Most Famous Contemporary Philosophers

Contemporary philosophers

• Albert Camus 1913 – 1960 · French

  Albert Camus was a 20th-century French philosopher, novelist, and journalist, born in French Algeria, who developed the philosophical position known as absurdism. His 1942 essay...

• 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...

• Hannah Arendt 1906 – 1975 · German-American

  Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century German-American political theorist whose work shaped post-war thinking about totalitarianism, political action, and moral responsibility. The Or...

• Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980 · French

  Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th-century French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist, the leading public exponent of existentialism in the post-war period. His m...

• Karl Popper 1902 – 1994 · Austrian-British

  Karl Popper was a 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher of science, social philosopher, and one of the most influential thinkers of the analytic tradition. The Logic of Scie...

• Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951 · Austrian

  Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher whose work transformed 20th-century analytic philosophy. His 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written largely while h...

• Martin Heidegger 1889 – 1976 · German

  Martin Heidegger was a 20th-century German philosopher whose 1927 work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) is one of the most influential texts of contemporary continental philosophy...

• Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986 · French

  Simone de Beauvoir was a 20th-century French philosopher, writer, and political activist, a central figure of post-war French existentialism and a foundational thinker of modern...

• Michel Foucault 1926 – 1984 · French

  Michel Foucault was a 20th-century French philosopher, historian, and social theorist, one of the most influential figures of post-war continental philosophy. His major works, i...

• 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...

• Gilles Deleuze 1925 – 1995 · French

  Gilles Deleuze was a 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential figures of post-structuralist continental philosophy. His early monographs on Hume, Bergson, Sp...

• 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...

• Jacques Derrida 1930 – 2004 · French

  Jacques Derrida was a 20th-century French philosopher, born in French Algeria, who developed the influential approach to philosophical, literary, and political analysis known as...

• 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...

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908 – 1961 · French

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20th-century French phenomenologist and one of the most original philosophers of the post-war French tradition. His 1945 work Phenomenology of Percep...

• 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...

• Theodor Adorno 1903 – 1969 · German

  Theodor W. Adorno was a 20th-century German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and a leading figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His ...

• 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 ...

• Walter Benjamin 1892 – 1940 · German

  Walter Benjamin was an early 20th-century German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, whose work has become one of the most studied bodies of writing in the histor...

• Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955 · German-American

  Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist whose work revolutionized the scientific understanding of space, time, energy, and matter. His 1905 papers on Brownian mo...

• Emmanuel Levinas 1906 – 1995 · Lithuanian-French

  Emmanuel Levinas was a 20th-century Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher of the phenomenological and ethical tradition, one of the most influential figures of late 20th-cen...

• Frantz Fanon 1925 – 1961 · Martinican-French

  Frantz Fanon was a Martinican-born psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary whose work has been foundational for postcolonial theory. Trained in France and posted as a psych...

• George Santayana 1863 – 1952 · Spanish-American

  George Santayana was a Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Educated at Harvard alongside William James and Josiah Royce, he taught there for more th...

• Henri Bergson 1859 – 1941 · French

  Henri Bergson was a 19th and 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential thinkers of the early 20th century and a major figure of continental philosophy in the ...

• Herbert Marcuse 1898 – 1979 · German-American

  Herbert Marcuse was a 20th-century German-American philosopher and a leading figure of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, particularly in its American period. His major wo...

• Jiddu Krishnamurti 1895 – 1986 · Indian

  Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian-born philosopher and spiritual teacher whose lectures, dialogues, and writings challenged organized religion and the very category of the guru. ...

• Mahatma Gandhi 1869 – 1948 · Indian

  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as Mahatma Gandhi, was an Indian lawyer, political leader, and philosopher who developed the doctrine and practice of satyagraha, nonviolent ci...

• Martin Buber 1878 – 1965 · Austrian-Israeli

  Martin Buber was a 20th-century Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher and one of the most influential figures of modern Jewish religious thought. His 1923 book Ich und Du, tr...

• Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941 · Indian

  Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, philosopher, musician, and educator and the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born into a prominent Bengali fa...

• Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939 · Austrian

  Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. Working in Vienna, he developed an elaborate theory of the unconscious, of repression and the struct...

• Simone Weil 1909 – 1943 · French

  Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Trained in philosophy alongside Simone de Beauvoir, she taught at provincial lycees while spending vacation...

• Aime Cesaire 1913 – 2008 · Martinican

  Aime Cesaire was a Martinican poet, playwright, and philosopher and a co-founder of the Negritude movement. Studying in Paris in the 1930s alongside Leopold Senghor and Leon Dam...

• Antonio Gramsci 1891 – 1937 · Italian

  Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and a founder of the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by Mussolini's regime in 1926, he spent the last decade of...

• B. R. Ambedkar 1891 – 1956 · Indian

  Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and the principal architect of the Indian Constitution. Born into the Mahar caste, he was the first Dali...

• D. T. Suzuki 1870 – 1966 · Japanese

  Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was a Japanese author, scholar, and translator who did more than any other figure to introduce Mahayana Buddhism, especially Zen, to the English-speaking ...

• Emile Durkheim 1858 – 1917 · French

  Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. His Rules of Sociological Method established the autonomy ...

• Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 · German-American

  Erich Fromm was a German-Jewish social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanist philosopher associated in his early career with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Aft...

• Gabriel Marcel 1889 – 1973 · French

  Gabriel Marcel was a French Catholic existentialist philosopher, dramatist, and music critic. Often called the first French existentialist, he distinguished his thought sharply ...

• Hans-Georg Gadamer 1900 – 2002 · German

  Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher and the founder of philosophical hermeneutics. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he taught at Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg, w...

• 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...

• Jacques Maritain 1882 – 1973 · French

  Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the architects of the twentieth-century revival of Thomism. After studies at the Sorbonne and a conversion to Catho...

• Jean-Francois Lyotard 1924 – 1998 · French

  Jean-Francois Lyotard was a 20th-century French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist, one of the leading figures of post-structuralism and a central exponent of postm...

• Jose Ortega y Gasset 1883 – 1955 · Spanish

  Jose Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and the most influential Spanish thinker of the twentieth century. Educated in Marburg under the neo-Kantians, he retur...

• Karl Jaspers 1883 – 1969 · German

  Karl Jaspers was a 20th-century German philosopher and psychiatrist, one of the founders of existentialism and a major figure of mid-20th century European thought. His early wor...

• Kwame Nkrumah 1909 – 1972 · Ghanaian

  Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian political philosopher and the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana. After studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, he...

• Leo Strauss 1899 – 1973 · German-American

  Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish philosopher who emigrated to the United States in 1937 and spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. He devoted his work to the reco...

• Louis Althusser 1918 – 1990 · French

  Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and a teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure for nearly thirty years. His For Marx and Reading Capital, the latter co-written w...

• 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...

• Max Horkheimer 1895 – 1973 · German

  Max Horkheimer was a 20th-century German philosopher and sociologist, the founder of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt and the central organising ...

• Max Scheler 1874 – 1928 · German

  Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German phenomenologist and the most important phenomenological ethicist of the early twentieth century. Drawing on but moving beyond Husserl, he argu...

• Max Weber 1864 – 1920 · German

  Max Weber was a German sociologist, jurist, and political economist, one of the founders of modern social science. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued for a...

