50 Living Philosophers Part 1
When we hear the word “philosopher,” we tend to think of Ancient Greeks like Socrates or Plato, or perhaps the Frenchman René Descartes, or maybe infamous Germans like Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche. Influential philosophers thus seem to populate the past. But are there any important philosophers living in the world today?
We can thank philosophers, both past and present, for a number of our deeply held beliefs. These beliefs dictate how we understand and involve ourselves in the world. For millennia, philosophers have attempted to shape our beliefs, usually behind the scenes, and their influence is present in many of our existing practices, institutions, and basic assumptions about ourselves and the world we think we know.
Contemporary philosophers are enormously influential right now. Take Princeton’s Peter Singer and his work on animal ethics. How society sees its responsibilities to nonhuman others owes much to Singer. Though usually not household names, contemporary philosophers have radically altered the way we think about all sorts of things — from the nature of God to the role of race in democracy.
Philosophy, one of the oldest areas of intellectual endeavor, is as significant today as ever. This list collects together the 50 most influential philosophers working, thinking, writing, and teaching in the world today. Note that this list is not a ranking — the philosophers are presented alphabetically.
1Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in London, grew up in Ghana, received his Ph.D. from Clare College, Cambridge, and currently is a Professor with the NYU Department of Philosophy and the NYU school of Law. Much of his focus is in political theory and moral philosophy, and he is a leading name in race and identity studies. His early work was in the philosophy of language, and its influence carries into his later, more significant work in political and moral theory.
In his books Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996) and The Ethics of Identity (2005), Appiah has approached the notion of “biological race” as conceptually problematic, and argues that such notions of group identity like race, religion, gender, and sexuality harm the individual by oversimplifying their identity and constraining their freedom. In keeping with this line of argument, Appiah has been critical of what he identifies as contemporary Afrocentrism, and has promoted a philosophy of cosmopolitanism that goes beyond nationality and citizenship, a message that he spreads through lectures given at universities worldwide.
Web resource: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Home Page.
2Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou studied at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the école Normale Supérieure in Paris, and is a key figure in French philosophy and Marxist and Communist thought in the last half-century. He holds the title of the René Descartes Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is the former Chair of Philosophy at the école Normale Supérieure, and a founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the Université de Paris VIII, along with such major names as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard. Badiou, who has always been known for being politically active and outspoken, was involved in militant leftist groups as a young man, such as the Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste, and is a founding member of the Unified Socialist Party in France. Badiou’s work combines mathematics, political theory, and ontology, to focus on issues of truth, being, and subject. Having studied under Louis Althusser, Badiou’s philosophical approach has been influenced by Althusserian Marxism, and the psychoanalysis of Jacque Lacan. His most famous work is Being and Event (1988), which presents a shift away from these initial influences, establishes and brings together many of his key ideas.
Web resource: Alain Badiou’s Home Page.
3Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn earned his Ph.D. from Churchill College in 1970, is retired as a Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, but still holds the title of Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a member of the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, former President of the Aristotelian Society, and Fellow of the British Academy. In philosophy, Blackburn’s work is primarily concerned with metaethics, arguing for a quasi-realist approach, arguing that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences project emotional attitudes as though they were real properties. This position is derived from his defense and application of neo-Humean views, displayed in such books as Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993). Blackburn has been influential as patron of the British Humanist Organization and mainstream figure of atheism (though he refers to himself as an “infidel”), and has been vocal about the need for the reduction of religious influence in politics and governmental issues.
Web resource: Simon Blackburn’s Home Page.
4Robert Brandom
Robert Brandom earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1977, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Brandom is a philosophical pragmatist, and works in the areas of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and logic. Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, and Wilfrid Sellars, Brandom has spent much of his work focusing on the relationship between the socially normative use of language and the meaning of linguistic items. Brandom has been most influential for his work in semantics, such as in his book Making it Explicit (1994). In this text, Brandom explores the role of inference in the attribution of meaning to linguistic expressions, arguing that the meaning of expressions is developed through what we can infer about that expression in relation to other expressions, about which our ability to do so is governed by the social norm usage of language.
Web resource: Robert Brandom’s Home Page.
5Tyler Burge
Tyler Burge earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1971, and is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He is primarily known for his work in philosophy of mind, but has also done work in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and history of philosophy. Burge has been most influential with his article “Individualism and Self-Knowledge” (1988) in which he argued for the theory in philosophy of mind of “anti-individualism.” Essentially, Burge has argued for a conception of the mind in which the contents of one’s own thoughts are not entirely the product of the individual, but are, to some extent, also the product of the environment. Significantly, Burge’s theory breaks with the Cartesian model of mind, while retaining some limited agreement, rather than completely rejecting the Cartesian model. This theory has been controversial, as his critics claim that it undermines one’s claims about their own thought contents.
Web resource: Tyler Burge’s Home Page.
