Philosophers
Guy Debord
Guy Debord was a French Marxist theorist, filmmaker, and founder of the Situationist International whose concept of the 'spectacle' provided one of the most penetrating …
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty was an American philosopher who mounted one of the most influential critiques of the Western philosophical tradition from within analytic philosophy itself. Abandoning …
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher whose work on selfhood, modernity, secularism, and multiculturalism has made him one of the most important political and moral …
Kwasi Wiredu
Kwasi Wiredu was Ghana's most eminent analytical philosopher and one of the most internationally influential figures in African philosophy, whose project of 'conceptual decolonization' argued …
Desmond Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was a South African Anglican archbishop, theologian, and philosopher whose elaboration of *ubuntu* — the Nguni Bantu philosophical principle that personhood is …
John Searle
John Searle is an American philosopher whose work in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind has shaped debates about consciousness, intentionality, speech acts, …
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher whose capability approach to welfare and development, social choice theory, and analyses of famine, inequality, and justice …
Rubem Alves
Rubem Alves was a Brazilian Protestant theologian, philosopher, and educator who pioneered liberation theology in Latin America and developed the distinctive concept of *theopoetics* — …
Enrique Dussel
Enrique Dussel was an Argentine-Mexican philosopher whose *Philosophy of Liberation* (1977) established him as the founding architect of one of the most ambitious philosophical projects …
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic and philosopher whose *Orientalism* (1978) inaugurated postcolonial studies as a discipline and provided the most influential account …
Lélia Gonzalez
Lélia Gonzalez was a Brazilian philosopher, anthropologist, and political activist whose concepts of *amefricanidade* (Americanness rooted in African diasporic culture) and *pretuguês* (the African-inflected Portuguese …
Ernesto Laclau
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist whose *Hegemony and Socialist Strategy* (1985, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe) fundamentally transformed post-Marxist political philosophy by demonstrating that …
Gianni Vattimo
Gianni Vattimo was an Italian philosopher and politician whose concept of 'weak thought' (pensiero debole) became one of the most influential philosophical positions in postmodern …
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, mathematician, and novelist whose system of thought — centered on the concepts of being, event, truth, and subject — …
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher whose work on consciousness, subjectivity, moral philosophy, and the limits of reductionism has made him one of the most …
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher whose *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* provided the most rigorous and influential philosophical defense of libertarianism in the twentieth …
Leonardo Boff
Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian Franciscan theologian and philosopher who was one of the principal architects of liberation theology in Latin America and has subsequently …
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan novelist, playwright, and cultural theorist whose work constitutes one of the most sustained and intellectually rigorous critiques of linguistic …
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke was an American philosopher and logician whose work on modal logic, naming, necessity, and the philosophy of mind transformed analytic philosophy. His *Naming …
David Lewis
David Lewis was an American-Australian philosopher widely regarded as one of the greatest analytic metaphysicians of the twentieth century. His modal realism — the thesis …
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, literary critic, and novelist whose work on semiotics, abjection, intertextuality, and the relationship between language and the body …
Marilena Chaui
Marilena Chaui is Brazil's most prominent living philosopher, whose work spans Spinoza scholarship of international standing, an original theory of Brazilian social formation as an …
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose work on sovereignty, biopolitics, and the state of exception has become indispensable to contemporary political theory. Drawing on …
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist whose work on consciousness, intentionality, free will, and evolution made him one of the most influential …