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The American Scholar: Thought Experimenters - <a href='https://theamericanscholar.org/author/robert-zaretsky/'>Robert Zaretsky</a>

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The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger; Penguin Press, 400 pp., $32 We tend to think of philosophers as solitary creatures. Whether it be Diogenes or Socrates, Spinoza or Rousseau, Thoreau or Nietzsche, the philosopher is by necessity a loner. Several recent books, however, remind us that philosophers can also travel in packs. Not the packs that wear lanyards at academic conferences, mind you, but those that form in spite (or defiance) of the academy. David Edmonds’s The Murder of Professor Schlick and Karl Sigmund’s Exact Thinking in Demented Times are sharp accounts of the Vienna Circle, the group of European thinkers who founded the club of logical positivism (one that their idol, Ludwig Wittgenstein, refused to join). Another pair of books—Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals and Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something—offer insightful and often moving portraits of Iris

Thought Experimenters - The American Scholar Skip to content Book Reviews Thought Experimenters Making sense of a broken world By Robert Zaretsky | November 27, 2023 From left: Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Ayn Rand, Simone de Beauvoir (Background: Amélien Bayle/Flickr, figures: Wikimedia Commons) The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger; Penguin Press, 400 pp., $32 We tend to think of philosophers as solitary creatures. Whether it be Diogenes or Socrates, Spinoza or Rousseau, Thoreau or Nietzsche, the philosopher is by neces

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