Lev Shestov 1866 – 1938

Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian Jewish religious-existentialist philosopher who emigrated after the Bolshevik revolution and spent the rest of his life in Paris. Through readings of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and the Hebrew Bible, he attacked the rationalist tradition from Plato to his own day, arguing that necessity is a tyrant and that the truths of faith are inaccessible to reason but liberate the person to whom they are given. His major works include Athens and Jerusalem, Potestas Clavium, and In Job's Balances. He shaped a generation of French existentialism.