50 Living Philosophers Part 2
18John Haldane
John Haldane studied art before pursuing philosophy, earning a B.A. in fine art in 1975 from the Wimbledon School of Art in London, before going on earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of London in. 1984. Haldane is currently a University Professor at the University of St. Andrews, holds the tile of J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at Baylor University, and is the current chairman of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the U.K. Haldane is not just a notable analytical philosopher, but is recognizable in the mainstream; he has published articles in art magazines, and contributed to numerous television programs. Haldane is a catholic, he and is a papal advisor to the Vatican.
Haldane is most notable for his work on Thomas Aquinas. Haldane has coined the term “Analytical Thomism” to describe the philosophical movement he has spearheaded, which has been influential in re-popularizing the ideas of Aquinas in contemporary philosophy. Analytical Thomism seeks to merge the ideas of contemporary analytical philosophy with the ideas of 13th century thinker (and saint) Thomas Aquinas. Through his work, Haldane has been influential in developing a space for Catholic philosophy in the modern analytical landscape.
Web resource: John Haldane’s Home Page.
19Graham Harman
Graham Harman received his Ph.D. at DePaul University in Chicago in 1999, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Harman’s work has primarily focused on metaphysics and ontology, and he has been influential as a key figure in speculative realism and the development of object oriented ontology. Harman’s goal in philosophy has been to reject anthropocentric philosophical views in favor of a metaphysical realist approach. In his first and major work, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002), and in other works since, he has used Martin Heidegger’s concept of “tool-analysis” to legitimately examine the autonomous existence of objects, removed from their relationships with humans, resulting in the term “tool-being,” which gives the book its namesake. In his view, everything is an object (human, animal, rock, city, etc.), existing on a level ontological and metaphysical plane. Harman’s philosophy is primarily concerned with understanding objects in the world as things-in-themselves, without allusion to anthropocentric qualities of being.
Web resource: Graham Harman’s Home Page.
20John Hawthorne
John Hawthorne earned his Ph.D. from Syracuse University and from 2006 to 2015 was the Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Currently he holds the title of Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Hawthorne’s work primarily focuses on metaphysics and epistemology, and his most influential book on the subjects is Metaphysical Essays (2006). His philosophical views present a kind of pragmatism, as he argues against epistemic contextualism; the meaning of the word “know” does not change in regards to context of the truth statement expressing what is known. However, Hawthorne grants that this is separate from whether the subject can be said to have knowledge, which depends on the subject’s own context.
Web resource: John Hawthorne’s Home Page.
21John Heil
John Heil is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, and holds the title of Honorary Research Associate at Monash University. Heil’s work combines metaphysics with philosophy of mind, using each realm as a way of understanding the other. In his book The Universe as we Find It (2012), Heil considers how our notions of causation and truth making contribute to our ontological understanding of the world, and pursues the application of this ontology to contemporary philosophical problems.
Heil is most influential as an educator in philosophy.He is probably better known for his book Philosophy of Mind: a Contemporary Introduction (first ed. 1998), which seeks to provide a simple, broad introduction to the area of contemporary philosophy of mind for both students of philosophy, and interested readers in the general public.
Web resource: John Heil’s Home Page.
22Ingvar Johansson
Ingvar Johansson earned his Ph.D. in 1973 at the University of Gothenburg and holds the title of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Ume? University in Sweden. Johansson primarily works in the area of ontology, and is an epistemological fallibilist. In his book Ontological Investigations: An Inquiry into the Categories of Nature, Man, and Society (1989) Johansson has worked toward developing a modern realist version of Aristotle’s theory of categories, in order to update Aristotle’s ontology and for the theory to be made compatible with modern science. More recently, Johannson has been focused on applied ontology in the area of medical information science, working with the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science at Saarland University.
Web resource: Ingvar Johansson’s Home Page.
23Jaegwon Kim
Korean American philosopher Jaegwon Kim earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1962 and holds the title of Professor Emeritus from Brown University. His research is focused in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics, and he has been influential in his work on mental causation ,the mind-body problem, and supervenience. Kim is known for rejecting Cartesian metaphysics, though he does argue for a kind of dualism. Though he as argued both for and against a physcialist and non-physicalist account of mental states,Kim’s current dualism, he admits, is more on the side of physicalism. He holds that while some mental states (intentional mental states, such as beliefs and desires) can be reduced to physical sources in the brain, other mental states, (phenomenal mental states, such as sensations) cannot be reduced to physical sources, and are epiphenomenal.
Web resource: Jaegwon Kim’s Home Page.
24Christine Korsgaard
Christine Korsgaard received her Ph.D. from Harvard and currently holds the title of Arthur Kindsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. Korsgaard is primarily interested in moral philosophy and how it relates to metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of identity, and issues of normativity. Best known for her defense of Kantian moral philosophy in The Sources of Normativity (1992), Korsgaard sought to justify, not just explain, the notion that people have moral obligations to one another. To do this, she surveyed several major arguments about moral obligation, all of which call for the necessity of normative entities in determining moral obligation, finding that Immanuel Kant and contemporary Kantians offer the strongest approach to the justification of moral obligation.
Korsgaard argues that the normativity of moral obligation is self-imposed, and is justified through our establishing a kind of self-authority through our autonomy. If we take anything to be of value, then, in Korsgaard’s view, we have to acknowledge that we have moral obligations, implied through us finding value in those things, which we must maintain in order to be consistent with our autonomy, the source of our moral obligation. Korsgaard has been influential in defending and reestablishing the significance of the Kantian approach in contemporary moral philosophy.
Web resource: Christine Korsgaard’s Home Page.
25Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke was considered a prodigy as a child and, while still just a sophomore at Harvard, he taught a course in logic at MIT. In 1962 he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a B.A. in mathematics, his only non-honorary degree, and has received honorary degrees from the University of Omaha, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Haifa (Israel), and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Emeritus Professor at Princeton University.
Strongly embedded in the Analytic tradition, Kripke’s major contributions in philosophy are in the areas of logic (specifically modal logic), philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, set theory, and philosophy of mind. Naming and Necessity (1972), is perhaps his most significant work, based on transcriptions of his lectures at Princeton in 1970. In it, Kripke challenges and overturns Immanuel Kant’s theory on truth in propositions, arguing that some propositions are only knowable a posteriori, but are necessarily true, while others are knowable a priori, but are only contingently true. Through this notion, along with others, Kripke was able to turn the conventional understanding of truth, propositions, and logic on its head, significantly contributing to the decline of ordinary language philosophy, and the public understanding of the function of philosophy in the 20th century.
Web resource: Saul Kripke’s Home Page.
26Alasdair Macintyre
Alasdair Macintyre received Masters of Arts degrees from the University of Manchester and the University of Oxford, and currently holds the titles of Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics at London Metropolitan University, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Macintyre’s most work has been most influential in moral and political philosophy, but it also incorporates history of philosophy and theology. Arguing from history, Macintyre’s work is largely concerned with accounting for the decline of morality and moral rationality in society since the Enlightenment, and reclaiming the philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as a potential solution to what he sees associety’s current ills. This makes him an Aritstotelian-Thomist.
Macintyre is most well known for his influential book After Virtue (1981), which explores the above-mentioned ideas. The book represents a shift in his philosophical approach, as prior to that point he had primarily been a Marxist. In the book, Macintyre develops his critique of modern liberal capitalism and the society it has produced, arguing that because there is an absence of any coherent moral code, the sense of purpose and community has been lost for most people in modern society. Macintyre argues for a return to purpose and community through a return to virtue ethics.
Web resource: Alasdair Macintyre’s Home Page.
27John J McDermott
John McDermott received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Fordham University, in New York City, in 1959, and, though he is getting up in his years, is still teaching, holding the position of University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University. McDermott’s work is primarily focused on the philosophy ofculture, specifically American literature and philosophy, having written, compiled, or contributed to books on William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey, as well as being a former President of the William James Society. McDermott is most notable for, and has been most influential in exploring and advancing the ideas of James and Dewey in relation to American culture, as well as his examination of American culture through philosophy.
Web resource: John J McDermott’s Home Page.
28John McDowell
John McDowell is currently University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and though he has a lengthy bibliography covering metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, he is best known for his influential work in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His work has been significantly influenced by Wilfrid Sellars and Ludwig Wittgenstein, evident not just in his approach to philosophy of language, but to philosophy as a whole, understanding his own work as a type of philosophical quietism. In this view, McDowell sees philosophy as therapeutic, with its goal being to sooth and dissolve philosophical error, to find where philosophers have caused aggravation and to quiet it by discovering where things went wrong. Instead of pushing for radical new ideas, and increasingly complicated conceptions of meaning, knowledge, reality, etc., McDowell has adopted Wittgenstein’s position that we, basically, should leave everything as it is, such as in his book Mind and World (1994).
Web resource: John McDowell’s Home Page.
29Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley studied at Oxford, though did not earn a doctorate, but has received honorary doctorates from both Durham University and Newcastle University. Midgley has taught off and on through the years, her longest stint being at Newcastle University from 1962 to 1980, and did not publish her first book Beast and Man (1978) until she was 59 years old. Midgley is a moral philosopher who has also worked in the areas of philosophy of science and animal rights.
Midgley is a supporter of the “Gaia hypothesis” of Earth life, and is an opponent of scientism, reductionism, and materialism. Because of these views, Midgley is probably most famous for her criticism of and ongoing debate with Richard Dawkins. Though not self-identified as a Christian, and not a supporter of the theory of intelligent design, Midgley takes issue with what she identifies as “scientism,” characterized by the views of Richard Dawkins, which takes a materialistic approach toward explaining the phenomena of consciousness, emotion, and cognition. She argues these views are overly reductionist in scope.
30J.P. Moreland
J.P. Moreland’s background is spread across multiple disciplines, having earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Missouri, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of California, Riverside, and a Th.M in Theology from the Dallas Theological Seminary prior to earning his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California in 1985. He currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Miranda California and is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. Moreland’s work combines metaphysics, philosophy of mind, chemistry, and theology, and he is known for his defense of the existence of God and thesupernatural, as well as “old-Earth” creationism (a form of creationism that is somewhat more compatible with modern science than the “new-Earth” version). He is known for his many books, media appearances, and his involvement with the evangelical organization Campus Crusade for Christ.
Web resource: J.P Moreland’s Home Page.
31Timothy Morton
Timothy Morton received his doctorate in philosophy from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1993 and currently holds the title of Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Morton’s work is primarily focused in ontology and ecotheory, as well as literary theory and criticism. Morton has been most influential in the development of the focus of ontology in contemporary philosophy, and is most famous for his book Ecology Without Nature (2007), and his major role in the object-oriented ontology (OOO) movement. In Ecology Without Nature, Morton has argued that ecological writing typically views “nature” and “civilization” as two separate things, nature being something we emerged from, and have since become removed from. In response to this problem, Morton argues that we dissolvethis binary opposition and begin to understand nature as a social construct that is inseparable from civilization. In his work in the OOO movement, which focuses on the ontology of objects in the world apart from human ontology (the goal being to avoid anthropocentrism), Morton has coined the term “hyperobjects” as a way of describing objects that transcend attempts to pin them to any particular locality in time and space.
Web resource: Timothy Morton’s Home Page.
32Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel wants to know “What is Like to be a Bat?” (1974); or, at least, that is the question he asked when advancing the study of the philosophy of mind. Nagel was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and received a B.A. in philosophy from Cornell University, where he was introduced to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He went on to study under J.L. Austin, the famous philosopher of language, at Oxford, before earning a PhD. at Harvard in 1963.
