Most Famous British Philosophers

British philosophy is dominated by the analytic tradition and by the major contributions to political theory, ethics, and the philosophy of mind made by British thinkers from the nineteenth century onward. John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism and liberal political theory closed out the classical empiricist line and opened modern political philosophy; F. H. Bradley's idealism formed the backdrop against which the analytic revolution emerged. In the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead transformed logic and philosophy of mathematics; Susan Stebbing was among the first systematizers of modern analytic method; Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley reshaped moral philosophy; Simon Blackburn has been a leading voice in contemporary metaethics.

The broader British philosophical world also includes the English empiricists and the Scottish Enlightenment, treated on their own pages. The thinkers below include the figures most associated with twentieth-century analytic philosophy and with British political and moral thought.

British philosophers

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 · British
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and political activist whose work is foundational to 20th-century analytic philosophy. With Alfred North Whi...
John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873 · British
John Stuart Mill was a 19th-century British philosopher and political economist, the most influential English-language thinker of the Victorian era. He refined and defended the ...
Alfred North Whitehead 1861 – 1947 · British
Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of the late 19th and 20th centuries. With his student Bertrand Russell he co-authored the monumenta...
Iris Murdoch 1919 – 1999 · British
Iris Murdoch was a 20th-century British philosopher and novelist, the author of 26 novels and several volumes of moral philosophy. Her philosophical work, including The Sovereig...
F. H. Bradley 1846 – 1924 · British
Francis Herbert Bradley was an English philosopher and the leading representative of British absolute idealism. A fellow of Merton College, Oxford, he wrote almost in solitude, ...
Mary Midgley 1919 – 2018 · British
Mary Midgley was a British moral philosopher and one of the small group of women who shaped Oxford philosophy during the Second World War, alongside Anscombe, Foot, and Iris Mur...
A. C. Graham 1919 – 1991 · British
Angus Charles Graham was a British sinologist and philosopher, professor of classical Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the most influential E...
A. J. Ayer 1910 – 1989 · British
Alfred Jules Ayer was a British philosopher and the most prominent representative of logical positivism in the English-speaking world. Having spent time with the Vienna Circle w...
Alan Turing 1912 – 1954 · British
Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of mind who is widely regarded as the founder of theoretical computer science and artificial intellig...
Antony Flew 1923 – 2010 · British
Antony Garrard Newton Flew was a British analytic philosopher of religion and ethics who, for most of a long career, was one of the most prominent philosophical defenders of ath...
C. D. Broad 1887 – 1971 · British
Charlie Dunbar Broad was a British analytic philosopher and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge for nearly fifty years. He distinguished critical philosophy, the scrutiny of ...
Derek Parfit 1942 – 2017 · British
Derek Parfit was a British philosopher widely regarded as one of the most important moral philosophers of the late twentieth century. A long-serving senior research fellow at Al...
Frank Ramsey 1903 – 1930 · British
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of extraordinary precocity who, in a career cut short by his death at twenty-six, made foundational ...
Gilbert Ryle 1900 – 1976 · British
Gilbert Ryle was a British analytic philosopher and one of the architects of post-war Oxford ordinary-language philosophy. As Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and ...
J. L. Austin 1911 – 1960 · British
John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher, the leading figure of post-war Oxford ordinary-language philosophy alongside Gilbert Ryle. As White's Professor of Moral Philosop...
John Hick 1922 – 2012 · British
John Harwood Hick was a British philosopher of religion and one of the most influential religious thinkers of the late twentieth century. Trained at Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambr...
Michael Oakeshott 1901 – 1990 · British
Michael Oakeshott was a British political philosopher and one of the most distinctive English conservatives of the twentieth century. He held chairs at Cambridge, Oxford, and th...
Roger Scruton 1944 – 2020 · British
Roger Scruton was a British philosopher, public intellectual, and the foremost philosophical exponent of conservative thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centur...
Simon Blackburn b. 1944 · British
Simon Blackburn is a British philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and one of the leading defenders of expressivism in contemporary metaethics. Spreadi...
Susan Stebbing 1885 – 1943 · British
L. Susan Stebbing was a British analytic philosopher and the first woman in the United Kingdom to hold a full professorship in philosophy, at Bedford College, London. A pupil of...
Bernard Williams 1929 – 2003 · British
Bernard Williams was a British analytic philosopher and one of the most original and influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Holding chairs at Cambridge, Berkel...
G. E. Moore 1873 – 1958 · British
