Thinkers

Sigmund Freud Neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis. Although not strictly a philosopher, his theory of the unconscious, drives, and repression became one of the most influential philosophical matrices of the 20th century, especially for the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and post-structuralism. Key Concepts Unconscious: the greater part of mental life escapes consciousness; repressed desires, traumas, and conflicts determine behavior. The unconscious does not obey logic or linear time Psychic topography: First topography: Unconscious / Preconscious / Conscious Second topography: Id (primitive drives) / Ego (mediation with reality) / Superego (internalization of social norms) Drives: Eros (drive for life, love, creativity) and Thanatos (death drive, aggression, repetition) — fundamental conflict of the psyche Repression: civilization demands the repression of drives; the cost is neurosis. Central theme of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Oedipus complex: desire for the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry with the same-sex parent; structure of entry into culture and formation of the superego Dreams, slips, and symptoms: “Royal road to the unconscious” — encrypted language of repressed desires Critique of religion: The Future of an Illusion (1927) — religion is childish illusion of a protective father; Totem and Taboo — origin of religion in primordial patricide Influenced by Charles Darwin — drives and biological evolution Nietzsche — critique of morality, unconscious forces (notable parallels) Franz Brentano — philosophy of mind and intentionality Influenced Marcuse — Eros and Civilization: freedom vs. capitalist over-repression Adorno and Horkheimer — social unconscious, authoritarianism Walter Benjamin — dream, dialectical image Sartre — critiques psychoanalysis but engages with it (bad faith vs. repression) Simone de Beauvoir — psychoanalysis and the construction of the feminine Derrida — trace, différance and the unconscious as writing Foucault — critiques the apparatus of sexuality in The History of Sexuality Jacques Lacan — structuralist rereading of Freud Works The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905); Totem and Taboo (1913); Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17); The Ego and the Id (1923); The Future of an Illusion (1927); Civilization and Its Discontents (1930); Moses and Monotheism (1939). ...

Simone de Beauvoir French philosopher; intellectual companion of Sartre. Founder of existentialist feminism. The Second Sex is one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Born in Paris in 1908, Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and passed the agrégation examination in 1929, becoming one of the first women in France to earn that distinction. A central figure in the post-war Parisian existentialist circle, she co-founded the journal Les Temps Modernes and engaged actively in the major political and moral debates of her time, from anticolonialism to critiques of Stalinism. Her core philosophical project was to apply existentialist categories — facticity, situation, project — to the concrete condition of women, demonstrating that female oppression is not rooted in nature but in historical and social structures that can, and must, be transformed. ...

Simone Weil French philosopher, mystic, and activist. A student of Alain (Émile Chartier) at the École Normale Supérieure, she worked alongside factory laborers and fought in the Spanish Civil War. Her work, almost entirely posthumous, crosses philosophy, Christian mysticism (without formal adherence to the Church), social critique, and reflection on labor. She died at 34 in London, weakened by tuberculosis and her refusal to eat more than those rationed in occupied France. An unclassifiable thinker who fascinated Camus, who edited her first published books. ...

Slavoj Žižek Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist, researcher at the University of Ljubljana. He combines the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan with the dialectic of Hegel and the critique of ideology in the Marxist tradition. Prolific and provocative, he is known for analyzing pop culture phenomena (cinema, jokes, advertising) as illustrations of deep ideological structures. A critic of both liberal capitalism and identity-based leftism, he defends an emancipatory universalism. Key Concepts Ideology as fantasy: ideology is not false consciousness (an illusion dispelled by knowledge) but a structuring fantasy — “they know what they are doing, and yet they do it” (cynicism as the dominant ideological form) The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary: takes up the Lacanian triad — the Real is what resists symbolization; irruptions of the Real destabilize the symbolic order (trauma, social antagonism) Jouissance (enjoyment): the subject is trapped in paradoxical modes of satisfaction that sustain the ideological order — ideology functions not through belief but through the enjoyment invested in social practices Parallax (parallax view): a shift in perspective that reveals the object is constituted by the very displacement of the gaze — there is no neutral point of view; antagonism is irreducible The big Other (grand Autre): the symbolic order (language, law, social norms) — the subject constitutes itself in relation to the Other, but the Other is inconsistent, barred The barred subject: the subject is not a full identity but a constitutive lack — it is what emerges in the failure of the symbolic order Pop culture as philosophy: films (The Matrix, Hitchcock), jokes, and anecdotes are read as enactments of Lacanian and Hegelian structures Influenced by Hegel — dialectic, negativity, contradiction as the motor of thought Jacques Lacan — structural psychoanalysis; Real, Symbolic, Imaginary Marx — critique of ideology and commodity fetishism Kant — transcendental subject and antinomies Schelling — freedom and the abyss of the ground Influenced Contemporary critical theory Cultural studies and ideological analysis of cinema Post-Marxist left and contemporary political debate Alain Badiou — interlocution on subject and event Works The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); For They Know Not What They Do (1991); The Parallax View (2006); Living in the End Times (2010); Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012); How to Read Lacan (2006). ...