• Pierre Bourdieu 1930 – 2002 · French

  Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher whose work fundamentally reshaped the twentieth-century social sciences. Drawing on long ethnographic w...

• Pierre Hadot 1922 – 2010 · French

  Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian of ancient thought. Trained as a classicist and editor of the Plotinian and Marcus-Aurelian corpora, he developed in a long s...

• Ramana Maharshi 1879 – 1950 · Indian

  Ramana Maharshi was an Indian Hindu sage and one of the most influential teachers of Advaita Vedanta in the twentieth century. At sixteen he experienced a spontaneous identifica...

• 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...

• Roland Barthes 1915 – 1980 · French

  Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, semiotician, and essayist. His Mythologies submitted the codes of everyday French life to a structural reading, while Elements of ...

• Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan 1888 – 1975 · Indian

  Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian philosopher and statesman, the second President of independent India and one of the foremost twentieth-century interpreters of Indian phil...

• Sri Aurobindo 1872 – 1950 · Indian

  Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, yogi, poet, and anti-colonial revolutionary. After studies at Cambridge and early activism in the Bengali nationalist movement, he withd...

• Swami Vivekananda 1863 – 1902 · Indian

  Narendranath Datta, known as Swami Vivekananda, was an Indian Hindu monk and the principal disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. His address at the Parliament of the W...

• 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...

• 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...

• Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907 – 1972 · Polish-American

  Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American Jewish philosopher, theologian, and rabbi, the descendant of a long line of Hasidic masters, professor at the Jewish Theologica...

• Alain 1868 – 1951 · French

  Emile-Auguste Chartier, who wrote under the pen name Alain, was a French philosopher, essayist, and one of the most influential lycee teachers of his generation. After studies a...

• Alain Badiou b. 1937 · French

  Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, a former student of Louis Althusser, and one of the leading figures of post-Maoist French philosophy. His Being and Event grounds an auster...

• 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...

• Alasdair MacIntyre 1929 – 2025 · Scottish-American

  Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was a Scottish-American moral and political philosopher and one of the principal architects of the late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics. H...

• Albert Memmi 1920 – 2020 · Tunisian-French

  Albert Memmi was a Tunisian-French Jewish philosopher, novelist, and essayist whose The Colonizer and the Colonized became one of the founding texts of postcolonial thought, wit...

• Alexandre Kojeve 1902 – 1968 · Russian-French

  Alexandre Kojeve was a Russian-born French philosopher whose lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939 shaped a gener...

• Ali Shariati 1933 – 1977 · Iranian

  Ali Shariati was an Iranian sociologist and Islamic political philosopher, trained at the Sorbonne under Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque, who became the most influential inte...

• 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...

• Amartya Sen b. 1933 · Indian

  Amartya Sen is an Indian philosopher and economist, Nobel laureate in economic sciences, and one of the most influential thinkers on famines, social choice, and the foundations ...

• Antonio Caso 1883 – 1946 · Mexican

  Antonio Caso Andrade was a Mexican philosopher and one of the founders of the Ateneo de la Juventud, the intellectual circle that broke with Mexican positivism in the years befo...

• Antonio Negri 1933 – 2023 · Italian

  Antonio Negri was an Italian Marxist political philosopher and revolutionary intellectual, a leading figure of the Italian operaismo movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and a co-au...

• 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...

• 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...

• Bruno Latour 1947 – 2022 · French

  Bruno Latour was a French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science, and one of the principal architects of actor-network theory and the field of science and techn...

• Byung-Chul Han b. 1959 · Korean-German

  Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist, professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, whose short and aphoristic books have become widely rea...

• 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 ...

• 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...

• Carl Schmitt 1888 – 1985 · German

  Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and political theorist, one of the most influential and most compromised legal thinkers of the twentieth century. His Political Theology, The Co...

• 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...

• Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 – 2009 · French

  Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and philosopher and the founder of structural anthropology. Influenced by Roman Jakobson's structural linguistics and his own fie...

• 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...

• Cornelius Castoriadis 1922 – 1997 · Greek-French

  Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and political theorist. A founding figure of the heterodox Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie in post-war ...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...

• Edith Stein 1891 – 1942 · German

  Edith Stein was a German philosopher, phenomenologist, and Carmelite nun. She studied under Edmund Husserl at Gottingen, served as his assistant, and wrote her doctoral disserta...

• Edouard Glissant 1928 – 2011 · Martinican

  Edouard Glissant was a Martinican philosopher, novelist, and poet, one of the founding figures of Caribbean philosophy, and the most original theorist of creolization in late-tw...

• Emanuele Severino 1929 – 2020 · Italian

  Emanuele Severino was an Italian philosopher and one of the most controversial and original metaphysicians of the late twentieth century. A pupil of Gustavo Bontadini and long-t...

• Eric Voegelin 1901 – 1985 · German-American

  Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher whose work ranged from political theology to a vast philosophy of history. After the publication of his Political Relig...

• 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...

• Ernst Bloch 1885 – 1977 · German

  Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher and one of the most original utopian thinkers of the twentieth century. After early association with Lukacs and Walter Benjamin, he ...

• Etienne Gilson 1884 – 1978 · French

  Etienne Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, the leading figure of twentieth-century neo-Thomism. He devoted his career to recovering medieval philosophy...

• 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 ...

• Friedrich Kittler 1943 – 2011 · German

  Friedrich Adolf Kittler was a German literary scholar and media theorist and one of the principal architects of the German tradition of media philosophy. After studies at Freibu...

• G. A. Cohen 1941 – 2009 · Canadian

  Gerald Allan Cohen was a Canadian-British political philosopher and the leading figure of the school of analytical Marxism. Born to a Communist Jewish family in Montreal, he stu...

• Gaston Bachelard 1884 – 1962 · French

  Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher of science and imagination whose work spanned both rigorous epistemology and a phenomenology of poetic reverie. After self-taught studi...

• Georg Lukacs 1885 – 1971 · Hungarian

  Georg Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, one of the founders of Western Marxism. His History and Class Consciousness reintroduced Hegelian categorie...

• Georges Bataille 1897 – 1962 · French

  Georges Bataille was a French philosopher, novelist, and librarian whose work occupied a singular position at the edges of surrealism, sociology, and the history of religions. A...

• Gianni Vattimo 1936 – 2023 · Italian

  Gianteresio Vattimo, known as Gianni Vattimo, was an Italian philosopher and politician and the principal architect of what he called pensiero debole, weak thought. A pupil of L...

• 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 ...

• Giorgio Agamben b. 1942 · Italian

  Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose Homo Sacer project, begun in 1995, has reshaped contemporary political philosophy through a radical genealogy of sovereignty, bar...

• Giovanni Gentile 1875 – 1944 · Italian

  Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher and the principal theorist of the official idealism of Italian Fascism, which he called actual idealism. After a long collaboration w...

• Hans Jonas 1903 – 1993 · German-American

  Hans Jonas was a German-Jewish philosopher, a student of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bultmann, who emigrated first to Palestine and then to North America. After early work on Gnosti...

• Hans Reichenbach 1891 – 1953 · German-American

  Hans Reichenbach was a German-American philosopher of science and the founder of the Berlin Circle of logical empiricists. Trained in physics and mathematics, he produced founda...

