Lives of Existential Philosophers

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Shakespeare's Hamlet, a troubled dropout struggling with questions of responsibility, to his best friend. Even by the Elizabethan era, it seems, a discipline that had begun in classical times as a practical method for discerning how best to live life had devolved into something increasingly hermetic. Wind the clock forward, to the late 19th century, and philosophy had become an exclusively academic profession, focused on seemingly arcane questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics.