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Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he analyzed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

Peter Singer is a well-known Australian moral philosopher, Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, and Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He studied at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. Peter Singer first arrived on the scene of international prominence with the publication of Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement in 1975. In this book, he makes a compelling case for eschewing the eating of animals for a life of veganism. His critical essay, “Famine, A...

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher mostly associated with the influential Frankurt School in Germany, part of the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt, and historically an important center for research on social theory and critical philosophy. Habermas, now 90, earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1954. Habermas is a famed philosopher who has taught a number of influential philosophers, including Hans Joas at the University of Chicago. Habermas is known for his work on communicative rationality, a position that place emphasis on rational...

Alasdair MacIntyre is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University. He is also Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and Permanent Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. MacIntyre received his early philosophical training at the University of Manchester and the University of Oxford. MacIntyre is widely considered one of the world’s top philosophers in ethics and political philosophy. His book, After Virtue, is a classic exp...

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter of which came to constitute the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge involves correct representation of a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation.

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, he began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959. He was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until 2019.

Alvin Plantinga currently holds the title of the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin University. Previously, Plantinga has taught at Wayne State University and the University of Notre Dame. Additionally, Plantinga was the president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division from 1981 to 1982. As an undergraduate, Plantinga studied at Jamestown College, Calvin College, and Harvard University. Plantinga went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Michigan, before transferring to Yale University in 1955 and earning his PhD there in 1958. Plantinga is o...

Currently appointed as the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University (and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies) Daniel Dennett is a philosopher concerned with questions of the mind and cognitive science, and is colloquially known as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.” As an undergraduate, Dennett studied at Wesleyan University and Harvard University before earning his PhD in philosophy at Oxford University in 1965. Whether discussing consciousness, perception, or free will, the philosophy of mind is central to Dennett’s work. In particular, Dennett is kno...

Saul Kripke currently boasts the title of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Unlike other philosophers on this list (and other notable academics in general) Kripke holds only a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, earned in 1962 at Harvard University. It is worth noting, however, that during his undergraduate studies Kripke taught a graduate-level logic course at MIT. He also holds numerous honorary degrees. Kripke has also taught at Harvard University, Rockefeller University, and Princeton University. Kripke’s influence is felt most in logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology.

John Bordley Rawls was an American moral and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one".

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London. He is also Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, and a Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University. He works in subjects including continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critique of political economy, political theory, cultural studies, art criticism, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism, and theology.

Alain Badiou is formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS), and is a founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII along with French philosophy luminaries Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou though associated with postmodern thinkers like Foucault maintains that his thought and work cannot be described adequately by postmodernism, though it is not also purely modern. He is a prominent advocate of a return to communism as a form of government. Badiou received his diploma from the École Normale Supérieure, essentially a master’s degree in Philosophy, on the topic of modern philosopher Spinoza.

Graham Harman is currently the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Prior to his current position, Harman taught at the American University in Cairo from 2000-2016, and also held positions at the University of Amsterdam, University of Turin, Yale University, and the European Graduate School. Harman studies philosophy as an undergraduate at St. John’s College, earning his BA in 1990, before earning his MA at Pennsylvania State University, and his PhD at DePaul University, finishing his studies in 1999. Harman is best known for his role in ...

William Lane Craig was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1949. He earned a B.A. from Wheaton College, and pursued graduate work at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the philosophy of religion. His earned his doctorate in 1977 at the University of Birmingham, England, with work on the cosmological argument for God’s existence under the supervision of John Hick. He pursued postdoctoral work under the direction of Wolfhart Pannenberg at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München in Germany, where he earned a doctorate in theology in 1984. Craig is currently research professor of philosophy at t...

Swedish-born British philosopher Timothy Williamson currently holds the title of the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and is a fellow of the New College at Oxford. Williamson has also taught at places including Trinity College Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, the Australian National University, the University of Canterbury, and the University of Michigan. Williamson completed his BA in mathematics and philosophy at Oxford in 1976, and his PhD in 1981. As an analytic philosopher, Williamson is best known for his work in philosophy of language and in epistemology. Williamson has advanced a position known as epistemicism, which focuses on vagueness in language.

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.

Judith Butler is the Maxine Ellio Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler earned a bachelor of arts in philosophy at Yale University in 1978, and her PhD at Yale in 1984. In addition to UC Berkeley, Butler has taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and the University of Amsterdam. Drawing on critical traditions including phenomenology, feminism, cultural criticism, and philosophy of language, much of Butler’s work focuses on issues of gender.

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first n...

Areas of Specialization: Actor Network Theory, Social Theory Bruno Latour is an anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tours. Soon after graduating, he became interested in anthropology, and set out on a study of race and decolonization in Ivory Coast. He is best known for his work, Nous n’avons jamais ete modernes: Essais d’anthropologie symetrique (translated: We Have Never Been Modern). This theme, of challenging methods and findings of scientific inquiry, is revisited in his later work, Pandora’s Hope. His work in Science, Technology and Modernity has been provocative, to say the least.

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations , which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice , in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology.

Currently holding the title of University Professor of Philosophy and Law, Emeritus at New York University, Thomas Nagel previously held positions at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University, among others. Nagel earned a BA in philosophy from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil in 1960 at the University of Oxford (as a Fulbright scholar, and studying under JL Austin, no less), and his PhD from Harvard University in 1963. Though primarily working in political philosophy and ethics throughout his career, Nagel achieved quite a bit of (ongoing) fame and notoriety in the rea...

John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a Fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.

Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of North London in 1995. He received his master’s degree in 1997 and in 2001 his Ph.D., both from the University of Warwick. Brassier is known for his work on philosophical realism, the view that an object we perceive is “really out there” and external to our perception, as opposed to an idealist view which holds that the object is known only in our minds, as a sense perception (or a concept). Brassier’s treatment of philosophical realism is known as “spe...