• Hans Urs von Balthasar 1905 – 1988 · Swiss

  Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher and one of the most wide-ranging Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. After early studies of Germa...

• Henri Lefebvre 1901 – 1991 · French

  Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist whose work shaped the critical theory of everyday life and the philosophy of urban space. A long-time member of t...

• Ian Hacking 1936 – 2023 · Canadian

  Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher of science whose work bridged the analytic and historical traditions in the philosophy of science. Trained at Cambridge under Wittgenstein...

• Imre Lakatos 1922 – 1974 · Hungarian-British

  Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian-British philosopher of mathematics and science. After surviving the Second World War in the Hungarian Communist underground and later being imprison...

• 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...

• Jacques Lacan 1901 – 1981 · French

  Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose return to Freud through structural linguistics reshaped psychoanalytic theory and exerted a wide infl...

• 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...

• Jean Baudrillard 1929 – 2007 · French

  Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher and one of the most provocative voices of late twentieth-century social theory. After early work on consumer society in...

• Jean Wahl 1888 – 1974 · French

  Jean Andre Wahl was a French philosopher and poet and the principal channel by which Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the wider current of existentialism reached French philosophical edu...

• 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...

• John Mbiti 1931 – 2019 · Kenyan

  John Samuel Mbiti was a Kenyan-born Christian theologian and philosopher and the founding scholar of the modern academic study of African religions and philosophy. After studies...

• 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. ...

• Joseph Pieper 1904 – 1997 · German

  Joseph Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and one of the most widely read twentieth-century interpreters of Thomas Aquinas. Long-time professor at Munster, he combined car...

• Joseph Raz 1939 – 2022 · Israeli-British

  Joseph Raz was an Israeli-British legal and moral philosopher and one of the leading legal positivists of his generation. Trained at Hebrew University and Oxford, he held the ch...

• Joseph Soloveitchik 1903 – 1993 · Russian-American

  Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was a Russian-born American Orthodox Jewish philosopher and rabbi, the long-time head of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva Univers...

• 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...

• Jurgen Habermas b. 1929 · German

  Jurgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist, the most influential heir of the Frankfurt School and the foremost theorist of communicative reason. The Structural Tran...

• Karl Mannheim 1893 – 1947 · Hungarian-British

  Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. After teaching at Heidelberg and Frankfurt, he fled the Naz...

• Karl Polanyi 1886 – 1964 · Hungarian-American

  Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian-American economic historian, social theorist, and political philosopher. After service in the Austro-Hungarian army and a period of activism in Vien...

• Kate Manne b. 1983 · Australian

  Kate Manne is an Australian moral philosopher, associate professor at Cornell University, whose work has reshaped contemporary feminist analytic philosophy of misogyny and patri...

• Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz 1890 – 1963 · Polish

  Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was a Polish philosopher and logician of the Lwow-Warsaw school and one of the leading philosophers of language and theory of knowledge of the interwar per...

• Kurt Godel 1906 – 1978 · Austrian-American

  Kurt Friedrich Godel was an Austrian-American mathematician, logician, and philosopher and one of the most important logicians in the history of the discipline. His incompletene...

• Leopoldo Zea 1912 – 2004 · Mexican

  Leopoldo Zea was a Mexican philosopher and the principal figure of the philosophy of Latin American identity in the second half of the twentieth century. A student of Jose Gaos,...

• Leszek Kolakowski 1927 – 2009 · Polish

  Leszek Kolakowski was a Polish philosopher and the most influential critic of Marxism from within the Marxist tradition. After early Marxist work that had brought him to a chair...

• Lev Shestov 1866 – 1938 · Russian

  Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian Jewish religious-existentialist philosopher who emigrated after the Bolshevik revolution and spent the rest of his life in Paris. Through re...

• Lewis Gordon b. 1962 · Jamaican-American

  Lewis Gordon is a Jamaican-American philosopher, professor at the University of Connecticut, and one of the most important figures in contemporary Africana philosophy, black exi...

• 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...

• Luigi Pareyson 1918 – 1991 · Italian

  Luigi Pareyson was an Italian philosopher of existence, hermeneutics, and aesthetics and the principal architect of Italian personalism in the second half of the twentieth centu...

• 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 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...

• Michael Polanyi 1891 – 1976 · Hungarian-British

  Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, physical chemist, economist, and philosopher and the younger brother of the economic historian Karl Polanyi. After a distinguis...

• 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...

• Ngugi wa Thiong'o 1938 – 2025 · Kenyan

  Ngugi wa Thiong'o was a Kenyan novelist, philosopher, and one of the most influential theorists of language, culture, and postcolonial liberation. Decolonising the Mind argued t...

• Nicola Abbagnano 1901 – 1990 · Italian

  Nicola Abbagnano was an Italian philosopher and the principal architect of what he called positive existentialism. After early work in Naples and many years as professor at Turi...

• Niels Bohr 1885 – 1962 · Danish

  Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to atomic theory and quantum mechanics. His 1913 model of the hydrogen atom introduced quantiz...

• Niklas Luhmann 1927 – 1998 · German

  Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist and one of the leading systems theorists of the twentieth century. Trained as a lawyer and trained further in the United States under Tal...

• Nikolai Berdyaev 1874 – 1948 · Russian

  Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher. After early involvement with Marxism and a brief imprisonment under the Tsar, he turned to Ch...

• Nishitani Keiji 1900 – 1990 · Japanese

  Nishitani Keiji was a Japanese philosopher and one of the principal figures of the second generation of the Kyoto School. A student of Nishida Kitaro at Kyoto and of Heidegger a...

• 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...

• Octavio Paz 1914 – 1998 · Mexican

  Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat and one of the foremost Latin American writers of the twentieth century. His Labyrinth of Solitude, published in 1950, con...

• Otto Neurath 1882 – 1945 · Austrian

  Otto Neurath was an Austrian sociologist, economist, and philosopher of science and one of the leading members of the Vienna Circle. A committed socialist and engineer of public...

• 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 ...

• Paul Feyerabend 1924 – 1994 · Austrian

  Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his anti-methodological critique of the philosophy of science. After early work in the orbit of t...

• Paul Tillich 1886 – 1965 · German-American

  Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Lutheran theologian and philosopher of religion and one of the most widely read religious thinkers of the twentieth century. After se...

• Paul Virilio 1932 – 2018 · French

  Paul Virilio was a French philosopher, urbanist, and cultural theorist whose work made speed the central category of contemporary politics. Trained as an architect and shaped by...

• Paulo Freire 1921 – 1997 · Brazilian

  Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher and one of the founders of critical pedagogy. After early work with adult literacy programs among the poor of ...

• Peter Singer b. 1946 · Australian

  Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher and the most widely read utilitarian writer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His Animal Liberation became ...

• Peter Sloterdijk b. 1947 · German

  Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist, long associated with the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, whose three-volume Spheres trilogy offered a sw...

• 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...

• Roberto Mangabeira Unger b. 1947 · Brazilian

  Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher and the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard, whose work has spanned legal theory, political philosophy, and Brazilian p...

• 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...

• 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...

• Roger T. Ames b. 1947 · Canadian

  Roger T. Ames is a Canadian philosopher, Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University and emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii, and one of the most influential Engl...

