Odd Facts About Philosophers

Question: Which towering 20th-century mathematician and philosopher starved himself to death because of his paranoid belief that someone was poisoning his food?

Answer: Kurt Gödel established the incompleteness of mathematics and was the most-sophisticated 20th-century exponent of mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics deals with real objects that exist independently of space and time.

Question: Which philosopher declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964?

Answer: The prize, and especially its monetary award, embodied the bourgeois values that Jean-Paul Sartre, by then a committed Marxist, had long since rejected.

Question: Which philosopher''s headless skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, is displayed in a glass case at University College London?

Answer: Jeremy Bentham’s mummified head, which turned out not to be suitable for display, was replaced with a wax replica.

Question: Which philosopher was forcibly castrated after he fathered a child by, and secretly married, the niece of a prominent Paris clergyman?

Answer: The tragic love affair of Peter Abelard and Héloïse became a great medieval romance.

Question: Which philosopher forbade his followers from eating beans?

Answer: There must have been a good reason.

Question: Which philosopher was killed by being stripped, beaten, dragged, mutilated, and burned by a Christian mob?

Answer: A woman of extraordinary intellectual accomplishments, Hypatia was a gifted philosopher and by far the leading mathematician and astronomer of the Hellenistic era of Greco-Roman philosophy.

Question: Which philosopher saved fashion model Naomi Campbell from likely sexual assault by boxer Mike Tyson at a party in New York City in 1987?

Answer: Mike Tyson had cornered Naomi Campbell in a bedroom. Ayer managed to distract him long enough for Campbell to make her escape.

Question: Which philosopher was known for his profound dislike of humanity and his fondness for poodles?

Answer: Arthur Schopenhauer made provision for his last poodle in his will.

Question: Which philosopher was regularly required to rise before 5 AM to give philosophy lessons to Queen Christina of Sweden?

Answer: While delivering draft statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences to Queen Christina at 5 AM, René Descartes caught a chill. He died of pneumonia 10 days later.

Question: Which philosopher declared, “Let not doctrines and ideas be your guide. The Führer is Germany’s only reality and law”?

Answer: Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and supported Adolf Hitler through at least the early years of World War II.

Question: Which philosopher was imprisoned by the British government in 1918 for campaigning against war and conscription?

Answer: Sentenced to a term of six months, Bertrand Russell spent his time in prison writing his acclaimed Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).

Question: Which philosopher was considered the ugliest man in Athens?

Answer: Socrates had wide-set bulging eyes that enabled him to see sideways, like a crab.

Question: Which philosopher was clinically insane for the last 11 years of his life?

Answer: Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a sudden and complete mental breakdown in the streets of Turin, Italy, in 1889.

Question: Which world-renowned philosopher reportedly threatened a visiting colleague with a red-hot poker at a meeting of the Aristotelian Society at the University of Cambridge in 1946?

Answer: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper fell into a violent argument about whether there really are philosophical problems. On some accounts, Wittgenstein pulled a poker from the fire and waved it at Popper in a threatening manner, putting it down and leaving only after being ordered to do so by Bertrand Russell, his former mentor and the only person he ever listened to.

Question: Which philosopher was ordered to commit suicide by the Roman emperor Nero?

Answer: He obeyed.