6Judith Butler
Judith Butler earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1984, and currently holds the title of Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. She is primarily known as a major proponent of gender theory and criticism, and her work has been influential to many areas of critical thought, both in and out of philosophy, including ethics, political philosophy, feminist theory, queer theory, and literary theory. Butler has seen influence and sparked controversy as a globally vocal advocate of LGBTQ rights and as a critic the politics and actions of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
With many books published to her name, Butler is probably most famous for her 1990 work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Much of her work has been focused on developing the ideas of gender performativity and construction, which are significantly addressed in this text. Essentially, Butler argues that sex, gender, and sexuality are all culturally constructed normative frameworks, and as such, the individual uses their body in the performance of identifying with or against these norms. This book has been very influential in feminist and queer theory, as well as in political discourse of gender and identity issues.
Web resource: Judith Butler’s Home Page.
7Nancy Cartwright
Nancy Cartwright earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. She also holds the titles of Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, Fellow of the British Academy, Tsing Hua Honorary Distinguished Chair Professor at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and Visiting Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. She is a co-founder of the Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society at the University of Durham. Cartwright’s work is primarily focused in philosophy of science. Specifically, Cartwright has been influential because of her focus on the actual practice of science, rather than the abstract theorizing that is usually performed in the area of philosophy of science.
Web resource: Nancy Cartwright’s Home Page.
8David Chalmers
David Chalmers earned his Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science as a Rhodes Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington in 1993 under Douglas Hofstadter, and was also a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program under Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis. Currently Chalmers holds the title of Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University. Chalmers is both a philosopher and cognitive scientist who focuses his work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and their points of overlap with cognitive science. Chalmers identifies his philosophical view as “naturalistic dualism”, and is critical of physical reductionist explanations of mental experience, citing an “explanatory gap” between accounts of objective and subjective experience. Chalmers is best known for his influential formulation of the “hard problem” of consciousness, and his introduction of the “philosophical zombies” thought experiment, which he has used to argue the thesis that physical properties alone cannot account for cognition and sentience.
Also, for most of his career he looked like Dave Mustaine from Megadeth.
Web resource: David Chalmers’s Home Page.
9Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky may be the “father of modern linguistics,” and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, but his interests and influence extend into philosophy, cognitive science, history, logic, social criticism, and political activism. His work is widely cited (making him one of the most cited scholars in history), and he has encountered more than his fair share of controversy, both in academia, and in his public life. As a child, Chomsky took trips to New York City, where he found (and was encouraged to read) books that introduced him to ideas of resistance and anarchism. In 1945, at just 16 years old, Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, from where he would study linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and eventually earn a Ph.D., before being appointed to Harvard University’s Society of Fellows.
Chomsky’s work in linguistics challenged the school of thought that dominated linguistics at the time, structural linguistics, and helped establish the field as a natural science, by approaching the study of linguistics through the lens of cognitive science, such as in his book Syntactic Structures (1957). In the process, Chomsky developed the ideas of universal grammar, transformational grammar, and generative grammar, giving rise to the “linguistics wars” with his critics. Besides generating academic controversy, Chomsky is well known for his political views and publications, which are anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war, with his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1967) being a prime example. For his political activism, Chomsky has been arrested multiple times, and was even on President Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List.”
Chomsky is also featured in our article, “The 10 Most Controversial College Professors in the U.S.”
Web resource: Noam Chomsky’s Home Page.
10Andy Clark
Andy Clark earned his Ph.D. from the University of Stirling, and currently holds the titles of Professor of Philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Clark’s work is primarily focused in philosophy of mind, in particular how it relates to cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Clark’s views run counter to traditional models of cognition in that, rather than understanding cognition as a one-way flow of sensory phenomena, he argues that cognition takes a two-way route of sensory input, assessment, and prediction. These views have been applied in his criticism of the computational model of artificial intelligence.
Clark has perhaps been most influential in his development of the “extended mind” hypothesis, presented in the essay “The Extended Mind” (1998) that he co-authored with David Chalmers. In this hypothesis, building upon the aforementioned ideas, it is argued that the mind and the world form a kind of information feedback loop in which the mind is not just within the individual experiencing the world, but that it extends into the environment they are experiencing
Web resource: Andy Clark’s Home Page.
11Ulrich de Balbian
Sees philosophy as straight, correct thinking without fallacies and argumentation to sort out issues in thinking. He deals with the basics of the philosophical discourse namely metaphysics, ontology and epistemology as socio-cultural practices. He writes on many topis such as art, spirituality, theology, etc to illustrate this.
Web resource: Ulrich de Balbian
12Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford in 1965, and he is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is a cognitive scientist in addition to being a philosopher, and his work considers philosophy of mind and science in relation to the fields of cognitive science and evolutionary biology.
Though he has done significant work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, such as arguing for consciousness the product of the interaction between physical and cognitive processes in the brain in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett might be most well known for his criticism of religion. Dennett, an atheist and strong supporter of evolution (arguing for natural selection as an algorithmic process) has seen plenty of criticism and controversy from religious groups for his views, and has the unofficial title of one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism,” (self-imposed) along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Dennett has argued that the origin of morality can be found in evolution, and not from abstract sources.