• 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...

• Rudolf Carnap 1891 – 1970 · German-American

  Rudolf Carnap was a German-born philosopher and a leading figure of the Vienna Circle and of logical empiricism. His Logical Structure of the World attempted to construct all sc...

• Sayyed Hossein Nasr b. 1933 · Iranian-American

  Sayyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian-American Islamic philosopher, university professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and one of the leading living exponents ...

• 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...

• 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...

• Slavoj Zizek b. 1949 · Slovenian

  Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals working in the broadly Hegelian and Lacanian tradition. The Sublime ...

• Susan Haack b. 1945 · British-American

  Susan Haack is a British-American philosopher, distinguished professor at the University of Miami, and one of the leading defenders of pragmatism and epistemological responsibil...

• 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...

• 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...

• Thich Nhat Hanh 1926 – 2022 · Vietnamese

  Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, peace activist, and one of the most influential teachers of contemporary engaged Buddhism. His leadership of the Buddhist Pea...

• 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...

• Umberto Eco 1932 – 2016 · Italian

  Umberto Eco was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and one of the most widely read public intellectuals of his time. A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader...

• 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...

• Walter Kaufmann 1921 – 1980 · German-American

  Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet and the principal English-language interpreter of Nietzsche in the second half of the twentieth ce...

• Werner Heisenberg 1901 – 1976 · German

  Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the principal architects of quantum mechanics. His 1925 paper laid the foundation for matrix mechanics, and ...

• Yeshayahu Leibowitz 1903 – 1994 · Latvian-Israeli

  Yeshayahu Leibowitz was a Latvian-Israeli philosopher, scientist, and Orthodox Jewish religious thinker, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in biochemistry, neurolo...

• Zygmunt Bauman 1925 – 2017 · Polish-British

  Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-British sociologist and social philosopher and one of the most widely read social theorists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. D...

• 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...

• Alfred Tarski 1901 – 1983 · Polish-American

  Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher and one of the founders of modern mathematical logic and model theory. After his early career in the...

• Ananda Coomaraswamy 1877 – 1947 · Sri Lankan-American

  Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was a Sri Lankan-born philosopher of art and metaphysics and one of the principal exponents of the Traditionalist school of thought in the twentieth ...

• 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...

• Charles Mills 1951 – 2021 · Jamaican-American

  Charles Mills was a Jamaican-American philosopher, distinguished professor at the City University of New York, and one of the most original political philosophers of his generat...

• Cheikh Anta Diop 1923 – 1986 · Senegalese

  Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and political philosopher who argued for the African origin of ancient Egyptian civilization and for the ...

• Hans Kelsen 1881 – 1973 · Austrian-American

  Hans Kelsen was an Austrian-American jurist and legal philosopher and the principal theorist of the pure theory of law. He drafted the federal constitution of the Austrian Repub...

• Ernst Cassirer 1874 – 1945 · German

  Ernst Cassirer was a German Jewish philosopher and the leading representative of the Marburg neo-Kantian tradition in the twentieth century. His three-volume Philosophy of Symbo...

• 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...

• Jean-Luc Marion b. 1946 · French

  Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and theologian, a major figure in contemporary phenomenology, and a leading interpreter of Descartes. His God Without Being challenged th...

• Michel Serres 1930 – 2019 · French

  Michel Serres was a French philosopher of communication and science, a member of the Academie francaise, and one of the most idiosyncratic stylists of late-twentieth-century Fre...

• Pierre Duhem 1861 – 1916 · French

  Pierre Duhem was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and historian of medieval science. His work in thermodynamics and chemistry was respected during his lif...

• Rene Girard 1923 – 2015 · French

  Rene Girard was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science best known for his theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. From his early li...

• Samuel Ramos 1897 – 1959 · Mexican

  Samuel Ramos was a Mexican philosopher and one of the principal exponents of philosophy of lo mexicano, the reflective inquiry into the character of Mexican national life that f...

• Sylvia Wynter b. 1928 · Jamaican

  Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican philosopher, dramatist, and professor emerita at Stanford University, whose work has reshaped contemporary thinking on humanism, race, and the very c...

• David Chalmers b. 1966 · Australian

  David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher, professor at New York University and the Australian National University, and a leading voice in the contemporary philosophy of mind....

• 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 ...

• Edmund Husserl 1859 – 1938 · German

  Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the founder of phenomenology and one of the most influential figures of modern European though...

• 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...

• Karl Lowith 1897 – 1973 · German

  Karl Lowith was a German philosopher and a student of Husserl and Heidegger. His doctoral thesis, completed under Heidegger, was followed by a long period of exile in Italy, Jap...

• 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...

• 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...

• Alexis Kagame 1912 – 1981 · Rwandan

  Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan Catholic priest, philosopher, historian, and linguist and one of the principal pioneers of academic African philosophy. After studies at Astrida and ...

• Daya Krishna 1924 – 2007 · Indian

  Daya Krishna was an Indian philosopher and the most influential figure in the post-independence Indian philosophical scene, professor of philosophy at the University of Rajastha...

• 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...

• Hu Shi 1891 – 1962 · Chinese

  Hu Shi was a Chinese philosopher, essayist, and diplomat, and a leader of the May Fourth and New Culture movements. After completing his doctorate under John Dewey at Columbia, ...

• 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: ...

• Paul Ricoeur 1913 – 2005 · French

  Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher and one of the great synthesizers of twentieth-century continental thought. Drawing on phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and anal...

• 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...

• Sara Ahmed b. 1969 · British-Australian

  Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian feminist philosopher and independent scholar, formerly professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose work has shaped contemporary femin...

• 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...

• Alexandre Koyre 1892 – 1964 · Russian-French

  Alexandre Koyre was a Russian-born French historian and philosopher of science whose work helped to inaugurate the modern internalist history of science. After studies under Hus...

• Benedetto Croce 1866 – 1952 · Italian

  Benedetto Croce was an Italian historian, philosopher, and statesman and the principal exponent of neo-idealist philosophy in early twentieth-century Italy. From his independent...

• 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. ...

• Jose Carlos Mariategui 1894 – 1930 · Peruvian

  Jose Carlos Mariategui was a Peruvian journalist and Marxist political philosopher and one of the most important Latin American thinkers of the twentieth century. Self-educated ...

• 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...

• Markus Gabriel b. 1980 · German

  Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher, professor at the University of Bonn, and the youngest holder of a German philosophy chair when he was appointed in 2009. Why the World Do...

• 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...

• Adriana Cavarero b. 1947 · Italian

  Adriana Cavarero is an Italian feminist philosopher, professor emerita at the University of Verona, and one of the leading voices of contemporary Italian thought of sexual diffe...

• Annette Baier 1929 – 2012 · New Zealander

  Annette Claire Baier was a New Zealand-born moral philosopher and one of the most distinctive analytic voices in late twentieth-century ethics. After studies at Otago and Oxford...

• 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 ...

• Enrique Dussel 1934 – 2023 · Argentine-Mexican

  Enrique Dussel was an Argentine-Mexican philosopher and theologian and the principal architect of the philosophy of liberation. After studies in Mendoza, Madrid, and Paris, he t...