Areas of Specialization: Urban and Media Anthropology Richard Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and former University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science, but he is best known for his work in evolutionary biology. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a bachelor’s degree, MA, and PhD. Dawkins is a pioneer in the role of genes in evolution. His most well-known book, The Selfish Gene, is an examination of how genetics drive evolutionary change. He also coined the term meme in this book, to describe the behavioral equivalent of a gene. A m...

Noam Chomsky currently holds joint appointments at MIT as Institute Professor Emeritus, and the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor. Chomsky completed his university studies between the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The influence of Chomksy in both linguistics and political discourse cannot be overstated; regardless of what aspect of his work you are discussing, his name always perks a few ears. Depending on who is describing him, Chomsky is either one of the most important linguists in modern times, one of the most important political thinkers, or (most often) both. Chomsky began his career squarely in academia as a professor of linguistics at MIT.

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter of Frege, and made original contributions particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped to popularize.

Currently, Martha Nussbaum holds the position of Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Too influential to be confined to one department, Nussbaum is appointed to the faculty of both the philosophy department and the law school. As an undergraduate, Nussbaum spent two years at Wellesley College, before deciding to pursue theatre studies at New York University. After, Nussbaum completed her graduate studies and PhD at Harvard University. With roots in ancient philosophy and classics, Nussbaum is a significantly influential voice of feminism and liberalism.

Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Political Unconscious .

German-born Nicholas Rescher is a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the Chairman for the Center of Philosophy of Science. Rescher came to the United States as a child, where he would go on to earn a degree from Queens College (in mathematics) before earning a PhD in philosophy in 1951 at Princeton University, at only 22 years of age. Rescher taught at Princeton until 1961, when he changed to the University of Pittsburgh. Rescher’s influence can be appreciated merely by the volume of his bibliography; he claims authorial credit on over 100 books and 400 articles.

Meillassoux is a French philosopher who studied under Alain Badiou. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (or “the Sorbonne”). Meillassoux is perhaps best known for his 2006 book on philosophy, After Finitude. In it, he develops a position which has made him a notable and iconoclastic philosopher, as it departs radically from the mainstream in philosophy, often traced back to Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that our ideas about the world are “correlated” with ourselves, in the sense that we cannot understand the world apart from ourselves. By contrast, Meill...

Tom Regan was an American philosopher who specialized in animal rights theory. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, where he had taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.

Derek Antony Parfit was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, who was inspired by the ethics of Aristotle. She is credited with inventing the so-called trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.

Susan Haack is a British philosopher. She is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Her pragmatism follows that of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Mario Augusto Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles. He was an advocate of "exact philosophy" and a critic of existentialist, hermeneutical, phenomenological philosophy, and postmodernism. He was popularly known for his opinions against pseudoscience.

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method , on hermeneutics. Life Family and early life Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer , a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian. Gadamer resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and became more and more interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Geiese died of diabetes while Hans-Georg was four years ...

Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford. Floridi holds a number of other positions, including Director of the Digital Ethics Lab at OII. He is also Professorial Fellow at Executer College, Oxford, and Professor of Philosophy at Oxford. Floridi studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Rome University, where he received his degree. He later received a master’s and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Warwick. Though trained as a philosopher and logician, in his professional life Floridi has turned to iss...

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has defended ethical intuitionism, direct realism, libertarianism, veganism, and philosophical anarchism. Education and career Huemer graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1998 under the supervision of Peter D. Klein.

Mary Rosalind Hursthouse is a British-born New Zealand moral philosopher noted for her work on virtue ethics. Hursthouse is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. Biography Born in Bristol, England, in 1943, Hursthouse spent her childhood in New Zealand. Her aunt Mary studied philosophy and when her father asked her what that was all about, he could not understand her answer. Rosalind, 17 at the time, knew immediately that she wanted to study philosophy, too, and enrolled the next year.

David Chalmers serves currently as Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, as well as University Professor, Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science, and co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (with philosopher Ned Block) at New York University. One of the world’s most influential philosophers on the problem of consciousness, Chalmers has a degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia, and received his Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington, where he studied with noted AI researchers and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter.

Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to renowned philosopher H. L. A. Hart. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the ...

Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a "feminist and postmodernist". Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" .

Jan Hertrich-Woleński is a Polish philosopher specializing in the history of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his academic career at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he is currently professor emeritus. His main fields of research are logic, epistemology, and the history of philosophy in Poland.

Areas of Specialization: Superintelligence, Human Enhancement Ethics Nick Bostrom is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford, the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and a philosopher at Oxford. He has earned a B.A. from the University of Gothenburg, an M.A. from Stockholm University, an M.Sc. from King’s College of London, and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. Bostrom is best known for his work on superintelligence, human enhancement ethics, the anthropic principle and existential risk. He has also written two majo...

Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is a British philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in the style of analytic philosophy. He is one of the executors of Wittgenstein's literary estate. He is a former president of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Simon Critchley is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, a board member for the Onassis Foundation, and a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School. He earned his M.Phil at the University of Nice, and his Ph.D. at the University of Essex. A former member of a punk band, his research interests have encompassed many aspects of the human experience, including political theory, psychoanalysis, ethics, and more. His broad interests are reflected in his writing; he has written on topics as varied as pop culture, soccer, religion, and suicide. S...

Charles Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. He is known best for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and the philosophy of history and intellectual history. Taylor received a bachelor’s degree in History from McGill in 1953. As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Taylor took a first-class bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) from Oxford in 1961. Notably, his supervisor was Isaiah Berlin, the renowned British social and political theorist. Taylor is ...

François Laruelle is a French philosopher, formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle is notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. He currently directs an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.