Deep Art Nature: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

“I think I speak for many of us when I say that coffee fuels our greatest intellectual efforts. And even as we get the jitters and leave brown rings on our desks, we can take comfort in the fact that so it also went with some of the most notable philosophers in the history of the discipline. ... In the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard would also get into a coffee ritual. He ‘had his own quite peculiar way of having coffee,’ writes biographer Joakim Garff. ‘Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.’ I always drink it black myself, but who among us dares think ourselves too good for the teeth-aching preferred by the author of Fear and Trembling? ...”

Open Culture

The fuel of philosophers

YouTube: The Strange Coffee Habits of Famous Philosophers (Voltaire, Kant, Kierkegaard)

2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup