50 Living Philosophers Part 3

36Derek Parfit

Derek Parfit was Born in Chengdu, China to two medical doctors who were teaching missionaries abroad, grew up wanting to become a poet (an idea he eventually discarded), earned an M.A. in modern history at the University of Oxford in 1964, and continued to study modern history on a fellowship, before finally abandoning the study for philosophy and becoming a Fellow of All Souls College. Parfit has taught at numerous universities around the world, but has been based out of the University of Oxford for the entirety of his career, and is an Emeritus Senior Research Professor at All Souls College. Parfit is best known for his book Reasons and Persons (1984) which focuses on the intersection of ethics, rationality, and personal identity, in relation to the passage of history, and the future.

Web resource: Derek Parfit’s Home Page.

37Graham Priest

As a student, Graham priest studied more mathematics than philosophy, and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1974 at the London School of Economics for a thesis that combined the philosophy of mathematics and logic. He holds the titles of Professor Emeritus at Melbourne University, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and is a former President of the Australasian Association for Logic and the Australasian Association of Philosophy. His work is primarily focused in logic, and he has been widely published with an estimated 240 papers to his name, in addition to six books. He is best known for his influential work on logical paradoxes, arguing that many major paradoxes hold a uniform solution, and for his defense of dialtheism, the idea that some statements can be both false and true simultaneously, making them “true contradictions.”

Web resource: Graham Priest’s Home Page.

38John Searle

John Searle received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1959, and is currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Searle’s work primarily addresses problems in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. Earlier in his career, Searle focused specifically on philosophy of language, particularly the work of J.L. Austin. In his book Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Langauge (1969) Searle developed what came to be known as speech-act theory, taking a very systematic approach to investigating the relationship between illocutionary acts and meaning; this would later lead to a major debate with Jacques Derrida.

Depending on what you read and where you study, Searle may be more notable for his influential work in philosophy of mind. In his 1980 paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs” Searle introduced his “Chinese Room” thought experiment, which has since been widely discussed and argued over. In it, Searle drew on the “Turing Test” (originated by Alan Turin) thought experiment, which seeks to show a machines ability to exhibit intelligent behavior, indistinguishable from a human. Instead, Searle used the Chinese Room thought experiment to refute what he referred to as “Strong A.I.” (used to represent functionalism and computationalism) to show that the human mind is more than just a quantifiable, information processing machine.

Web resource: John Searle’s Home Page.

39Peter Simons

Peter Simons earned his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in 1975, and holds the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, as well as begin an Honorary Professor at the University of Salzburg, a Fellow of the British Academy, President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy, and is the current Director of the Franz Brentano Foundation. His writing primarily focuses on metaphysics and ontology, as seen in his book Parts: A Study in Ontology (1985), and he is also interested in the history of Central European philosophy, discussed in his book Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski: Selected Essays (1992). Though he only has two books to his name, Simons has published over two hundred articles. In his work, Simons has been influential in his particular concern with the application of metaphysics and ontology to non-philosophical disciplines, especially in engineering.

Web resource: Peter Simons’s Home Page.

40Peter Singer

Peter Singer received an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Melbourne in 1969, and currently holds the titles of Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. Singer specializes in applied ethics, and is best known for his contemporary utilitarianism. Being a specialist in applied ethics, Singer has been influential not just through his books and articles, but through his actions. He is on the Advisory Boards of several global humanitarian organizations, such as Academics Stand Against Poverty, and Animal Charity Evaluators. Singer is a very popular moral philosopher, both in and out of academia, and because of his fame, influence, outspokenness and moral stance, Singer has garnered controversy and protest, especially among conservative groups.

One of Singer’s major works, and perhaps what he is best known for, is Practical Ethics (1980), in which he theorizes on the application of utilitarianism to contemporary problems. Singer evaluates how the individual interests of living beings should be weighed, concluding that they do not all garner equal treatment. The opposite of David Oderberg, Singer has argued in favor of abortion, on the grounds that the “right to life” is tied to an individual’s capacity to hold preferences (which include pain and pleasure) and a fetus cannot do this. Singer is a strong advocate of altruism, arguing that our goal should be to reduce suffering in the most effective way possible. Singer is also a major advocate of animal rights, and his book Animal Liberation (1975) has been very influential to the modern animal liberation movement.

