Thinkers Timeline

Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, theologian, and teacher. He was one of the most influential and controversial intellectual figures of the 12th century. He helped lay the foundations of the Scholastic method that would dominate medieval European universities. He was born in 1079 in Le Pallet, near Nantes in western France. He died in 1142, aged about 63. He came from a minor noble family. He was the eldest son. He could have inherited the family's modest lands. He gave up the inheritance to study philosophy. He became a wandering student in northern France, going from teacher to teacher. He was clever, ambitious, and difficult. He repeatedly fell out with his teachers and set up rival schools. By his thirties he was the most famous teacher of philosophy in Paris. In the 1110s he met Heloise, the brilliant niece of a Paris cathedral canon named Fulbert. Heloise was about 20 years younger than Abelard. He arranged to lodge in Fulbert's house and tutor her. They became lovers. She became pregnant. Abelard arranged a secret marriage to protect her reputation, though Heloise initially resisted. When Fulbert discovered the relationship, he had Abelard attacked and castrated. Abelard withdrew to a monastery. Heloise became a nun. They never lived together again, though they corresponded for the rest of their lives. Abelard kept teaching and writing. He produced original works on logic, ethics, and theology. His positions were sometimes radical for his time. He was condemned for heresy twice, in 1121 and 1140. He died in a monastery while travelling to defend himself in Rome. His remains were eventually buried with Heloise's at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where their joint tomb is still a popular site for visitors.

Heloise was a French abbess, philosopher, and letter-writer. She was one of the most original intellectual voices of the 12th century. She is often remembered chiefly for her tragic love affair with the philosopher Peter Abelard, but she was a serious thinker in her own right and a successful religious leader for over 30 years. She was probably born around 1100 in France. She died in 1164, aged about 64. Her family background is unclear. She seems to have come from minor French nobility. She was raised partly in the convent of Argenteuil near Paris. By her teens she was already famous for her learning. She read Latin, Greek (very rare for a woman of her time), and Hebrew. She studied Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, the Church Fathers, and the philosophy of her own day. Her uncle Fulbert, a canon at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, brought her to live with him in the city to continue her education. In her late teens she became a private student of Peter Abelard, the most famous philosopher in Paris. He was about 20 years older than her. They became lovers. She became pregnant with their son Astrolabe. Abelard arranged a secret marriage, which Heloise initially opposed because she thought it would damage Abelard's career. When her uncle Fulbert tried to publicise the marriage, Abelard sent Heloise to a convent. Fulbert thought Abelard had abandoned her and arranged Abelard's castration in revenge. After the catastrophe, Abelard pushed Heloise to take religious vows. She became a nun, then prioress, then abbess of a community Abelard had founded called the Paraclete. She ran it successfully for over 30 years. She was widely respected by religious authorities including Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny. The famous correspondence with Abelard came years later, after she happened to read his autobiography. She died at the Paraclete and was eventually buried with Abelard.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher and writer. He is one of the most important thinkers of the European Enlightenment. He was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, which was then an independent city-state, not part of France or Switzerland. His mother died nine days after his birth. His father was a watchmaker who taught him to read and love books. When Rousseau was ten, his father got into a fight and had to flee Geneva. Young Jean-Jacques was left with relatives. At fifteen, he left Geneva and wandered across Europe. He worked as a servant, a private tutor, and a music copyist. He taught himself by reading. He met a wealthy older woman named Madame de Warens, who took him in for several years. His early life was unstable. He had little formal education. He would later turn this outsider experience into a source of philosophical insight. He moved to Paris in 1742. He made his name in 1750 when he won an essay competition on whether progress in arts and sciences had improved human morals. His answer, surprisingly, was no. The essay made him famous. For the next twenty years, he wrote a series of books that changed European thought. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) argued that civilisation had corrupted humanity. Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century. The Social Contract (1762) proposed a new theory of political legitimacy. Emile, or On Education (1762) proposed a revolutionary theory of how to raise children. Rousseau had six children with his partner, Thérèse Levasseur, and placed all of them in a foundling hospital. He did this against her wishes. The facts are hard to reconcile with his writing on education and family. He spent his final years moving from country to country, often in conflict with authorities who banned his books. He died on 2 July 1778 in Ermenonville, France, aged 66.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French philosopher, novelist, and feminist thinker. She was born in Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she came second in the national philosophy examination, beaten only by Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifelong intellectual partner and companion. She spent most of her adult life in Paris, writing philosophy, fiction, essays, and memoirs. Her most important philosophical work is The Second Sex, published in 1949, which is one of the founding texts of modern feminist philosophy. In it she argued that women are not born inferior but are made to be subordinate through social processes, cultural norms, and internalised beliefs. She was a committed political activist throughout her life, supporting Algerian independence, signing a petition supporting the right to abortion in France at a time when this was dangerous to do, and consistently speaking out on behalf of those without power. She lived by her philosophy: her own life, including her refusal to marry and her insistence on her independence as a thinker, was a demonstration of what she argued was possible.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a French philosopher, political activist, and mystic. She was born in Paris into a secular Jewish family of considerable intellectual distinction — her brother André became one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. She was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where she studied alongside Simone de Beauvoir, graduating first in her class. She taught philosophy in several provincial schools but was also committed to a different kind of knowing: she worked for a year in a Renault car factory to experience industrial labour from the inside, went to the front during the Spanish Civil War, and worked as an agricultural labourer. She developed a profound mystical Christian spirituality while remaining outside the institutional church. She died in 1943 at the age of thirty-four in England, where she had gone to work for the Free French government in exile. The immediate cause of her death was tuberculosis, but she had refused to eat more than the ration allowed to people in occupied France. She left behind an extraordinary body of writing, much of it published posthumously, covering philosophy, theology, political theory, labour, affliction, and attention.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a middle-class family. His father was a surgeon. He was expected to follow his father into medicine but chose philosophy instead. This caused serious tension at home. As a young man, he struggled with depression and attempted suicide at least once while a student. He studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the late 1940s, where his classmates included future major thinkers like Louis Althusser. After university, he worked in Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Tunisia before returning to France. He completed his doctorate in 1961. The thesis, published as Madness and Civilization, was the first of his major books. He held teaching positions at several French universities and in 1970 was elected to the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic institution in France. His yearly lectures there, now published in full, drew large audiences. He wrote a series of major books including The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976-1984). He was openly gay in a time when this was still unusual for a public intellectual. He was politically active, involved in campaigns around prison reform, gay rights, and opposition to French immigration policy. He died of AIDS on 25 June 1984 in Paris, aged 57. He was one of the first major public figures to die of the disease.

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He is best known for a way of reading texts called deconstruction. He was born on 15 July 1930 in El-Biar, a small town near Algiers, in what was then French Algeria. His family was Sephardic Jewish. They had lived in Algeria for many generations. French was the language spoken at home. In 1942, when Derrida was twelve, his life changed. The Vichy government in France had passed anti-Jewish laws. These laws reached Algeria too. On the first day of school that year, he was told he could not come back. He was sent away because he was Jewish. He did not attend school for a whole year. He later said this moment marked him for life. After the war, he returned to school. He read hungrily. He discovered Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Sartre. In 1949 he moved to Paris. After two tries, he got into the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. This is France's top university for philosophy. He met great teachers and students there. He also met his future wife, Marguerite. He published his first major books in 1967. There were three of them in one year: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. These books made him famous, first in France and then around the world. He taught in Paris and at many universities in the United States. He wrote more than forty books in total. He died on 9 October 2004 of pancreatic cancer, aged 74.