Most Famous American Philosophers

American philosophers

• Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 · American

  Henry David Thoreau was a 19th-century American philosopher, essayist, and naturalist, the second major figure of the Transcendentalist movement after Ralph Waldo Emerson, his m...

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882 · American

  Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th-century American essayist, lecturer, and poet, the leading figure of the Transcendentalist movement in New England. His 1841 collection Essays: Fi...

• Charles Sanders Peirce 1839 – 1914 · American

  Charles Sanders Peirce was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, regarded as the founder of pragmatism and one of the most ...

• John Dewey 1859 – 1952 · American

  John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, the most influential figure of the second generation of pragmatist philosophy and one of the most...

• John Rawls 1921 – 2002 · American

  John Rawls was a 20th-century American political philosopher whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice is the most influential work of political philosophy of the post-war era. The bo...

• Margaret Fuller 1810 – 1850 · American

  Margaret Fuller was a 19th-century American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate, the first major figure of American feminist political thought and a central figure o...

• Susan Sontag 1933 – 2004 · American

  Susan Sontag was a 20th and early 21st-century American writer, critic, and political activist, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her generation. Her essays, inc...

• W. V. O. Quine 1908 – 2000 · American

  Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher and logician, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the post-war era. His landmark 1951 essay Two ...

• William James 1842 – 1910 · American

  William James was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher and psychologist, one of the founders of pragmatism and a central figure in the early development of modern ...

• Hilary Putnam 1926 – 2016 · American

  Hilary Putnam was an American philosopher and one of the central figures of late twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Over a long career at Harvard he made foundational contri...

• Richard Rorty 1931 – 2007 · American

  Richard Rorty was an American philosopher who began in the analytic tradition and gradually became its most celebrated internal critic. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature d...

• Robert Nozick 1938 – 2002 · American

  Robert Nozick was an American philosopher and a longtime professor at Harvard. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974 in part as a response to Rawls's Theory of Justi...

• W. E. B. Du Bois 1868 – 1963 · American

  William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, philosopher, historian, and civil rights leader. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he pr...

• Alvin Plantinga b. 1932 · American

  Alvin Plantinga is an American philosopher of religion, long associated with Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame, and the most influential analytic Christian philoso...

• Anna Julia Cooper 1858 – 1964 · American

  Anna Julia Cooper was an American philosopher, educator, and one of the founding voices of African-American feminist thought, the fourth African-American woman to receive a doct...

• Audre Lorde 1934 – 1992 · American

  Audre Lorde was an American Black feminist philosopher, poet, and essayist whose work shaped contemporary thinking on race, gender, sexuality, and difference. Sister Outsider an...

• C. I. Lewis 1883 – 1964 · American

  Clarence Irving Lewis was an American philosopher and the principal figure of the third generation of American pragmatism. A long-serving professor at Harvard, he made foundatio...

• Charles Hartshorne 1897 – 2000 · American

  Charles Hartshorne was an American philosopher and the principal interpreter and developer of Whitehead's process metaphysics. After early studies at Harvard with R. B. Perry an...

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 – 1935 · American

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, philosopher, novelist, and one of the leading feminist theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wome...

• Cornel West b. 1953 · American

  Cornel West is an American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual whose work brings together pragmatism, the African-American intellectual tradition, and prophetic Chr...

• Daniel Dennett 1942 – 2024 · American

  Daniel Clement Dennett was an American philosopher of mind, philosopher of biology, and longtime professor at Tufts University. A pupil of Gilbert Ryle, he developed an influent...

• Donald Davidson 1917 – 2003 · American

  Donald Davidson was an American philosopher whose work in the philosophy of action, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind shaped late twentieth-century analytic thought...

• Ernest Nagel 1901 – 1985 · American

  Ernest Nagel was a Czech-American philosopher of science and one of the leading representatives of logical empiricism in the United States. After studies under Morris Cohen at C...

• Henry James Sr. 1811 – 1882 · American

  Henry James Sr. was an American philosopher and religious thinker and the father of the novelist Henry James and the philosopher William James. Wealthy enough to devote his enti...

• Jane Addams 1860 – 1935 · American

  Jane Addams was an American social philosopher, reformer, and pacifist and the most influential American woman public intellectual of her generation. In 1889 she co-founded Hull...

• John Searle b. 1932 · American

  John Searle is an American philosopher long associated with the University of California, Berkeley, whose work has shaped the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. ...

• Jonathan Edwards 1703 – 1758 · American

  Jonathan Edwards was an American Puritan theologian, philosopher, and pastor and the leading intellectual of colonial New England. From his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts,...

• Judith Butler b. 1956 · American

  Judith Butler is an American philosopher whose Gender Trouble made the performative theory of gender central to contemporary feminism, queer theory, and political thought. Drawi...

• Lewis White Beck 1913 – 1997 · American

  Lewis White Beck was an American philosopher and the most influential English-language Kant scholar of his generation. After studies at Emory and Duke and a long teaching career...

