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