• Gershom Scholem 1897 – 1982 · German-Israeli

  Gerhard, later Gershom, Scholem was a German-Israeli philosopher, historian, and the founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism. Born in Berlin and committed from his tee...

• 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 ...

• John Finnis b. 1940 · Australian-British

  John Finnis is an Australian-British legal and moral philosopher, emeritus professor of law at Oxford and a long-time professor at the University of Notre Dame. Natural Law and ...

• 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...

• Karl Rahner 1904 – 1984 · German

  Karl Rahner was a German Jesuit theologian and philosopher and one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Trained in scholastic theology and in Heid...

• 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 ...

• Raimon Panikkar 1918 – 2010 · Spanish-Indian

  Raimon Panikkar was a Spanish-Indian philosopher and Catholic priest, born in Barcelona to a Catalan mother and an Indian father, and one of the most influential figures in twen...

• 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...

• 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...

• Akeel Bilgrami b. 1950 · Indian-American

  Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian-American philosopher, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and one of the leading contemporary analytic philosophers o...

• Charles Taylor b. 1931 · Canadian

  Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher and one of the most influential figures in late-twentieth-century political philosophy and the history of ideas. Sources of the Self tra...

• Franz Rosenzweig 1886 – 1929 · German

  Franz Rosenzweig was a German Jewish philosopher and one of the great figures of twentieth-century Jewish thought. After a near-conversion to Christianity, he returned to Judais...

• Gilbert Simondon 1924 – 1989 · French

  Gilbert Simondon was a French philosopher whose work on technical objects and individuation has become a touchstone for contemporary philosophy of technology and metaphysics. Hi...

• 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...

• 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...

• Mikhail Bakhtin 1895 – 1975 · Russian

  Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher of language, literary theorist, and philosophical anthropologist whose work, much of it written in obscurity and exile, tr...

• Norberto Bobbio 1909 – 2004 · Italian

  Norberto Bobbio was an Italian legal and political philosopher and one of the principal voices of postwar Italian liberal democracy. After clandestine resistance to Fascism in h...

• Achille Mbembe b. 1957 · Cameroonian

  Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, and one of the most influen...

• Axel Honneth b. 1949 · German

  Axel Honneth is a German philosopher, the most important successor to Jurgen Habermas in the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, and the long-time director of the Ins...

• Bas van Fraassen b. 1941 · Dutch-American

  Bas C. van Fraassen is a Dutch-born American philosopher of science, distinguished professor emeritus at Princeton University and former professor at San Francisco State Univers...

• Felix Guattari 1930 – 1992 · French

  Pierre-Felix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political activist, and philosopher and the long-time collaborator of Gilles Deleuze. After training as a psychoanalyst at the ...

• 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....

• Giorgio Colli 1917 – 1979 · Italian

  Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher and classicist, professor at the University of Pisa, and the co-editor with Mazzino Montinari of the critical edition of Nietzsche's com...

• 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 ...

• Jan Patocka 1907 – 1977 · Czech

  Jan Patocka was a Czech philosopher and the most important Czech phenomenologist of the twentieth century. A pupil of Husserl and Heidegger and a long-time editor of the Prague ...

• Jeremy Waldron b. 1953 · New Zealand

  Jeremy Waldron is a New Zealand-born British and American legal and political philosopher, University Professor at the New York University School of Law and emeritus Chichele Pr...

• John Mackie 1917 – 1981 · Australian

  John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher who spent the greater part of his career at the University of Sydney, the University of York, and University College, Oxford. Hi...

• Julia Kristeva b. 1941 · Bulgarian-French

  Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst whose work has shaped semiotics, feminist theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. R...

• Li Zehou 1930 – 2021 · Chinese

  Li Zehou was a Chinese philosopher and aesthetician, the most influential figure of the post-Mao Chinese philosophical scene, who reconstructed the Confucian and Marxist traditi...

• Louis Lavelle 1883 – 1951 · French

  Louis Lavelle was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the principal exponents of the philosophy of being and of participation in twentieth-century French thought. Long-time...

• Luce Irigaray b. 1930 · Belgian-French

  Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and linguist, and one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the late twentieth century. Speculum of the...

• Lucien Levy-Bruhl 1857 – 1939 · French

  Lucien Levy-Bruhl was a French philosopher and ethnologist and one of the most influential and most controversial of the early twentieth-century students of comparative thought....

• Maria Lugones 1944 – 2020 · Argentine-American

  Maria Lugones was an Argentine-American philosopher, long associated with Binghamton University, and a foundational figure in decolonial feminism and Latina philosophy. Pilgrima...

• 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...

• Patricia Churchland b. 1943 · Canadian-American

  Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher, professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the founders of the field she named neurop...

• 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...

• 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...

• Bimal Krishna Matilal 1935 – 1991 · Indian

  Bimal Krishna Matilal was an Indian philosopher and Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford, widely credited with putting classical Indian...

• Fazlur Rahman 1919 – 1988 · Pakistani

  Fazlur Rahman was a Pakistani-American Islamic philosopher and the most influential modernist interpreter of the Quran in twentieth-century Muslim thought. After studies at Oxfo...

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak b. 1942 · Indian-American

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian-American literary theorist and philosopher, professor at Columbia University, and one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. He...

• Ivan Ilyin 1883 – 1954 · Russian

  Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, legal theorist, and political thinker and one of the most consequential conservative voices of the Russia...

• Jean-Pierre Vernant 1914 – 2007 · French

  Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and philosopher of ancient Greek thought, professor at the College de France, and the founding figure of the Paris school of structura...

• Leopold Sedar Senghor 1906 – 2001 · Senegalese

  Leopold Sedar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, philosopher, and the first president of independent Senegal. As a student in Paris in the 1930s, he was a co-founder of the Negritud...

• 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...

• A. N. Prior 1914 – 1969 · New Zealander

  Arthur Norman Prior was a New Zealand-born logician and the founder of modern tense logic. After early work in theology and ethics, he turned to logic and, in a series of articl...

• Abe Masao 1915 – 2006 · Japanese

  Abe Masao was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher of the Kyoto School and the principal exponent of Zen thought in interreligious dialogue with Christianity and Judaism in the late ...

• Adolf Reinach 1883 – 1917 · German

  Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach was a German philosopher, lawyer, and one of the most original of the early phenomenologists. A pupil of Husserl and the leading philosophical voi...

• Albrecht Wellmer 1933 – 2018 · German

  Albrecht Wellmer was a German philosopher and one of the leading representatives of the third generation of the Frankfurt School. A pupil of Adorno and a long-time colleague of ...

• Aleksei Losev 1893 – 1988 · Russian

  Aleksei Losev was a Russian philosopher, classicist, and historian of philosophy, the last great Russian neoplatonist of the Silver Age, who survived imprisonment in the Stalini...

• Alfred Schmidt 1931 – 2012 · German

  Alfred Schmidt was a German philosopher and long-time professor at Frankfurt and one of the principal interpreters of the Frankfurt School in the second half of the twentieth ce...

• Alfred Schutz 1899 – 1959 · Austrian-American

  Alfred Schutz was an Austrian-American philosopher and the principal founder of the phenomenology of the social world. Trained as a lawyer and economist in Vienna, he combined a...

