Most Famous Continental Philosophers

Continental philosophy is a broad term for several twentieth-century philosophical traditions developed primarily in continental Europe. It includes phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and critical theory. Continental philosophers tend to emphasize history, language, the social conditions of thought, and the limits of scientific rationalism. The category is largely defined by contrast with analytic philosophy, which is dominant in the English-speaking world. Major figures include Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida.

Philosophers in this tradition

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...
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...
Karl Marx 1818 – 1883 · German
Karl Marx was a 19th-century German philosopher, economist, historian, and revolutionary socialist whose work founded the tradition of thought that bears his name. With Friedric...
Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910 · Russian
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher whose two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are among the supreme achievements of world litera...
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...
Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881 · Scottish
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher and one of the most prominent Victorian moral voices. After early labors as the introducer of German Romantic ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
F. H. Bradley 1846 – 1924 · British
Francis Herbert Bradley was an English philosopher and the leading representative of British absolute idealism. A fellow of Merton College, Oxford, he wrote almost in solitude, ...
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...
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...
Ludwig Feuerbach 1804 – 1872 · German
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German anthropological philosopher and one of the most influential of the Young Hegelians. After training under Hegel at Berlin and a brief univer...
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...
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...
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 · German
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, classical philologist, and cultural critic. He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, declaring that ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895 · German
Friedrich Engels was a 19th-century German philosopher, social scientist, and revolutionary, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx and a co-founder of the tradition of thought t...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 · German
Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19th-century German philosopher best known for his metaphysical pessimism and his theory of the world as will and representation. The World as Will and...
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831 · German
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and the most influential systematic thinker of the German Idealist tradition. His Phenomenology of Spirit traces the devel...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834 · English
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, and philosopher and one of the central figures of English Romanticism. After early association with Wordsworth in t...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Ferdinand de Saussure 1857 – 1913 · Swiss
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician whose posthumously assembled Course in General Linguistics (1916) became the foundational text of structural linguisti...
Gabriel Tarde 1843 – 1904 · French
Jean-Gabriel de Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social philosopher, and the chief rival of Emile Durkheim in the foundation of French sociology. After two dec...
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 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 Poincare 1854 – 1912 · French
Jules Henri Poincare was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science, often described as the last universalist of mathematics. He made foundational...
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...
Hermann Cohen 1842 – 1918 · German
Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher and the founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Holding the chair of philosophy at Marburg for more than thirty years, he ...
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...
Johann Georg Hamann 1730 – 1788 · German
Johann Georg Hamann was a German philosopher of language and religion, often called the Magus of the North. A Konigsberg contemporary and lifelong interlocutor of Kant, he combi...
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...
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,...
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...
Max Stirner 1806 – 1856 · German
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who wrote under the pen name Max Stirner, was a German philosopher and the principal exponent of philosophical egoism. A regular at the Berlin circle of t...
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...
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...
Vladimir Solovyov 1853 – 1900 · Russian
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most important Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century and the founder of modern Russian...
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...
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...
Alexander Herzen 1812 – 1870 · Russian
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer, philosopher, and revolutionary, often called the father of Russian socialism. The illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, he was...
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...
Eduard von Hartmann 1842 – 1906 · German
Eduard von Hartmann was a German philosopher whose Philosophy of the Unconscious, published in 1869, became one of the most widely read philosophical books of the late nineteent...
Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881 · Russian
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist and essayist whose late masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, place him among ...
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...
Hippolyte Taine 1828 – 1893 · French
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher and the principal exponent of positivism in nineteenth-century French humanistic scholarship. Af...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Ernst Mach 1838 – 1916 · Austrian
Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher of science whose work helped to inaugurate twentieth-century philosophy of science. His Mechanics in Its Development subject...
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...
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...
John Caird 1820 – 1898 · Scottish
John Caird was a Scottish theologian, philosopher of religion, and Church of Scotland minister, elder brother of Edward Caird, and from 1873 principal of the University of Glasg...
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...
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...
Nikolai Fyodorov 1829 – 1903 · Russian
Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, librarian, and the founder of the movement of thought known as Russian cosmism. He worked for many dec...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Edward Caird 1835 – 1908 · Scottish
Edward Caird was a Scottish Hegelian philosopher, long-time professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and from 1893 master of Balliol College, Oxford, in succession to Benjamin ...
Ernest Renan 1823 – 1892 · French
Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Semitic philologist, historian, and philosopher of religion and one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of nineteenth...
Friedrich Schlegel 1772 – 1829 · German
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German philosopher, literary critic, and one of the central figures of early Romanticism. With his brother August Wilhelm he founded the At...
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...
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...
Victor Cousin 1792 – 1867 · French
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher and statesman and the dominant figure of academic philosophy in nineteenth-century France. As Minister of Public Instruction in the early ...
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 ...
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...
Lou Andreas-Salome 1861 – 1937 · Russian-German
Lou Andreas-Salome was a Russian-born German writer, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, whose intimate intellectual companionship with Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Rainer Maria R...
Novalis 1772 – 1801 · German
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, who published under the pen name Novalis, was a German poet, mystic, and philosopher of early Romanticism. Trained in law and mi...
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...
Wilhelm Wundt 1832 – 1920 · German
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher and the principal founder of experimental psychology. In 1879 he opened the first formal labora...
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...
Emile Boutroux 1845 – 1921 · French
Emile Boutroux was a French philosopher whose work in the philosophy of science and religion shaped a generation of French and American thinkers, including his student Henri Ber...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776 – 1841 · German
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist, and educational theorist, and the principal opponent of post-Kantian idealism in the first half of the nineteent...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Pyotr Chaadaev 1794 – 1856 · Russian
Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev was a Russian philosopher and the catalyst of nineteenth-century Russian self-questioning. A decorated officer in the Napoleonic Wars who left militar...
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...
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 ...
Franz Brentano 1838 – 1917 · German-Austrian
Franz Brentano was a German-Austrian philosopher, a former Catholic priest, and the teacher of Husserl, Meinong, Stumpf, Twardowski, and many other founders of twentieth-century...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Bruno Bauer 1809 – 1882 · German
Bruno Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher, and historian of the early Christian church and one of the leading figures of the Young Hegelian movement in the 1830s and 1840...
David Strauss 1808 – 1874 · German
David Friedrich Strauss was a German Protestant theologian, philosopher, and biographer and one of the most controversial religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. After stu...
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...
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...
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....
Maine de Biran 1766 – 1824 · French
Marie-Francois-Pierre Gontier de Biran, known as Maine de Biran, was a French philosopher and statesman, sometimes called the founder of French spiritualism. After service in th...
Pierre Leroux 1797 – 1871 · French
Pierre-Henri Leroux was a French philosopher, journalist, and one of the founders of nineteenth-century French socialism. Often credited with introducing the word socialisme int...
T. H. Green 1836 – 1882 · English
Thomas Hill Green was an English philosopher, social reformer, and tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, who shaped a generation of British political and ethical thinking. Drawing o...
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 ...
Alexei Khomyakov 1804 – 1860 · Russian
Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, poet, and the principal founder of the Slavophile movement. A landowner who freed his serfs long before the imper...
Alexius Meinong 1853 – 1920 · Austrian
Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a student of Franz Brentano, and the founder of the Graz school of object theory. Drawing on Brentano's thesis of intentionality, he...
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...
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...
Antonio Rosmini 1797 – 1855 · Italian
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was an Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, and the founder of the Institute of Charity. His many works, including the New Essay on the Origin of Ideas,...
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 ...
August Cieszkowski 1814 – 1894 · Polish
Count August Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist, and political reformer and one of the most original of the Young Hegelians of the 1830s and 1840s. His Prolegomena ...
Bernard Bosanquet 1848 – 1923 · British
Bernard Bosanquet was a British philosopher and one of the central figures of British absolute idealism, alongside F. H. Bradley. He produced major works in logic, aesthetics, s...
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...
Borden Parker Bowne 1847 – 1910 · American
Borden Parker Bowne was an American philosopher and Methodist theologian and the founder of Boston Personalism, the most distinctively American school of idealist personalist ph...
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...
Carl Stumpf 1848 – 1936 · German
Carl Stumpf was a German philosopher, psychologist, and musicologist who taught for many years at Berlin and shaped a generation of phenomenological thought. A student of Brenta...
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 Renouvier 1815 – 1903 · French
Charles Renouvier was a French neo-Kantian philosopher and the founder of what he called neo-criticism. Working largely outside the academy, he produced a vast philosophical sys...
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 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...
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...
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg 1802 – 1872 · German
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy and the leading Aristotelian critic of Hegelian idealism in the second quarter of the nineteen...
Friedrich Albert Lange 1828 – 1875 · German
Friedrich Albert Lange was a German neo-Kantian philosopher and social theorist and the author of the most influential nineteenth-century critique of materialism. Trained at Bon...
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...
Gustav Fechner 1801 – 1887 · German
Gustav Theodor Fechner was a German experimental psychologist, philosopher, and the principal founder of psychophysics, the systematic study of the relations between physical st...
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...
Heinrich Rickert 1863 – 1936 · German
Heinrich Rickert was a German neo-Kantian philosopher of the Baden school and, with Wilhelm Windelband, the principal theorist of the distinction between the natural sciences an...
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...
Hermann Lotze 1817 – 1881 · German
Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and physician whose work bridged the late idealist and the natural-scientific cultures of nineteenth-century Germany. Trained in bo...
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-...
Ivan Kireevsky 1806 – 1856 · Russian
Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky was a Russian philosopher and literary critic and, with Alexei Khomyakov, one of the founding figures of the Slavophile movement. After early work as ...
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...
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...
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...
Konstantin Leontiev 1831 – 1891 · Russian
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev was a Russian philosopher of culture, novelist, and former diplomat in the Ottoman Empire and one of the most uncompromising conservative voices...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Nikolai Chernyshevsky 1828 – 1889 · Russian
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, and novelist and the most influential radical Russian thinker of the 1850s and 1...
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...
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-...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Wilhelm Dilthey 1833 – 1911 · German
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German philosopher and historian who devoted his career to the foundations of the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften, against the encroachment of na...
Wilhelm Windelband 1848 – 1915 · German
Wilhelm Windelband was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy and the founder, with Heinrich Rickert, of the Southwest German School of neo-Kantianism. Holding chairs ...
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...