Web resource: Peter Singer’s Home Page.

41Barry Smith

As an undergraduate, Barry Smith studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Oxford, before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1976. Currently, he holds the position of Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, and Neurology at the University of Buffalo in New York. As evidenced from his professorial titles, Smith occupies both the role of philosopher and scientist, blending the two areas of study through his dual focus on ontology and biomedical informatics. Smith has published articles in as many scientific publications has he has in philosophical publications, and his approach can be roughly described as applied ontology, as opposed to the very theoretical approach that is usually associated with ontology. Smith’s influence is notable outside of academia, such as his involvement with global health organizations in advancing biomedical informatics, and even with the U.S. Army and Air Force.

Web resource: Barry Smith’s Home Page.

42Ernest Sosa

Born in Cárdenas, Cuba, Ernest Sosa earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1964 and currently holds the title of Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Though he has written on metaphysics and philosophy of mind, Sosa is primarily an epistemologist. Sosa has been influential through his introduction of the notion of “virtue epistemology,” developed partly in response to the Gettier problem, which he discusses in his books such as Knowledge in Perspective (1991) and A Virtue Epistemology (2007).

Virtue epistemology represents a renewed philosophical interest in the concept of virtue, introducing intellectual virtues as a way to resolve the debate between foundationalism and coherentism. Finding problems with both schools of thought, Sosa put forth virtue epistemology, foregoing formulaic expressions that are designed to explain knowledge and instead applying virtue theory to human intellect, using virtue as the basis for assessing what is and is not knowledge. As virtue is based on the qualities of the individual, virtue ethics is person-based, rather than belief-based, and so, takes a more relativist approach to answering the Gettier problem.

Web resource: Ernest Sosa’s Home Page.

43Helen Steward

Helen Steward, who earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford in 1992, currently holds the title of Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the University of Leeds. In her work she is primarily concerned with free will, and combines philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of action, and ontology. Steward adopts what she describes as an “animalistic” approach to the study of free will, hypothesizing that if we understand humans as animals, ontologically, with needs based in our animal nature, then we can better understand and answer problems of free will. In her major book A Metaphysics for Freedom (2012), Steward develops this approach, arguing against a determinist theory of free will as both a problem for human and animal action. Through her ideas, Steward has been influential to the development of the posthumanist approach in philosophy and critical theory.

Web resource: Helen Steward’s Home Page.

44Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor earned his doctorate degree in philosophy from Oxford in 1961, and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at McGill University. His work is primarily focused in political philosophy, philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and in the later portion of his career, philosophy of religion. Taylor’s philosophical style lies somewhere between analytical and continental traditions, and he adopts a somewhat hermeneutical approach. Taylor argues for communitarianism, claiming that we as individuals have obligations and responsibilities beyond ourselves to our communities.

Taylor is largely concerned with identity and the self, in relation to the societies that surround us, and he has been influential in defining how we conceive of ourselves in the modern world. In Taylor’s view, the nature of the modern self is defined by multiplicity, developed my numerous distinct strands through history that both complement and contradict each other. Rather than human nature being universal and unchanging, it is contingent on society and history.

Web resource: Charles Taylor’s Home Page.

45Amie Thomasson

Amie Thomasson received her Ph.D. from University of California Irvine in 1995, and is currently Professor of Philosophy, Cooper Fellow, and Parodi Senior Scholar in Aesthetics at the University of Miami. Thomasson combines the areas of aesthetics, ontology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology in her work, arguing against metaphysical skepticism. In Thomasson’s view, many of the metaphysical disputes about existence that populate contemporary philosophy suffer from being misguided in their basic questioning. Rather than offer a complex, highly abstract rebuttal of such arguments, Thomasson has provided a simpler (though not to imply insignificant) answer: that these questions can be answered much more easily than many philosophers have imagined, using inferences from uncontroversial premises. This goal is clearly identified in her recent book, Ontology Made Easy (2015).