• Mary Daly 1928 – 2010 · American

  Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher and theologian who taught for more than thirty years at Boston College, where she insisted on the right to teach women-onl...

• Michael Sandel b. 1953 · American

  Michael Sandel is an American political philosopher, professor at Harvard University, and one of the most widely read public philosophers of our time. Liberalism and the Limits ...

• Mortimer Adler 1902 – 2001 · American

  Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher and educator and the most prolific philosophical popularizer of his generation. After studies at Columbia and a long teaching c...

• Noam Chomsky b. 1928 · American

  Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, political philosopher, and one of the most cited intellectuals alive. His Syntactic Structures and the theory of generative grammar transfo...

• Patricia Hill Collins b. 1948 · American

  Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist and Black feminist philosopher, distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and the first African-American ...

• Reinhold Niebuhr 1892 – 1971 · American

  Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Reformed theologian and the principal exponent of Christian realism in twentieth-century social thought. After thirteen years as a par...

• Roderick Chisholm 1916 – 1999 · American

  Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher and one of the principal figures of mid-twentieth-century American analytic metaphysics and epistemology. He spent his entir...

• Ronald Dworkin 1931 – 2013 · American

  Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal and political philosopher and one of the most influential jurisprudential thinkers of the late twentieth century. Successor to H. L. A...

• Sarah Grimke 1792 – 1873 · American

  Sarah Moore Grimke was an American abolitionist, philosopher, and one of the founding figures of nineteenth-century American feminist thought, the elder sister of Angelina Grimk...

• Sidney Hook 1902 – 1989 · American

  Sidney Hook was an American philosopher, long-time professor at New York University, and one of the most prominent American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. A pupi...

• Susanne Langer 1895 – 1985 · American

  Susanne Knauth Langer was an American philosopher of mind, art, and language and one of the first women to achieve a major reputation in twentieth-century American philosophy. A...

• Theodore Parker 1810 – 1860 · American

  Theodore Parker was an American Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, and abolitionist and one of the leading public intellectuals of antebellum New England. His sermon on The ...

• Thomas Kuhn 1922 – 1996 · American

  Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions changed how the development of the natural scienc...

• Thomas Nagel b. 1937 · American

  Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher long associated with New York University, whose work has shaped contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind, ethics, and political ph...

• Vine Deloria Jr. 1933 – 2005 · American

  Vine Deloria Jr. was a Standing Rock Sioux philosopher, theologian, and the most widely read indigenous American intellectual of the late twentieth century. Custer Died for Your...

• William Ellery Channing 1780 – 1842 · American

  William Ellery Channing was an American Unitarian minister, theologian, and one of the most influential moral voices of the early American republic. From his pulpit at the Feder...

• bell hooks 1952 – 2021 · American

  bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an American Black feminist philosopher, cultural critic, and the most widely read public writer of Black feminist thought in the late t...

• George Herbert Mead 1863 – 1931 · American

  George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist and one of the central figures of classical American pragmatism. A colleague of John Dewey at Chic...

• Josiah Royce 1855 – 1916 · American

  Josiah Royce was an American philosopher and the principal American defender of objective idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A colleague of William J...

• Donna Haraway b. 1944 · American

  Donna Haraway is an American philosopher of science, biologist, and feminist theorist who has been one of the most influential voices in late-twentieth and twenty-first century ...

• Mary Whiton Calkins 1863 – 1930 · American

  Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist and the first woman elected president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophi...

• Stanley Cavell 1926 – 2018 · American

  Stanley Cavell was an American philosopher and one of the most distinctive voices in late twentieth-century Anglo-American thought. After early studies at Berkeley and Harvard, ...

• Susan Wolf b. 1952 · American

  Susan Wolf is an American moral philosopher, distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose work has shaped contemporary thinking on the meani...

• Saul Kripke 1940 – 2022 · American

  Saul Kripke was an American philosopher and logician and one of the most consequential analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Already in his teens he...

• Gilbert Harman 1938 – 2021 · American

  Gilbert Helms Harman was an American philosopher of language, mind, and ethics and a long-serving professor at Princeton. After studies at Swarthmore and Harvard under W. V. O. ...

• Marilyn Frye b. 1941 · American

  Marilyn Frye is an American radical feminist philosopher, professor emerita at Michigan State University, and one of the most influential feminist analytic philosophers of the l...

• Norman Malcolm 1911 – 1990 · American

  Norman Adrian Malcolm was an American philosopher and the principal American interpreter of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. After studies at Nebraska, Harvard, and Cambridge, w...

• Virginia Held b. 1929 · American

  Virginia Held is an American moral and political philosopher, distinguished professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and one of the leading philosop...

• David Lewis 1941 – 2001 · American

  David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher and one of the most influential figures of late twentieth-century analytic metaphysics. Holding chairs at UCLA and Princeton, he ...

• John B. Cobb Jr. b. 1925 · American

  John B. Cobb Jr. is an American Process philosopher and theologian, professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, and one of the leading living interpreters of Alfred ...