• Allameh Tabatabai 1903 – 1981 · Iranian

  Sayyid Mohammad Husayn Tabatabai, known as Allameh Tabatabai, was an Iranian Twelver Shia philosopher, theologian, and Quranic commentator, professor in the Hawza of Qom and one...

• Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison 1856 – 1931 · Scottish

  Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison was a Scottish philosopher and one of the leading critics of absolute idealism within British Idealism itself. After studies at Edinburgh and in Ger...

• Anibal Quijano 1928 – 2018 · Peruvian

  Anibal Quijano Obregon was a Peruvian sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of decolonial thought. After early work in dependency theory, he developed in a series ...

• 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...

• Arne Naess 1912 – 2009 · Norwegian

  Arne Naess was a Norwegian philosopher, the youngest person ever appointed to a full professorship at the University of Oslo, and the founder of the deep ecology movement. His e...

• Arnold Gehlen 1904 – 1976 · German

  Arnold Gehlen was a German philosopher and one of the principal founders, with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, of modern philosophical anthropology. After teaching at Leipzig ...

• Aron Gurwitsch 1901 – 1973 · Lithuanian-American

  Aron Gurwitsch was a Lithuanian-born American phenomenologist whose long career carried Husserlian phenomenology through Berlin, Paris, and the New School for Social Research in...

• Augusto Salazar Bondy 1925 – 1974 · Peruvian

  Augusto Salazar Bondy was a Peruvian philosopher and educator and one of the founding voices of Latin American philosophy of liberation. A long-time professor at San Marcos Univ...

• Avishai Margalit b. 1939 · Israeli

  Avishai Margalit is an Israeli philosopher, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...

• Bernard Lonergan 1904 – 1984 · Canadian

  Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian and one of the leading representatives of transcendental Thomism. After studies at Heythrop, Lon...

• Bernard Stiegler 1952 – 2020 · French

  Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher of technology, a former pupil of Jacques Derrida, and one of the most original thinkers of digital culture in the late twentieth and ea...

• Boris Groys b. 1947 · Russian-German

  Boris Groys is a Russian-born German philosopher, art critic, and media theorist, professor at New York University, whose work has reshaped the philosophy of contemporary art an...

• 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...

• Carl Hempel 1905 – 1997 · German-American

  Carl Gustav Hempel was a German-American philosopher of science and one of the most influential members of the logical empiricist tradition. After early association with the Ber...

• 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...

• Catherine Malabou b. 1959 · French

  Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher, a former student of Jacques Derrida, and the leading thinker of plasticity in contemporary philosophy. From The Future of Hegel onward...

• 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 ...

• D. M. Armstrong 1926 – 2014 · Australian

  David Malet Armstrong was an Australian philosopher and the leading representative of the school of Australian materialism. Educated at Sydney and Oxford, he held the chair of p...

• Dieter Henrich 1927 – 2022 · German

  Dieter Henrich was a German philosopher, professor at the University of Munich, and the most important interpreter of post-Kantian German Idealism of the second half of the twen...

• 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...

• Eduardo Nicol 1907 – 1990 · Spanish-Mexican

  Eduardo Nicol was a Spanish-Mexican philosopher and one of the most original voices of the Spanish philosophical exile in Latin America after the Civil War. Trained at Barcelona...

• Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze 1963 – 2007 · Nigerian

  Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze was a Nigerian philosopher who taught for most of his career at DePaul University, and one of the most influential figures of the post-1990s wave of Africa...

• Emmanuel Mounier 1905 – 1950 · French

  Emmanuel Mounier was a French Catholic philosopher and the founder of the personalist movement and its journal Esprit, founded in 1932. Drawing on Bergson, Maritain, and the Chr...

• Ernst Tugendhat 1930 – 2023 · German

  Ernst Tugendhat was a Czech-born German philosopher and one of the most important twentieth-century bridges between analytic and continental traditions. Educated at Stanford and...

• Eugen Fink 1905 – 1975 · German

  Eugen Fink was a German phenomenologist, the closest collaborator of Edmund Husserl in his last years and a long-time colleague of Martin Heidegger at Freiburg. He served as Hus...

• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 1888 – 1973 · German-American

  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a German-American Christian philosopher of speech, history, and the social sciences. After a youthful conversion from Judaism to Christianity that is...

• Eugenio Trias 1942 – 2013 · Spanish

  Eugenio Trias was a Spanish philosopher, professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and the most original Spanish-language metaphysician of the late twentieth centur...

• Fabien Eboussi Boulaga 1934 – 2018 · Cameroonian

  Fabien Eboussi Boulaga was a Cameroonian philosopher and former Jesuit and one of the sharpest critics of ethnophilosophy in the African philosophical tradition. His Christianit...

• Felwine Sarr b. 1972 · Senegalese

  Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese philosopher, economist, and writer, professor at Duke University and the author of works on the philosophy of Africa, the meaning of development, an...

• Feng Youlan 1895 – 1990 · Chinese

  Feng Youlan was a Chinese philosopher and one of the most influential figures in the modern reception of Chinese philosophy. He earned his doctorate at Columbia under John Dewey...

• Ferdinand Tonnies 1855 – 1936 · German

  Ferdinand Tonnies was a German sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. His Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887, i...

• Francisco Romero 1891 – 1962 · Argentine

  Francisco Romero was an Argentine philosopher of Spanish origin and one of the principal architects of academic philosophy in the Spanish-speaking world of the twentieth century...

• Frank Jackson b. 1943 · Australian

  Frank Jackson is an Australian philosopher, distinguished honorary professor at the Australian National University, and one of the most influential analytic philosophers working...

• 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,...

• Galvano della Volpe 1895 – 1968 · Italian

  Galvano della Volpe was an Italian philosopher and aesthetician and the principal architect of the school of analytical Marxism that came to be known as the Della Volpian school...

• Georg Henrik von Wright 1916 – 2003 · Finnish

  Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher and logician, Wittgenstein's chosen successor at Cambridge, and one of his three literary executors. Returning to Helsinki, he ...

• Graham Priest b. 1948 · British-Australian

  Graham Priest is a British-born Australian and American philosopher, distinguished professor at the City University of New York, and the foremost living advocate of dialetheism,...

• Hans Albert 1921 – 2023 · German

  Hans Albert was a German philosopher, sociologist, and the principal continental representative of critical rationalism, the tradition founded by Karl Popper. After service in t...

• Hans Blumenberg 1920 – 1996 · German

  Hans Blumenberg was a German philosopher whose work ranged across the history of ideas, philosophy of science, rhetoric, and the theory of myth. His Legitimacy of the Modern Age...

• Hassan Hanafi 1935 – 2021 · Egyptian

  Hassan Hanafi was an Egyptian philosopher and Islamic intellectual of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, professor of philosophy at Cairo University and one of...

• Hedwig Conrad-Martius 1888 – 1966 · German

  Hedwig Conrad-Martius was a German Catholic phenomenologist and one of the leading figures of the Munich-Gottingen circle around Husserl and Reinach. A friend of Edith Stein, wi...

• Helmuth Plessner 1892 – 1985 · German

  Helmuth Plessner was a German philosopher and one of the principal founders, with Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, of philosophical anthropology. Trained in zoology, psychology, a...