Nagel might be most famous for his aforementioned essay, in which he refutes the materialist reductionist view of consciousness that dominated the field of philosophy of mind at the time, promoting a subjectivist approach. To simplify, what Nagel argues is that even though we may be able to objectively describe the physical processes that produce what we understand as consciousness, that does not enable us to describe consciousness itself, as consciousness is a subjective mental experience. We can study a bat, understand how its brain works, but say nothing objective about its consciousness; rather, we are limited to speaking about only our own consciousness, as we are limited to subjective experience. The thought experiment presented in the essay has been very influential in the debate about what we can and cannot claim when discussing the mind and consciousness.
More recently, Nagel has stirred up controversy in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012) by continuing to argue against reductionism, this time in the form of the Neo-Darwinist account of the emergence of life. Though not arguing from religion (he is an atheist) and not arguing for a theory of intelligent design, Nagel claims that the theory of natural selection alone cannot account for the existence of consciousness. Nagel is currently a Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.
Web resource: Thomas Nagel’s Home Page.
33Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1973 from the Institut de Philosophie in Strasbourg, studying under Paul Ricouer. He eventually became a Professor at the University of Strasbourg, and, though he is now retired, continues to add publication credits to his already lengthy bibliography. His approach is associated with continental philosophy and deconstructionism, and his work is primarily focused in ontology and literary criticism. Much of his early work focused on commenting on and interpreting the work of other major thinkers, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, and Martin Heidegger, but he is best known for his writings that apply deconstructionist thought to issues of freedom, existence, and community. His most influential work, The Inoperative Community (1986) presents and explores this focus, arguing that much of society’s problems result from designing society around pre-conceived definitions of what society should be, and failing to understand it for how it actually is.
Web resource: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Home Page.
34Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1975, and is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Working in the analytic school of philosophy, Nussbaum is has primarily focused on political philosophy, ethics (including animal rights), and feminism. She came from a background of East Coast high society (which she resents) and in her career has experienced no shortage of sexist discrimination, harassment, and resistance as she has entered and challenged the old boy’s club of philosophical academia, an institution about which Nussbaum has criticized Noam Chomsky for helping to maintain. On top of all of that, Nussbaum has been awarded 51 honorary degrees.
Much of Nussbaum’s work focuses on unequal freedom and opportunity for women, making her a notable feminist, and she has argued for a radical reconsideration of gender relations, roles and norms. Nussbaum has drawn on ancient Roman and Greek philosophy in order to make her arguments, such as in her books The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986) and Cultivating Humanity (1997). Somewhat due to this focus, Nussbaum testified in the Colorado bench trial for the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Romer v. Evans against the claim that ancient philosophy provides the state with “compelling interest” in resisting the passage of non-discrimination laws for LGBTQ people. More recently, Nussbaum has analyzed the role that disgust plays in laws concerning LGBTQ rights, and the debate of the issues, in her 2010 book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.
Web resource: Martha Nussbaum’s Home Page.
35David Oderberg
David Oderberg is an Australian philosopher based in Britain, who currently is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. Oderberg has worked in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion, but is perhaps best known for his particularly conservative moral philosophy. In his book influential Applied Ethics (2000), Oderberg argues against notable moral philosopher Peter Singer, and contemporary utilitarian and consequentialist approaches to moral philosophy.
Essentially, Oderberg’s moral philosophy centers on his notion of “innocence,” and from that he takes a hardline stance that intentionally ending an innocent life is always morally wrong. For Oderberg, a fetus is an innocent life, and abortion and euthanasia are equivalent to contract killing. However, Oderberg is in support of the state’s right to capital punishment as retribution, and in the concept of a “just war.” Animals, in Oderberg’s view, are not moral agents, and so have no rights that can be infringed upon.
Web resource: David Oderberg’s Home Page.