• Judith Jarvis Thomson 1929 – 2020 · American

  Judith Jarvis Thomson was an American moral and metaphysical philosopher and a long-serving professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her A Defense of Abortion, pu...

• Wendy Brown b. 1955 · American

  Wendy Brown is an American political theorist and UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose work has shaped contemporary critical reflecti...

• Iris Marion Young 1949 – 2006 · American

  Iris Marion Young was an American political philosopher and feminist theorist whose work reshaped late twentieth-century thinking about justice, oppression, and democratic inclu...

• Harry Frankfurt 1929 – 2023 · American

  Harry Frankfurt was an American moral philosopher, professor emeritus at Princeton University, and one of the most influential analytic theorists of the will. Freedom of the Wil...

• Helen Longino b. 1944 · American

  Helen Longino is an American philosopher of science, professor emerita at Stanford University, and one of the leading defenders of social epistemology in the late twentieth and ...

• Martha Nussbaum b. 1947 · American

  Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher whose work spans ancient Greek ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy of emotion, and feminist theory. The Fragility of Goodness...

• Alain Locke 1885 – 1954 · American

  Alain LeRoy Locke was an American philosopher, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, and the principal philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. After graduate studies at Oxfo...

• Borden Parker Bowne 1847 – 1910 · American

  Borden Parker Bowne was an American philosopher and Methodist theologian and the founder of Boston Personalism, the most distinctively American school of idealist personalist ph...

• Brand Blanshard 1892 – 1987 · American

  Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher of an Anglo-American rationalist temper, a long-serving professor at Yale, and one of the principal twentieth-century defenders...

• Bronson Alcott 1799 – 1888 · American

  Amos Bronson Alcott was an American Transcendentalist philosopher, educator, and social reformer and the father of the novelist Louisa May Alcott. His Temple School in Boston in...

• Carol Gilligan b. 1936 · American

  Carol Gilligan is an American moral psychologist and feminist philosopher, professor at New York University, whose 1982 In a Different Voice transformed the field of moral psych...

• Charles Stevenson 1908 – 1979 · American

  Charles Leslie Stevenson was an American moral philosopher and the principal architect of the emotivist account of ethical language. After studies at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvar...

• Christine Korsgaard b. 1952 · American

  Christine Korsgaard is an American philosopher long associated with Harvard University and one of the most important contemporary interpreters of Kantian ethics. The Sources of ...

• Edgar Sheffield Brightman 1884 – 1953 · American

  Edgar Sheffield Brightman was an American philosopher of religion and the leading second-generation representative of Boston Personalism. A pupil of Borden Parker Bowne, he held...

• Hortense Spillers b. 1942 · American

  Hortense J. Spillers is an American Black feminist literary critic and philosopher, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English emerita at Vanderbilt University, and one of the...

• John D. Caputo b. 1940 · American

  John D. Caputo is an American philosopher, professor emeritus at Villanova University and Syracuse University, and one of the most influential figures in the contemporary tradit...

• Linda Zagzebski b. 1946 · American

  Linda Zagzebski is an American philosopher, George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma, and one of the leading contemporary theorists of virtue epistemol...

• Mary Anne Warren 1946 – 2010 · American

  Mary Anne Warren was an American moral philosopher long associated with San Francisco State University, whose work in applied ethics shaped the late-twentieth-century debates ov...

• Nancy Fraser b. 1947 · American

  Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher, professor at the New School for Social Research, and one of the leading contemporary critical theorists working in the second generation...

• Nelson Goodman 1906 – 1998 · American

  Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher who made fundamental contributions to logic, the theory of induction, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of art. The...

• Robert Brandom b. 1950 · American

  Robert Brandom is an American analytic philosopher, distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the most influential contemporary defenders of inferentia...

• Roy Wood Sellars 1880 – 1973 · American

  Roy Wood Sellars was an American philosopher, long-time professor at the University of Michigan, and one of the founders of the school of critical realism in early twentieth-cen...

• Ruth Barcan Marcus 1921 – 2012 · American

  Ruth Barcan Marcus was an American philosopher and logician and one of the principal architects of twentieth-century quantified modal logic. Her doctoral thesis, written in 1946...

• T. M. Scanlon b. 1940 · American

  Thomas Michael Scanlon is an American moral and political philosopher, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity Emeritus at Harvard University, a...

• Wesley Salmon 1925 – 2001 · American

  Wesley Charles Salmon was an American philosopher of science and one of the leading writers on scientific explanation, causation, and induction in the second half of the twentie...

• Wilfrid Sellars 1912 – 1989 · American

  Wilfrid Sellars was an American philosopher and one of the most influential analytic thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. His seminal essay Empiricism and the P...

• William Frankena 1908 – 1994 · American

  William Klaas Frankena was an American moral philosopher and one of the most respected ethicists of the mid-twentieth century. Trained at Calvin College, the University of Michi...