Web resource: Daniel Dennett’s Home Page.
13Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Dreyfus earned all three of his degrees at Harvard University, culminating in his Ph.D. in 1964, and is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University. His work is primarily focused in phenomenology, and he has been influential as an interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus is considered a leading authority on the notoriously dense and confusing philosophy of Martin Heidegger, having written multiple books of commentary Heidegger’s work, such as Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (1990). Dreyfus’ work has been influential to other major contemporary philosophers, such as John Searle (also on this list) and Richard Rorty, and he has been a significant critic of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist phenomenology.
Dreyfus is also notable for his influential critique of Artificial Intelligence, dating back to his 1965 article Alchemy and AI, which draws on his phenomenological background to argue that AI research is problematic because of its reliance on four implausible assumptions: the biological, the psychological, the epistemological, and the ontological. His criticism is, basically, that these assumptions hinge on the notion of a context-free psychology, which he argued is an inherently contradictory idea. Rather than claim AI is impossible, however, Dreyfus argued there needs to be a serious consideration of the current research programs in place. In the 1960s, this was met with criticism and hostility, but his ideas developed influence and acceptance over the next few decades of research.
Web resource: Hubert Dreyfus’s Home Page.
14Edmund Gettier
Edmund L. Gettier is Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his work is focused in epistemology. Gettier stands out on this list because, unlike many of his counterparts, many of whom are best known for long, dense books, developed over the length of their careers, Gettier’s fame and influence in the philosophy game comes from a three-page long essay written at the beginning of his career (which, reportedly, he only wrote on a whim in order to pad his publication list). Though short, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” (1963) has been influential far beyond its diminutive page length, lays out a problem at the center of a long-running philosophical debate, and has likely been read by every philosophy undergraduate in most of the last century.
In the landmark essay, Gettier challenged the classic “justified true belief” (JTB) model of knowledge, which dates back to Plato. Gettier used two thought experiments to show that even if the three conditions of the JTB model are met by a claim (It is true; I believe it is true; I am justified in believing it is true), this does not necessarily constitute that the claim is knowledge. Because of this, Gettier argued that the JTB model is insufficient for accounting for knowledge, and we need a different conceptual approach to understand what knowledge is. This gave rise to what has been called the “Gettier Problem,” although the problem itself did not originate with him. It also gave rise to the foundationalism and coherentism debate as a response to this problem. Quitting while he was ahead, Gettier has since published nothing.
Web resource: Edmund Gettier’s Home Page.
15Allan Gibbard
As an undergraduate, Allan Gibbard studied mathematics and physics, before earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1971, and holds the position of Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gibbard’s primary focus in in metaethics, and has been influential in arguing for a contemporary form of non-cognitivism, in which ethical sentences cannot be true or false because they do not express propositions. This is opposed to the cognitivist view that claims ethical sentences are capable of being objectively true. Like Christine Korsgaard, Gibbard is concerned with normativity.
In his major book Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement (1990) Gibbard has argued for the significance of the role that feelings play in our development and understanding of moral norms. In his view, if we perceive someone’s actions as rational, then we are endorsing the actions, and so, accepting them and the norms that they represent and enforce. Feelings like acceptance, guilt, and resentment, then, significantly affect our sense of moral norms. Ethical statements cannot be objective, and so, neither are neither true nor false.
Web resource: Allan Gibbard’s Home Page.
16Susan Haack
Susan Haack received her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1972, and is currently a Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. Haack’s work can be primarily described as pragmatic philosophy, and she has written on logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of law, philosophy of science, feminism, and literature.
While her interests and writings range in many different areas of philosophical study, Haack is probably best known for her influential book Evidence and Inquiry (1993) in which she presented her epistemological theory of “foundherentism.” Through this idea, Haack to applied her pragmatic approach to epistemology in order to account for the justification of knowledge, avoiding the problem of infinite regress which foundationalism falls prey to, while also avoiding the problem of circularity that plagues coherentism. Much of her later work has been concerned with defending science and scientific inquiry against skepticism and faulty epistemologies, with religious doctrine being a primary obstacle.
Web resource: Susan Haack’s Home Page.
17Jürgen Habermas
In the late 1950s, Jürgen Habermas studied philosophy and sociology at the Institute for Social Research Frankfurt am Main, the “Frankfurt School,” under none other than Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. After some disagreements, Habermas finished his education studying political science at the University of Marburg under notable Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. Habermas would also teach at the Frankfurt school, retiring in 1994. Habermas works in the traditions of critical theory and pragmatism, and has been very influential to philosophy and sociology.
Habermas has placed a great deal of emphasis on the power of rational discourse. In what is perhaps his most important work, Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas expressed criticism of modern society for the development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism, and its demand for mass consumption. Habermas argued that with the development of modern industrial society since the start of the 19th century, democracy shifted from being participatory to representative, and the body of the public lost its voice in the democratic discourse, as public life became rationalized and quantified. With some controversy, Habermas has called for the need to shift from representative democracy to a deliberative one, in which discourse is made equal again among citizens and government.