Unknown author · Public domain

Lev Shestov, born Yeguda Shvartsman in Ukraine, argued that reason and system-building philosophy could never settle the questions that mattered most — the nature of God, the meaning of a life — a position that later scholars have labeled "anti-philosophy." His major work, Athens and Jerusalem, set faith against rationalism as two irreconcilable sources of truth, drawing on his readings of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. After emigrating to Paris in 1921 he influenced Edmund Husserl and Georges Bataille among others, remaining there until his death in 1938.