Socrates Socrates is the pivot of Greek philosophy: his figure divides the tradition between the pre-Socratics, concerned with the investigation of nature (physis), and the Socratics, who shifted the focus to the human being, the soul, and ethics. An Athenian of the fifth century B.C., son of the sculptor Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, he lived through the Peloponnesian War — serving as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis — and turned the streets and gymnasia of Athens into the setting for an entirely oral philosophy. He left no writings: everything we know comes from others, above all the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Xenophon, alongside the comic caricature of Aristophanes (The Clouds). The difficulty of separating the historical Socrates from the literary character is what scholars call the “Socratic problem.” ...

Søren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher; the “father of existentialism”. Wrote frequently under pseudonyms to present opposing perspectives. His philosophy is a reaction to Hegel’s speculative system and the bourgeois comfort of institutional Christianity. Key Concepts Three stages of existence: Aesthetic: life oriented toward pleasure, novelty, aesthetics — the despair of inevitable boredom Ethical: commitment to duty, universal morality, marriage — the despair of unforgivable guilt Religious: suspension of the ethical by the singular before God — the “leap of faith” beyond reason Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844): human freedom as “vertigo of possibility”; anxiety has no determinate object (unlike fear) — it is dizziness before the abyss of the possible Despair (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849): unwilling to be oneself, or willing to be other than oneself — the universal condition of humanity without relation to God Subjectivity (“Subjectivity is truth”): existential truth is not attained through Hegel’s objective speculation, but through subjective and passionate commitment Leap of faith: Abraham who goes to sacrifice Isaac — an act that suspends the ethical and makes sense only before the singular of God; Camus criticizes it as “philosophical suicide” Pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantine Constantius — each represents a stage or perspective Influenced by Hegel — point of departure and principal adversary; rejects the speculative system Socrates — irony and indirect method; identified with him Plato — dialogues and Socratic position Luther — individual faith against institution Influenced Heidegger — anxiety, authenticity, being-toward-death Sartre — radical freedom, bad faith, existential project Camus — the absurd (but rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith) Simone de Beauvoir — concrete existential situation Existential theology (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich) Works Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); The Concept of Anxiety (1844); Stages on Life’s Way (1845); Philosophical Fragments (1844); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859, posthumous). ...

Stuart Hall Stuart Henry McPhail Hall (3 February 1932, Kingston, Jamaica — 10 February 2014, London) was a Jamaican-born British cultural theorist and sociologist, regarded as one of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies. He came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He was the founding editor of New Left Review (1960), a central organ of the English New Left, and from the late 1960s to 1979 he directed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, succeeding Richard Hoggart; he then became professor of sociology at the Open University. Hall made culture — understood not as entertainment but as the terrain on which meaning and power are contested — a legitimate object of political analysis, within an open, anti-reductionist Marxism that he described as practising “without guarantees.” ...

Thales of Miletus A philosopher from Miletus, in Ionia (in present-day Turkey), who lived around 624–546 BCE, Thales is considered the first philosopher of the Western tradition and was counted among the legendary Seven Sages of Greece. He left no writings; what we know comes from later reports, above all from Aristotle, who hailed him as the founder of this kind of inquiry (Metaphysics I, 3). Many stories gathered around his name: he is said to have predicted a solar eclipse, measured the height of the pyramids by their shadow, and, according to Aristotle, demonstrated the practical value of philosophy by foreseeing a good harvest and cornering the olive-press market. ...

Theodor W. Adorno Born in Frankfurt in 1903, Theodor W. Adorno was, alongside Horkheimer, the most rigorous figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Also trained in music — he studied composition in Vienna — he united philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics in a radical critique of modern society. A Jew and a Marxist, he went into exile in the United States during Nazism, where he observed mass culture at close range; he returned to Frankfurt after the war and died there in 1969. ...

Thomas Aquinas Born around 1225 in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in southern Italy, Thomas belonged to the high nobility, which firmly opposed his entry into the mendicant order of the Dominicans — even confining him for about a year. He studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne and became a master of theology at the University of Paris. Despite the nickname “the dumb ox,” he proved to be the greatest genius of Scholasticism. After an intense experience in 1273, he ceased writing, saying that all he had produced seemed to him like “straw”; he died the following year, on his way to the Council of Lyon. Canonized in 1323, he is “the Angelic Doctor,” and Thomism remains the official reference of Catholic philosophy. ...

Thomas Hobbes Born in England in 1588 — according to tradition prematurely, amid the panic over the threatened Spanish Armada, which led him to say that “fear and I were born twins” — Thomas Hobbes studied at Oxford and became tutor to the noble Cavendish family. In his travels through Europe, he engaged with the new science of Galileo and with the great philosophers of the continent. A witness to the bloody English Civil War, he went into exile in Paris for over a decade; it was there that he matured the political theory published in Leviathan (1651). He is the founder of modern state theory. ...