Web resource: Amie Thomasson’s Home Page.

46Judith Jarvis Thomson

Judith Jarvis Thomson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959, and is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at MIT. Her work is primarily focused on metaphysics and moral philosophy, in which she uses metaphysics to argue and support moral philosophical claims. Thomson has contributed a great deal to the areas of meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, with much of her work arguing for personal bodily autonomy.

Her books and articles focus on the moral and metaphysical issues of action and agency, and, more concretely, on topics like assisted suicide, self-defense, preferential hiring, and abortion. Thomson is perhaps most famous for a thought experiment which she presented in her influential 1971 essay, “A Defense of Abortion,” which is sometimes referred to as the “Unconscious Violinist” argument. In the thought experiment, Thomson argues by analogy from a hypothetical situation that each person has a right to bodily autonomy, and to infringe on that right is immoral, whether it is a comatose violinist depending on another person for life-support, or a fetus.

Web resource: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Home Page.

47Peter Unger

Peter Unger studied under A.J. Ayer at Oxford University and earned his Ph.D. in 1966. He currently holds the title of Professor of Philosophy at New York University. Unger’s work is focused in metaphysics, epistemology, applied ethics, and philosophy of mind. He is well known for his book Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism (1975) in which he defends philosophical skepticism arguing, basically, that we do not know anything, and cannot claim to know anything, a stance that he has continued to defend in his suggestively titled Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (2014). He is the only philosopher on this list defending such views. Unger is also famous for his controversial book on applied ethics, Living High and Letting Die (1996), inspired by Peter Singer, in which he has argued that citizens of first-world countries are morally obligated to donate all money and possessions that they do not require beyond what is necessary for bare survival to charity organizations that will help citizens of third-world countries. Moreover, they are morally obligated to ensure others do the same, even if this requires them to lie, cheat, or steal.

Web resource: Peter Unger’s Home Page.

48Peter van Inwagen

Peter van Inwagen earned his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, New York in 1969, and holds the title of John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Van Inwagen is notable for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, the problem of free will, and was the President of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 2010 to 2013. Van Inwagen may be best known for his arguing in favor of an incompatibalist understanding of free will, at a time in which compatibilism was significantly more popular in philosophy. In An Essay on Free Will (1983) van Inwagen argued that, if we actually have free will, it is incompatible with determinism. Following from this, van Inwagen has been influential in repopularizing metaphysical libertarianism (not the same as the political theory) as an alternative view, arguing that free will is real, and so determinism is false.

Web resource: Peter van Inwagen’s Home Page.

49Cornel West

Cornel West earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980, making him the first African-American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D. He was Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton until 2011, and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. West has stated that he found as much influence in Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement as he did in his studies at Harvard and Princeton, but as a Christian he did not join the party on religious grounds. In addition to being a philosopher and academic, West is a very prominent and influential social activist, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, author, and public intellectual. West’s work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and class in society. West has sparked controversy because of his outspokenness on these issues in the U.S., and his criticism of the country as continuing to be defined by white supremacist and patriarchal attitudes and institutional structures.

Though he has written numerous books and articles that are widely references, such as Race Matters (1994), West is probably most readily recognized as a political commentator, making frequent appearances as on television and radio news programs, as well as late night talk shows.

You may have also seen him in one of the Matrix sequels, or heard one of his hip-hop albums. No, really.

Web resource: Cornel West’s Home Page.

50Crispin Wright

Crispin Wright earned his Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1968 and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling, as well as being a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work is primarily concerned with philosophy of mind and philosophy of mathematics, and he is a major proponent neo-Fregeanism (sometimes called neo-logicism), having written on reviving Frege’s philosophy of mathematics, as seen in his book Frege’s Conception of Numbers (1983). He also has a significant interpretation of Wittgenstein, presented in his book Wittgenstein on the Foundation of Mathematics (1980).

Web resource: Crispin Wright’s Home Page.