“A main cause of philosophical disease – an unbalanced diet: one nourishes oneself with only one kind of example.” (Wittgenstein, PI 593)
Here is a collection of historical and fictional individuals whose circumstances, lives or depictions raise vexed issues about integrity. As difficult cases, they focus discussion from different directions on different aspects of the integrity question. Some have already generated discussion in existing literature.
More detailed discussion can be found on our Portraits of Integrity pages.
Click on the icons below to find out more or contact us if you have an example we should add.
- Mohandas Gandhi
- Tony Benn
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Michael Kohlhaas
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Henry James
- John Brown
- Confucius
- Oscar Schindler
- Socrates
- Simone Weil
- Hannah Arendt
- William Gladstone
- Elizabeth Costello
- George Orwell
- Rosa Parks
- Virginia Woolf
- Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
- Heinrich Himmler
- Elizabeth Anscombe
- Sir Edward Grey
- Michael Kohlhaas
- Edward Snowden
- Nelson Mandela
- Captain Vere
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- George Edward Moore
- Robespierre, the ‘Incorruptible’
- Howard W. Campbell Jr
- Mr. Adolf Verlog






