• Henry Odera Oruka 1944 – 1995 · Kenyan

  Henry Odera Oruka was a Kenyan philosopher and the founder of the sage philosophy project, which sought to identify and engage in dialogue with reflective indigenous thinkers in...

• 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...

• Ignacio Ellacuria 1930 – 1989 · Spanish-Salvadoran

  Ignacio Ellacuria Beascoechea was a Spanish-Salvadoran Jesuit philosopher, theologian, and the long-time rector of the Central American University in San Salvador. A pupil of Xa...

• Inoue Tetsujiro 1855 – 1944 · Japanese

  Inoue Tetsujiro was a Japanese philosopher of the Meiji and Taisho eras and one of the founders of academic philosophy in modern Japan. After early studies under foreign teacher...

• Isabelle Stengers b. 1949 · Belgian

  Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher of science, originally trained as a chemist, and a leading interpreter of Alfred North Whitehead and Ilya Prigogine, with whom she co-...

• J. L. Mehta 1912 – 1988 · Indian

  J. L. Mehta was an Indian philosopher and one of the most important interpreters of Heidegger and the Vedantic tradition in twentieth-century Indian thought. Trained in Banaras ...

• Jaakko Hintikka 1929 – 2015 · Finnish

  Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician and one of the most prolific and inventive logicians of the late twentieth century. Trained at Helsinki and ...

• Jacques Ranciere b. 1940 · French

  Jacques Ranciere is a French philosopher, a former pupil of Althusser who broke decisively with his master in his collaboration with workers' archives in the 1970s. The Ignorant...

• Jaegwon Kim 1934 – 2019 · Korean-American

  Jaegwon Kim was a Korean-American analytic philosopher, long associated with Brown University, and one of the most influential philosophers of mind of his generation. His early ...

• Jan Lukasiewicz 1878 – 1956 · Polish

  Jan Lukasiewicz was a Polish logician and philosopher and one of the founders of the Lwow-Warsaw school of analytic philosophy. After holding chairs at Lwow and Warsaw and servi...

• Jean Cavailles 1903 – 1944 · French

  Jean Cavailles was a French philosopher of mathematics and a hero of the French Resistance. Trained at the Ecole Normale Superieure under Brunschvicg and influenced by his excha...

• Jean Hyppolite 1907 – 1968 · French

  Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher and the most important early French interpreter and translator of Hegel. His French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit and his ac...

• Jean-Luc Nancy 1940 – 2021 · French

  Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher whose work extended the heritage of Heidegger and Derrida into an original thinking of community, the body, and shared existence. After t...

• 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...

• John Findlay 1903 – 1987 · South African

  John Niemeyer Findlay was a South African-born philosopher whose long career took him from Pretoria and Otago to Newcastle, King's College London, the University of Texas, Yale,...

• Jonardon Ganeri b. 1963 · British-Indian

  Jonardon Ganeri is a British-Indian philosopher, professor at the University of Toronto, and one of the leading interpreters of classical Indian philosophy in the English-speaki...

• Jose Vasconcelos 1882 – 1959 · Mexican

  Jose Vasconcelos Calderon was a Mexican philosopher, writer, and educator and the most influential intellectual of post-revolutionary Mexico. As Secretary of Public Education fr...

• Karl-Otto Apel 1922 – 2017 · German

  Karl-Otto Apel was a German philosopher and one of the principal architects, with Habermas, of discourse ethics. After early work on the history of linguistic philosophy, he dev...

• 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...

• Kuki Shuzo 1888 – 1941 · Japanese

  Kuki Shuzo was a Japanese philosopher who studied with Heinrich Rickert and Martin Heidegger in Germany before returning to teach at Kyoto Imperial University. His most original...

• Kwame Anthony Appiah b. 1954 · Ghanaian-American

  Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British and American philosopher whose work has reshaped contemporary debates on ethics, identity, race, and cosmopolitanism. In My Father's H...

• Kwame Gyekye 1939 – 2019 · Ghanaian

  Kwame Gyekye was a Ghanaian philosopher and one of the principal interpreters of Akan thought to the wider philosophical world. Trained at Ghana and Harvard, he held a long prof...

• Kwasi Wiredu 1931 – 2022 · Ghanaian

  Kwasi Wiredu was a Ghanaian philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary African analytic philosophy. Trained at Ghana and Oxford under Strawson, he taught for more than ...

• Leon Brunschvicg 1869 – 1944 · French

  Leon Brunschvicg was a French philosopher and the leading representative of French rationalist idealism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Long-time professor at the...

• Lev Karsavin 1882 – 1952 · Russian

  Lev Platonovich Karsavin was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, medieval historian, and one of the most original metaphysicians of the Russian religious renaissance. Afte...

• Liang Shuming 1893 – 1988 · Chinese

  Liang Shuming was a Chinese philosopher, rural reformer, and one of the founders of the New Confucian movement of the twentieth century. After early studies in Buddhism, he turn...

• Linda Martin Alcoff b. 1955 · Panamanian-American

  Linda Martin Alcoff is a Panamanian-American philosopher, professor at the City University of New York, and a leading voice in feminist epistemology, philosophy of race, and Lat...

• 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...

• Lucien Goldmann 1913 – 1970 · Romanian-French

  Lucien Goldmann was a Romanian-born French Marxist philosopher and literary theorist and the principal architect of what he called genetic structuralism. After early studies in ...

• Luis Villoro 1922 – 2014 · Mexican

  Luis Villoro Toranzo was a Mexican philosopher of Spanish origin and one of the leading voices of twentieth-century Mexican thought. After studies in Mexico and Paris under Gast...

• Mahmoud Mohamed Taha 1909 – 1985 · Sudanese

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese Islamic reformer, philosopher, and engineer, the founder of the Republican Brothers, a small but intellectually powerful movement that defend...

• Marcien Towa 1931 – 2014 · Cameroonian

  Marcien Towa was a Cameroonian philosopher and one of the sharpest African critics of ethnophilosophy in the twentieth century. After studies in Paris and Geneva, he taught for ...

• Maria Zambrano 1904 – 1991 · Spanish

  Maria Zambrano Alarcon was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and disciple of Jose Ortega y Gasset and one of the principal voices of twentieth-century Spanish-language thought. A...

• Mario Tronti 1931 – 2023 · Italian

  Mario Tronti was an Italian Marxist political philosopher, the founding theorist of operaismo or workerism, and a senator of the Italian Republic. His Workers and Capital revers...

• Maruyama Masao 1914 – 1996 · Japanese

  Maruyama Masao was the most influential Japanese political philosopher of the postwar period and a long-time professor at the University of Tokyo. His Studies in the Intellectua...

• 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...

• Maurice Blanchot 1907 – 2003 · French

  Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher whose work occupies a singular place in twentieth-century French thought. After early right-wing politic...

• Maurice Blondel 1861 – 1949 · French

  Maurice Blondel was a French Catholic philosopher and the principal architect of the philosophy of action. Long-time professor at Aix-en-Provence, he produced his foundational d...

• Miki Kiyoshi 1897 – 1945 · Japanese

  Miki Kiyoshi was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School and one of the most original Japanese interpreters of Marx, Heidegger, and Pascal. After studies under Nishida Kitaro...

• 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...

