Peter Singer
1946 - Present (76 years)
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.
Go to ProfileJürgen Habermas
1929 - Present (93 years)
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.
Go to ProfileAlasdair MacIntyre
1929 - Present (93 years)
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.
Go to ProfileDaniel Dennett
1942 - Present (80 years)
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.
Go to ProfileJohn Searle
1932 - Present (90 years)
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher. 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. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, he began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959.
Go to ProfileAlain Badiou
1937 - Present (85 years)
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.
Go to ProfileRichard Rorty
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
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.
Go to ProfileSlavoj Žižek
1949 - Present (73 years)
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, political theory, cultural studies, art criticism, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism and theology.
Go to ProfileSaul Kripke
1940 - Present (82 years)
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.
Go to ProfileAlvin Plantinga
1932 - Present (90 years)
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.
Go to ProfileWilliam Lane Craig
1949 - Present (73 years)
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.
Go to ProfileJacques Derrida
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Jacques Derrida , born in Algeria, was a 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.
Go to ProfileGraham Harman
1968 - Present (54 years)
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.
Go to ProfileTimothy Williamson
1955 - Present (67 years)
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.
Go to ProfileHilary Putnam
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
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.
Go to ProfileRay Brassier
1965 - Present (57 years)
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.
Go to ProfileRichard Dawkins
1941 - Present (81 years)
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, M.A., and Ph.D.
Go to ProfileJudith Butler
1956 - Present (66 years)
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.
Go to ProfileNick Bostrom
1973 - Present (49 years)
Nick Bostrom is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, 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.
Go to ProfileNoam Chomsky
1928 - Present (94 years)
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.
Go to ProfileThomas Nagel
1937 - Present (85 years)
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.
Go to ProfileDerek Parfit
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
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.
Go to ProfileMichael Huemer
1969 - Present (53 years)
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.
Go to ProfileMichael Dummett
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
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
Go to ProfileJohn McDowell
1942 - Present (80 years)
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 and the British Academy.
Go to ProfileMartha Nussbaum
1947 - Present (75 years)
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.
Go to ProfileQuentin Meillassoux
1967 - Present (55 years)
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...
Go to ProfileNicholas Rescher
1928 - Present (94 years)
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.
Go to ProfileBruno Latour
1947 - Present (75 years)
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.
Go to ProfileSimon Critchley
1960 - Present (62 years)
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.
Go to ProfileFredric Jameson
1934 - Present (88 years)
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 .
Go to ProfileEdward Feser
1968 - Present (54 years)
Edward C. Feser is an American philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California.Education Feser holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton. His thesis is titled "Russell, Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem". He also went to Crespi High School in California.
Go to ProfileIain Hamilton Grant
1950 - Present (72 years)
Iain Hamilton Grant is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German Idealism , and both contemporary and historical philosophy of nature. He is often associated with the recent philosophical current known as Speculative Realism.
Go to ProfileAlberto Toscano
1977 - Present (45 years)
Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
Go to ProfileTom Regan
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
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.
Go to ProfileSusan Haack
1945 - Present (77 years)
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.
Go to ProfileDavid Chalmers
1966 - Present (56 years)
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 Bloomingt...
Go to ProfileHans-Hermann Hoppe
1949 - Present (73 years)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American paleolibertarian and anarcho-capitalist political theorist. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas , Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
Go to ProfileCharles Taylor
1931 - Present (91 years)
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.
Go to ProfileAnthony Kenny
1931 - Present (91 years)
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is an English 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.
Go to ProfileNicholas Wolterstorff
1932 - Present (90 years)
Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently Noah Porter Professor Emeritus Philosophical Theology at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on aesthetics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of education. In Faith and Rationality, Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, and William Alston developed and expanded upon a view of religious epistemology that has come to be known as Reformed epistemology. He also helped to establish the jou...
Go to ProfileWilliam MacAskill
1987 - Present (35 years)
William MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.
Go to ProfileRoderick Long
1964 - Present (58 years)
Currently holding the title of Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, Roderick Long is known for his work in left-libertarianism. Long earned a BA in philosophy at Harvard University in 1985 and a PhD in 1992. Long has also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and the Institute for Humane Studies. Outside of teaching, Long is an editor with the Journal of Libertarian Studies and president of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society.
Go to ProfileScott Soames
1945 - Present (77 years)
Scott Soames is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. Soames studied philosophy as an undergrad at Stanford University, and as a graduate student at MIT, earning his PhD in 1976. Prior to his current position, Soames taught at institutions including Yale University and Princeton University.
Go to ProfilePeter Geach
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Peter Thomas Geach was an English philosopher who was Professor of Logic at the University of Leeds. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and the theory of identity.
Go to ProfileMario Bunge
1919 - 2020 (101 years)
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, and phenomenological philosophy, postmodernism, and feminist philosophy. He was popularly known for his opinions against pseudoscience.
Go to ProfileMichel Weber
1963 - Present (59 years)
Michel Weber is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international scholarly societies and publication projects devoted to Whitehead and the global relevance of process philosophy.
Go to ProfileRonald Dworkin
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
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
Go to ProfileGraham Priest
1948 - Present (74 years)
Graham Priest is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Priest received his undergraduate education at St. John’s College, Cambridge (UK) as well as the London School of Economics. He received a Doctor of Literature (DLitt) from the University of Melbourne. (A DLitt is an academic award roughly equivalent to a Ph.D.)
Go to ProfileBernard Stiegler
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation , which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of "politicised researchers" across multiple disciplines. His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
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