
Sartre is surely one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. His “philosophy of existence” influenced not just academic debate but the whole of Western civilization, especially European youth. In France, from the end of WW2 on into the 1960s, a certain “youth culture” milieu composed of secondary school and university students and young artists and intellectuals proclaimed their “existential” attitude to life by wearing the black clothes and horn-rimmed glasses that Sartre was seen to wear in so many photos from the period. The motto of these “existentialists” ran: ‘do not let anyone else tell you how you are to live’. They advocated a frank and intensive ...
Foucault in 60 Minutes
Foucault counts as one of the great Post-Structuralists. Already his book-titles -"History of Madness", "Discipline and Punish", "The Use of Pleasure", "The Order of Things" - show his entirely new way of looking at things. He is also one of those philosophers who have become more, not less, influential after their death. This should both please and worry us. It is pleasing that Foucault's key ideas have remained so vital and relevant but worrying also because the main one among these ideas is so disturbing. "Man is erased, like a face drawn in the sand": With this thesis of "the end of Man", Foucault does not mean that we are about to die out as a species, for example through climate change...
Rawls in 60 Minutes
John Rawls's masterpiece A Theory of Justice was discussed all over the world already during the author's lifetime. Its very title is provocative since it is generally believed that there can be no general theory of justice: what is just for one man is unjust for another. But Rawls succeeds nonetheless in giving a definition of a just society. To do this he develops a brilliant procedure: choice from behind a "veil of ignorance". If we are to choose, absolutely fairly and objectively, how property, income and education are to be justly distributed, then the people choosing must not know in advance whether, in the society they choose, they will be rich or poor, male or female, worker or emplo...
Adorno in 60 Minutes
Adorno is one of the most charismatic thinkers in philosophical history. The bald-headed professor in horn-rimmed glasses gave our modern civilization a fatal diagnosis - perhaps the most fatal one conceivable: we may have raised ourselves through science, capitalism and techniques of state administration to the position of masters over Nature and brought this latter under our control; but we have, precisely thereby, also enslaved ourselves. We have become in the end manipulated victims of the mass consumer society that we ourselves created. All our lives are lived in delusions whose shell we cannot penetrate. "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly": this famous dictum of Adorno's symbolizes, s...
Nietzsche in 60 Minutes
Nietzsche has the reputation of being the most provocative and controversial of all philosophers. What he demanded of humanity was something tremendous: that we should develop beyond ourselves and become "overmen". Formerly, we could draw a meaning for our lives from religion. But this is no longer possible because, as Nietzsche says: "God is dead!" This brief dictum has echoed around the world. Man, Nietzsche argues, has freed himself, with the rise of the natural sciences, from all belief in a "beyond" and now has, for the first time, the chance to take his existence into his own hands. Most human beings, however, prove unable to fill the gap in their lives that the "death of God" has left...
Smith in 60 Minutes
It was, of all people, to a Scottish philosopher of morality that there fell the role of intellectual forefather of capitalism. It was Adam Smith who was the first to recognize and describe, in 1776, the basic principle of the market economy. His magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, is still looked on today as “the Bible of capitalism”. And indeed, for a period of ten years it was, after the Bible itself, the most-translated book on earth. Smith created the “magic formula” of the free play of supply and demand and his theory of “the invisible hand” spread like wildfire around the world, remaining still today the core of the capitalist market model. What is more, Smith provided a p...
