Her account of the first Observer commission, which was a portrait of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, is classic Jane: concise, self-deprecating and modestly assured.
Scholar, soldier, statesman, arch-rebel, philosopher, poet, all crowded so glitteringly into so few early years.
Steiner schools are based on an understanding of child development rooted in the spiritual movement of "anthroposophy", first created by the (unarguably racist) Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
For the philosopher Roger Scruton growing up in rural Lincolnshire, "wine" meant elderberry wine.
The Roman Stoic philosopher, essayist, celebrity and dramatist Seneca was tutor, speech-writer and adviser to the emperor Nero, and he was also, not coincidentally, one of the very richest people of his age.
Yet fiction loses its special power if it seeks to instruct or clarify, rather than losing itself in ambiguity or what the philosopher Richard Rorty called contingency and irony.
Two weeks ago, I belatedly started reading Mammon's Kingdom, an extended essay about the modern British condition by the political philosopher and sometime MP David Marquand.
They exemplify Chinese philosopher and poet Lao Tzu's saying: "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him.
Research into ways to engineer the Earth's climate as a last-ditch response to global warming will be rendered "unviable" if the associated ethical issues are not tackled first, a leading environmental philosopher has warned.
"Politeness requires that you quickly close the door and say, 'Pardon, Madame!', whereas tact would be to quickly close the door and say: 'Pardon, Monsieur!'" "It is only in the second case," explained philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently, "by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person under the shower, that one displays true tact".
It was uncharacteristic rhetoric for the former KGB agent, but he quickly qualified the statement by framing his definition of freedom in terms given by the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin: "He who loves Russia should wish her freedom; first and foremost freedom for Russia itself, her independence and international standing … and finally, freedom for Russian people, for all of us".