• Mogobe Ramose b. 1947 · South African

  Mogobe Ramose is a South African philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of South Africa, and the most influential systematic exponent of ubuntu philosophy in the post...

• Mohammed Abed al-Jabri 1935 – 2010 · Moroccan

  Mohammed Abed al-Jabri was a Moroccan philosopher, long associated with Mohammed V University in Rabat, and one of the most influential Arab thinkers of the late twentieth centu...

• Mordecai Kaplan 1881 – 1983 · Lithuanian-American

  Mordecai Kaplan was a Lithuanian-born American Jewish philosopher and rabbi, long associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the founder of Reconstructionis...

• Mou Zongsan 1909 – 1995 · Chinese

  Mou Zongsan was a Chinese philosopher and one of the principal representatives of the New Confucian movement of the twentieth century. After studies at Peking University and a l...

• 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...

• Nikolai Lossky 1870 – 1965 · Russian

  Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher and the principal architect of the metaphysical position he called intuitivism. A professor at St. Peters...

• Nishida Kitaro 1870 – 1945 · Japanese

  Nishida Kitaro was a Japanese philosopher and the founder of the Kyoto School. Bringing the resources of European philosophy, particularly German idealism and phenomenology, int...

• 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 ...

• Paulin Hountondji 1942 – 2024 · Beninese

  Paulin Jidenu Hountondji was a Beninese philosopher and a leading critic of what he called ethnophilosophy, the projection of collective worldviews onto the discipline of philos...

• Pavel Florensky 1882 – 1937 · Russian

  Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox theologian, mathematician, electrical engineer, art historian, and philosopher of religion, often called the Russian Leonar...

• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe 1940 – 2007 · French

  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher, literary theorist, and translator, a long-time colleague of Jean-Luc Nancy at the University of Strasbourg, and a major interp...

• Pierre Klossowski 1905 – 2001 · French

  Pierre Klossowski was a French philosopher, novelist, translator, and visual artist, the elder brother of the painter Balthus, and one of the strangest figures of mid-twentieth-...

• Placide Tempels 1906 – 1977 · Belgian

  Placide Frans Tempels was a Belgian Franciscan missionary in the Belgian Congo and the author of Bantu Philosophy, published in 1945, the first book to argue at length that the ...

• Reinhart Koselleck 1923 – 2006 · German

  Reinhart Koselleck was a German historian and philosopher and the principal architect of the school of conceptual history known as Begriffsgeschichte. After studies under Karl L...

• 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. ...

• 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...

• Robert Spaemann 1927 – 2018 · German

  Robert Spaemann was a German Catholic philosopher, professor at the University of Munich, and one of the most influential conservative voices in late-twentieth-century German ph...

• Rodolfo Kusch 1922 – 1979 · Argentine

  Rodolfo Kusch was an Argentine philosopher and anthropologist whose work was a sustained attempt to think philosophically from within the Andean and indigenous American world. I...

• Roman Ingarden 1893 – 1970 · Polish

  Roman Ingarden was a Polish philosopher and a student of Edmund Husserl, the most distinguished representative of phenomenology in twentieth-century Polish philosophy. He broke ...

• Romano Guardini 1885 – 1968 · Italian-German

  Romano Guardini was an Italian-born German Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian and one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He held chair...

• Rosi Braidotti b. 1954 · Italian-Australian

  Rosi Braidotti is an Italian-Australian philosopher, distinguished university professor at Utrecht University, and one of the leading figures of contemporary feminist philosophy...

• 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...

• 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...

• Sadiq Jalal al-Azm 1934 – 2016 · Syrian

  Sadiq Jalal al-Azm was a Syrian philosopher, professor at the University of Damascus and at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and one of the most uncompromising secula...

• Semyon Frank 1877 – 1950 · Russian

  Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher and one of the foremost metaphysicians of the Russian religious renaissance of the early twentieth century...

• Sergei Bulgakov 1871 – 1944 · Russian

  Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, economist, and religious philosopher. After early career as a Marxist economist, he turned to religious philosophy...

• Seyla Benhabib b. 1950 · Turkish-American

  Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-American political philosopher long associated with Yale University, whose work brings together critical theory, feminist political philosophy, and t...

• Souleymane Bachir Diagne b. 1955 · Senegalese

  Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Senegalese philosopher, professor at Columbia University, and one of the leading living voices on African philosophy, Islamic thought, and translat...

• Stanislaw Lesniewski 1886 – 1939 · Polish

  Stanislaw Lesniewski was a Polish logician, philosopher of mathematics, and the most uncompromising formalist of the Lwow-Warsaw school. After studies under Kazimierz Twardowski...

• 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,...

• 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...

• Tadeusz Kotarbinski 1886 – 1981 · Polish

  Tadeusz Marian Kotarbinski was a Polish philosopher and logician and one of the leading figures of the Lwow-Warsaw school of analytic philosophy. Long-time professor at Warsaw, ...

• Tanabe Hajime 1885 – 1962 · Japanese

  Tanabe Hajime was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School and the principal successor of Nishida Kitaro at Kyoto Imperial University. After early studies in philosophy of mat...

• Tang Junyi 1909 – 1978 · Chinese

  Tang Junyi was a Chinese philosopher and one of the most important figures of the second generation of New Confucianism. After fleeing mainland China in 1949 he co-founded New A...

• 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...

• Tu Weiming b. 1940 · Chinese-American

  Tu Weiming is a Chinese-American philosopher, professor at Peking University and emeritus professor at Harvard, and the most influential exponent of New Confucianism in the late...

• Valentin Mudimbe 1941 – 2024 · Congolese

  Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was a Congolese philosopher, philologist, and novelist, and one of the most incisive theorists of the colonial production of knowledge about Africa. Traine...

• Vladimir Bibikhin 1938 – 2004 · Russian

  Vladimir Bibikhin was a Russian philosopher and translator, the most important interpreter of Heidegger in the Russian language, and a long-time professor at the Lomonosov Mosco...

• Vladimir Jankelevitch 1903 – 1985 · French

  Vladimir Jankelevitch was a French moral philosopher and musicologist, born in Bourges to Russian Jewish parents. After early studies under Bergson, he taught for thirty years a...

• Walter Mignolo b. 1941 · Argentine-American

  Walter Mignolo is an Argentine-American semiotician and decolonial theorist, professor at Duke University, and one of the founding figures of the Latin American decolonial schoo...

• Watsuji Tetsuro 1889 – 1960 · Japanese

  Watsuji Tetsuro was a Japanese moral philosopher and cultural historian and one of the principal figures of twentieth-century Japanese thought. Drawing on Heidegger, Kant, and t...

• 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...

• Will Kymlicka b. 1962 · Canadian

  Will Kymlicka is a Canadian political philosopher, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, and one of the most influential contemporary theorists of...

• 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...

• Xavier Zubiri 1898 – 1983 · Spanish

  Xavier Zubiri was a Spanish Catholic philosopher and one of the most original Spanish-language metaphysicians of the twentieth century. After studies under Husserl, Heidegger, a...

• Xiong Shili 1885 – 1968 · Chinese

  Xiong Shili was a Chinese philosopher and one of the founders of the New Confucian movement of the twentieth century. After early training in classical studies and Yogacara Budd...

• 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...