Thinkers

Abelardo (Peter Abelard) The most brilliant and controversial intellectual of the 12th century. Also famous for his tragic love affair with Heloise (castrated by order of her uncle). He proposed conceptualism in the dispute over universals and introduced dialectical reason into theology. “I understand in order to believe” — reason must examine before accepting by faith (an inversion of Anselm of Canterbury). Born in Brittany into a family of the minor nobility, Abelard renounced his military inheritance to devote himself to the liberal arts, becoming an itinerant master who drew crowds of students to the schools of Paris. His career spans the decisive moment when teaching ceased to be a monopoly of the monasteries and migrated to the urban schools, foreshadowing the medieval university. A tireless polemicist, he challenged his own teacher William of Champeaux over the universals and later found himself in open conflict with the monastic authority embodied by Bernard of Clairvaux, who saw in his confidence in reason a danger to faith. This tension between dialectic and the contemplative tradition marks his entire body of work and helps explain the condemnations he suffered at ecclesiastical councils. ...

Achille Mbembe Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages. ...

Adam Smith Scottish moral philosopher and economist, considered the father of modern political economy. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment and close friend of Hume. His work combines sentiment-based ethics with market theory. Before he became known as a theorist of economics, Smith was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and it is from that chair that the core of his thought takes shape. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he begins with a characteristically Enlightenment question: how do beings driven by their own interests come to make moral judgments and to care about others? His answer lies in sympathy — not a feeling of pity, but the capacity to imagine oneself in another’s situation — and in the “impartial spectator,” an inner tribunal that leads us to judge our own conduct as a well-informed and disinterested observer would. For Smith, morality derives neither from abstract reason nor from external commandments, but from this web of mutual affections and reciprocal judgments that sustains social life. ...

Adi Shankara Note on dating: The dates of Ādi Śaṅkara (also spelled Shankara; honorifically Śaṅkarācārya, “the teacher Śaṅkara”) are disputed. Tradition places him at 788–820 CE, but many modern scholars prefer an earlier dating, around c. 700–750 CE. His biography became interwoven with hagiographical material, so that many episodes of his life belong more to legend than to verifiable historical record. Śaṅkara is the most influential systematizer of Advaita Vedānta, the “non-dualist” current of Hindu philosophy. His work consists chiefly of rigorous commentaries on the canonical texts, in which he defends a metaphysics where the multiplicity of the world is ultimately reducible to a single reality. His influence on later Indian thought — and on the Western reception of Hinduism — is immense. ...

Aimé Césaire Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique — 17 April 2008, Fort-de-France) was a poet, playwright, and politician, one of the founding voices of twentieth-century anticolonial thought. A student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1935 cohort), it was there, in the vibrant milieu of black students from the French colonies, that he helped forge — alongside the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guianese Léon-Gontran Damas — the Négritude movement. Later elected mayor of Fort-de-France (1945–2001) and a deputy in the French National Assembly, he was one of the architects of the 1946 law that turned Martinique into an overseas department — a decision he would later reassess critically. He was also Frantz Fanon’s teacher at the Lycée Schœlcher. ...

Al-Farabi Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī (c. 872–c. 950) was one of the greatest philosophers of the medieval Islamic world, called by the tradition “the Second Teacher” (al-Muʿallim al-Thānī) — the first being Aristotle. Born in the region of Farab (present-day Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan), he worked principally in Baghdad and Aleppo under the patronage of the Hamdanid court. His work spans logic, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and theory of the sciences. ...

Alasdair MacIntyre Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was a Scottish-American moral philosopher, the author of one of the most influential works of twentieth-century moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981). His intellectual career was marked by a long pilgrimage: he set out from Marxism in his youth, passed through several positions, and ultimately converted to Catholicism and to Aristotelian Thomism in his maturity. He died in May 2025. MacIntyre diagnosed modern moral language as being in a state of grave disorder — composed of decontextualised fragments of traditions that have been lost — and argued that the “Enlightenment project” of providing an autonomous rational justification for morality had failed, clearing the way for emotivism. His proposal was the recovery of a virtue ethics of Aristotelian-Thomist roots, anchored in communal life and in traditions of enquiry. ...

