ABSTRACT
A Brief Intellectual History Introduction When comparing two thinkers whose lives were so far apart both geographically and chronologically, it hardly seems to pay to investigate their lives outside of philosophy to help shed some light on what appear to be quite remarkable similarities within their discipline. There is an upside and a downside to this situation. The downside is that there is no easy or obvious way into the comparison between the two thinkers that is fed by historical similarities, hence restricting the possible merits of such a comparison completely to the philosophical contents. There is no special interest in investigating how these two thinkers reacted intellectually to a particular circumstance in history, simply because they did not share such a circumstance.