George Edward Moore was a British philosopher and, with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a founding figure of the analytic tradition at Cambridge. In Principia Ethica h...
John McTaggart 1866 – 1925 · British
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was a British metaphysician and the leading defender of absolute idealism in early-twentieth-century Cambridge philosophy. A fellow of Trinity Col...
Mary Hesse 1924 – 2016 · British
Mary Brenda Hesse was a British philosopher of science and one of the first women to hold a senior chair in the philosophy of science in the United Kingdom. After early studies ...
P. F. Strawson 1919 – 2006 · British
Sir Peter Frederick Strawson was a British analytic philosopher and a long-standing fellow of University College, Oxford. His paper On Referring criticized Russell's theory of d...
Elizabeth Anscombe 1919 – 2001 · British
G. E. M. Anscombe was a British analytic philosopher, a student and literary executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the leading translator of his later works. She succeeded Wittge...
Michael Dummett 1925 – 2011 · British
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was a British philosopher of logic, language, and mathematics and a long-serving Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. His monumental Frege: ...
R. M. Hare 1919 – 2002 · British
Richard Mervyn Hare was a British analytic moral philosopher and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. After captivity in the Far East during the Second World War, he...
Philippa Foot 1920 – 2010 · British
Philippa Foot was a British analytic philosopher and one of the principal figures in the twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics. A founder of Oxfam and a longtime fellow of ...
Stephen Toulmin 1922 – 2009 · British
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher of science, ethics, and argumentation. Trained at Cambridge under Wittgenstein, he held posts in Britain, Australia, and the U...
Mary Warnock 1924 – 2019 · British
Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock of Weeke, was a British moral philosopher and one of the most consequential public philosophers of late twentieth-century Britain. After a l...
F. C. S. Schiller 1864 – 1937 · British
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was a British philosopher of pragmatism, holding for many years a fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He gave pragmatism the alternati...
Gillian Rose 1947 – 1995 · British
Gillian Rose was a British philosopher and social theorist whose work occupied a singular position between Hegel, the Frankfurt School, and post-Nietzschean Continental thought....
Peter Geach 1916 – 2013 · British
Peter Thomas Geach was a British philosopher of logic, language, and metaphysics, husband and long philosophical companion of Elizabeth Anscombe, and for most of his career prof...
Richard Swinburne b. 1934 · British
Richard Swinburne is a British philosopher of religion, long associated with the University of Oxford, and the most prolific defender of natural theology in late-twentieth-centu...
Anne Phillips b. 1950 · British
Anne Phillips is a British political philosopher, Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science emerita at the London School of Economics, and one of the most influential contemp...
Bernard Bosanquet 1848 – 1923 · British
Bernard Bosanquet was a British philosopher and one of the central figures of British absolute idealism, alongside F. H. Bradley. He produced major works in logic, aesthetics, s...
Frederick Copleston 1907 – 1994 · British
Frederick Charles Copleston was an English Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy and the author of the standard English-language survey of Western philosophy, ...
Galen Strawson b. 1952 · British
Galen Strawson is a British philosopher, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the son of P. F. Strawson, whose work has reshaped contemporary debate on free will,...
Kit Fine b. 1946 · British
Kit Fine is a British philosopher, university professor at New York University, and one of the most influential contemporary metaphysicians and philosophical logicians. His earl...
Miranda Fricker b. 1966 · British
Miranda Fricker is a British philosopher, professor at the City University of New York, and the originator of the influential concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic Injustice...
Onora O'Neill b. 1941 · British
Onora O'Neill is a British philosopher and Crossbench member of the House of Lords, formerly principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, whose work has shaped contemporary Kantian ...
Richard Wollheim 1923 – 2003 · British
Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher of art, mind, and emotion and a long-serving Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. ...
Roy Bhaskar 1944 – 2014 · British
Ram Roy Bhaskar was a British philosopher and the principal founder of the school of critical realism. After studies at Oxford under Rom Harre, he produced his foundational A Re...
Stuart Hampshire 1914 – 2004 · British
Stuart Newton Hampshire was a British philosopher and one of the leading figures of postwar Oxford philosophy. After service in British intelligence during the Second World War,...
Timothy Williamson b. 1955 · British
Timothy Williamson is a British philosopher, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and one of the most influential analytic philosophers of his generation. Kno...
John McDowell b. 1942 · British
John McDowell is a South African-born British philosopher, the University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the most influential figures in con...