Albert Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, on November 23, 1937, and grew up in the shadow of the gothic cathedral, the Black Forest, and the university where Husserl and Heidegger had taught. Still a student in Freiburg, he attended Heidegger’s lectures in 1957, an experience that would leave a lasting mark on his later reflection on technology. He later moved to the United States, where he earned an MA in German literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Munich, with a dissertation on Cardinal John Henry Newman. He briefly taught German literature at Illinois and philosophy at DePaul University and the University of Hawaii, before settling for decades at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he died on May 7, 2023, at the age of 85. ...

Albert Camus Born in 1913 in French Algeria, into a poor settler (pied-noir) family, Albert Camus lost his father in infancy, in the First World War, and was raised by his illiterate, partly deaf mother in a humble district of Algiers. Tuberculosis would mark his entire life. A journalist and writer, he edited the newspaper Combat in the French Resistance and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at the age of 44. Close to existentialism — though he rejected the label — he broke with Sartre over disagreements about revolutionary violence. He died in 1960 in a car accident, at the age of 46. ...

Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) Dominican friar, Bishop of Regensburg, and Doctor Universalis. He was the teacher of Thomas Aquinas and the principal figure responsible for the systematic introduction of Aristotle into the medieval Latin world. Unlike other scholastics, Albert had a genuine interest in the natural sciences — botany, zoology, mineralogy, alchemy — combining empirical observation with philosophical reflection. Canonized and declared Doctor of the Church in 1931, he is the patron saint of natural scientists. ...

Amartya Sen Amartya Sen (b. 1933, Santiniketan, Bengal) is an Indian economist and philosopher whose work has dissolved the border between economics and ethics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to social choice theory and welfare economics. A professor at Harvard, Sen studied in Calcutta and Cambridge and served as master of Trinity College. Marked in his youth by the Bengal famine of 1943 — which killed millions and in which he lost a relative — he devoted himself to understanding the causes of poverty and deprivation and to rebuilding the normative foundations of economics. In intellectual partnership with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, he developed the capability approach. He received the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour, in 1999. ...

Anaxagoras Born in Clazomenae, in Ionia, around 500 BCE, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring the Ionian tradition to Athens, where he lived for some thirty years and became a friend and adviser of the statesman Pericles. His intellectual boldness cost him dearly: accused of impiety for holding that the Sun was not a god but an incandescent stone, he was put on trial and had to leave the city, taking refuge in Lampsacus. ...

Anaximander A fellow citizen and disciple of Thales of Miletus, Anaximander (c. 610–546 BCE) was one of the boldest minds of the Milesian school and perhaps the first thinker to write a prose treatise on nature. Tradition credits him with the pioneering use of the term arché (“principle”), as well as remarkable achievements: drawing the first map of the inhabited world and introducing the gnomon (sundial) into Greece. Dissatisfied with Thales’s water, Anaximander proposed as the principle the apeiron — the boundless, indeterminate, and imperishable. No particular element could give rise to all the others without being consumed by them; only something indefinite and inexhaustible could be the eternal source of everything. From the apeiron, eternal and divine, the opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) separate out, and from this separation worlds are born — which, in due time, return to it. The only surviving verbatim fragment, transmitted by Simplicius, speaks of this cosmology in moral terms: things “pay one another penalty and retribution for their injustice, according to the order of time.” ...

Anaxímenes The third great name of the Milesian school, Anaximenes (c. 585–525 BCE) was a disciple of Anaximander. At first glance he took a step back, rejecting his master’s indeterminate apeiron and returning to a concrete element as the principle: air (aēr). But his choice carried a decisive advantage — air, being determinate, allowed him to explain how the single principle transforms into all things, something that neither Thales’s water nor the apeiron explained clearly. ...