Thomas Kuhn American historian and philosopher of science. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) completely transformed the understanding of scientific progress and introduced the concept of paradigm into global intellectual vocabulary. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1922, Kuhn trained as a physicist at Harvard University. While preparing a history of science course for humanities students, he wrestled with Aristotelian theories of motion. The puzzle of why Aristotle — a remarkably acute thinker — had made what seemed like obvious errors from a Newtonian standpoint led Kuhn to realize that the standards of scientific rationality themselves change across historical periods. Rather than asking “who was right?”, he began asking “how does a scientific community come to see the world in a particular way?”. That question shaped all his subsequent work, culminating years later in the book that would redefine how philosophers, historians, and scientists understand science itself. ...

Thomas More English humanist, jurist, and statesman. Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII; refused to recognize the king as supreme head of the Church and was beheaded. Canonized by the Catholic Church (1935). Author of the concept of utopia. Thomas More was born in London in 1478, the son of a successful lawyer, and received a rigorous classical education — he studied at Oxford and at the Inns of Court, becoming one of the most respected jurists in Tudor England. His friendship with Erasmus, forged in the early sixteenth century, shaped his intellectual orientation: Christian humanism, which held that society could be reformed through moral renewal and the recovery of good letters, without breaking from the Catholic tradition. Against this backdrop, Utopia (1516) is not merely a literary fantasy but a work of rigorous political philosophy that fuses the Platonic dialogue with Lucianic satire to diagnose the ills of contemporary Europe — land enclosure, noble corruption, dynastic warfare, and the brutality of capital punishment for petty crimes. ...

Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel is one of the most respected contemporary philosophers working in philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Born in 1937, he is a professor at New York University (NYU). His work returns obstinately to a single theme: the difficulty of reconciling the inner, subjective perspective of each conscious being with the external, impersonal, objective perspective that science and reason strive for. Known for his lucid prose and the intellectual honesty with which he exposes the limits of his own solutions, Nagel resists both easy reductions and mysticism, holding that certain philosophical problems are genuine and should not be dissolved prematurely. ...

Tobias Barreto Tobias Barreto de Menezes (1839–1889), born in the province of Sergipe, was a jurist, philosopher, critic and poet, recognised as one of the central figures of the so-called Recife School. In a Brazilian intellectual landscape dominated by an eclecticism of spiritualist inspiration, Tobias Barreto championed the introduction of “Germanism”—that is, German culture, science and philosophy—as a renewing alternative to the prevailing thought of the time. He drew close to monism and evolutionism, engaging critically with authors such as Haeckel, and turned against the dominant spiritualism. His most enduring contribution lies in the philosophy of law, where he defended a conception of law as a cultural and historical phenomenon rather than as the expression of a natural order. ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who would adopt the pen name Voltaire, was the most celebrated and combative figure of the French Enlightenment. Witty and provocative, he was imprisoned in the Bastille and went into exile in England (1726–1728), where he admired political liberty, the empiricism of Locke, and the science of Newton — an experience he would recount in the Philosophical Letters. He frequented the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia and finally settled at Ferney, near the Swiss border, from where he directed public campaigns against injustice. A prolific writer, he left plays, poems, historical works, philosophical tales, and a vast Philosophical Dictionary. ...

W. E. B. Du Bois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was an African-American sociologist, historian, philosopher, and activist born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895 he became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, with a historical dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade; he also studied in Berlin, where he absorbed the craft of German social science. His work inaugurated African-American urban sociology with The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and, with The Souls of Black Folk (1903), established a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about modern Black experience. He was a co-founder of the NAACP (1909) and a central figure in pan-Africanism. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party; he then moved to Ghana, where he acquired citizenship and where he died in 1963. ...

W.V.O. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century. A professor at Harvard for decades, his work revolutionised epistemology, philosophy of language, and ontology, while simultaneously dismantling the foundations of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Quine is the principal link between American pragmatism (Dewey, James) and contemporary analytic philosophy. Key Concepts Critique of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 1951, Philosophical Review; reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 1953): Quine attacks two dogmas of empiricism: (1) the belief in a sharp distinction between analytic propositions (true by meaning, e.g. “all bachelors are unmarried”) and synthetic ones (true by empirical fact); and (2) reductionism (each statement has an isolated empirical content). Quine argues that the notion of “analyticity” is circular — it presupposes “synonymy”, which presupposes “analyticity”. ...

Walter Benjamin Born in Berlin in 1892, Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and unclassifiable figures of twentieth-century thought — philosopher, literary critic, translator, and essayist, peripherally linked to the Frankfurt School and a friend of Adorno. His academic career failed (his habilitation thesis was rejected), and he lived by his writing, always in difficulty. In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he found himself blocked at the Franco-Spanish border, in Portbou, and took his own life — one of the most tragic fates of the European intelligentsia. ...