Raphael's "School of Athens" is considered by many art historians to be the absolute masterpiece of the Renaissance. It is the perfect pictorial counterpart to the enormous changes in thinking that came about in the 1300s as a result of economic and technological developments. Its rational perspe...

This is the best new book I have read this year. Kelley is by no means a new author but this is a more sweeping work revealing the author's keen grasp of the philosophy of history and particularly of Western civilization. Kelley positions the roots of Western civilization in the Homeric and Platoni...

In prehistoric times advice and knowledge were passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition. The development of writing systems enabled knowledge to be stored and communicated with much greater accuracy in reporting and describing facts and details, This combined with the development o...

Sophie's World Big Paper Sophie's World presents the history of philosophy in the form of a novel. A young girl learns about life and philosophy. One day a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday Norwegian schoolgirl Sophie Amundsen looks inside her mailbox and finds a mysterious letter ad...

Christianity played a major role throughout the Middle Ages in society and politics. The Middle Ages, classified from 600 AD to 1350 AD, was significantly effected by Christianity because of the impact it had on the daily lives of people of the time. The beginning of the Early Middle Ages, after ...

Education has always been perceived as a means of achieving wisdom even in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is believed that the embryos of the European educational systems were developed from the medieval monasteries (Plitz, 1981: 14). However, the cathedral schools soon outstripped the mona...

The word "medieval" came about when early scholars combined the two Latin words medium (middle) and aevum (age), which means the transition between ancient and modern times. The first 500 years of this period are the Early Middle Ages or the Dark Ages. They were called the Dark Ages because learni...