Andrew Feenberg Andrew Feenberg was born in 1943 in the United States. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, in 1972 under Marcuse, whose direct student he was during the final years of the exiled German philosopher’s career. As a student, Feenberg was actively involved with the New Left, founding the journal Alternatives and taking part, alongside Marcuse himself, in the May 1968 events in Paris — Marcuse, who was in the city for a UNESCO conference on Marx, was recognized by students occupying the École des Beaux-Arts and invited to address the assembly; Feenberg, who accompanied him, witnessed the episode and would, decades later, co-write with Jim Freedman the book When Poetry Ruled the Streets (2001), on that movement. He taught philosophy at San Diego State University from 1969 to 2003, with visiting appointments at Duke, SUNY Buffalo, the Sorbonne, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Tokyo, among other institutions. He later held the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he directed the Applied Communication and Technology Lab (ACT Lab) until becoming professor emeritus. ...

Anselm of Canterbury Born in Aosta, in the Alps, in 1033, Anselm entered the famous Benedictine monastery of Bec, in Normandy, where he became an admired master, and later became Archbishop of Canterbury, amid harsh conflicts with the English kings over the authority of the Church. He is called “the father of Scholasticism” for having inaugurated the systematic effort to use reason to penetrate the contents of faith. His motto sums up the whole medieval program: “fides quaerens intellectum” — faith seeking understanding. In the Proslogion he radicalizes it: “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand” — a formula that gathers up the “crede ut intelligas” of Saint Augustine. ...

Antonin Sertillanges Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges (1863–1948) — born Antonin-Gilbert — was a French Dominican friar, moral philosopher, and one of the most influential popularisers of Thomism in the early twentieth century. Born in Clermont-Ferrand, he entered the Order of Preachers in 1883 and was ordained a priest in 1888. He became professor of moral philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris and, in 1893, was among the founders of the Revue Thomiste, a journal that would become central to the renewal of studies on Thomas Aquinas. In 1918 he was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Although he produced a substantial body of Thomist exegesis, his name reached a wide readership chiefly through a small book of 1921, La Vie intellectuelle (The Intellectual Life), which became an enduring classic on the discipline, the ethics, and the method of the work of the mind. ...

Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci (22 January 1891, Ales, Sardinia — 27 April 1937, Rome) was an Italian philosopher, journalist, and Communist leader, one of the most original figures of twentieth-century Marxism. In Turin he founded the journal L’Ordine Nuovo (1919) during the factory-council movement, and in 1921 he helped found the Italian Communist Party, of which he became general secretary. Elected to parliament, he was arrested by the Fascist regime in 1926; at his trial the prosecutor declared that “we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” It was in prison, under harsh conditions, that Gramsci wrote his decisive work — the Prison Notebooks — composed between 1929 and 1935 and published after his death. ...

Aristotle Born in Stagira, in Macedonia, around 384 BCE, the son of Nicomachus — physician to the Macedonian court — Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen, where he remained for some twenty years, until his master’s death. He later tutored Alexander the Great and, in 335 BCE, founded the Lyceum in Athens, a school whose members became known as Peripatetics (from their habit of discussing while walking). With Alexander’s death and the wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, he left Athens in 323 BCE — so that the city, according to ancient tradition, “might not sin twice against philosophy” — and died the following year in Chalcis. The body of texts we have inherited from him is the largest and most systematic of antiquity, spanning logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. ...

Arnold Toynbee Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) was born in London and trained in classical Greco-Roman history at Balliol College, Oxford. He served in the British Foreign Office during and after the First World War and directed, for decades, the research department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), combining academic erudition with intense engagement in the analysis of international affairs. His magnum opus, A Study of History, published in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961, is the twentieth century’s most ambitious attempt to write a comparative history of all known civilizations, identifying roughly twenty-one of them across human history and proposing a common scheme for understanding their genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration. ...