“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.
- Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
- Simone Weil
- Virginia Woolf
- Heinrich Himmler
- Elizabeth Costello
- Mr. Adolf Verlog
- Robespierre, the ‘Incorruptible’
- Socrates
- Captain Vere
- Henry James
- Confucius
- Michael Kohlhaas
- Michael Kohlhaas
- George Edward Moore
- Nelson Mandela
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Rosa Parks
- Oscar Schindler
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Hannah Arendt
- Howard W. Campbell Jr
- William Gladstone
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Elizabeth Anscombe
- Mohandas Gandhi
- Tony Benn
- George Orwell
- Sir Edward Grey
- John Brown
- Edward Snowden






























