Thinkers

Arthur Schopenhauer Born in Danzig in 1788, into a wealthy merchant family, Arthur Schopenhauer was able to devote himself to philosophy with financial independence. He earned his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and at thirty published his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) — which, however, was almost entirely ignored for decades. Hostile to the then-dominant Hegel, he even scheduled his lectures at the same hour as his rival’s in Berlin, to no audience. Recognition came only at the end of his life, in the 1850s. He was also the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought (the Upanishads and Buddhism). ...

Auguste Comte French philosopher; founder of positivism and father of sociology as a scientific discipline. Disciple of Saint-Simon, from whom he later broke; proposed to reorganize society on scientific bases following the dual revolution (French and industrial). Comte wrote under the impact of the crisis opened by the French Revolution: the traditional order, sustained by theology and monarchy, had collapsed, yet no new principle of social cohesion had stably replaced it. His central problem is therefore at once intellectual and political — how to rebuild social consensus in an age in which religious authority has lost its force. Comte’s answer is the positive spirit: replacing the search for ultimate causes and hidden essences with the study of the laws that govern observable phenomena. Knowledge ceases to ask “why” in a metaphysical sense and instead describes “how” facts relate to one another in a constant manner, making possible prediction and rational action upon nature and society. ...

Averroes (Ibn Rushd) Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, Latinized as Averroes, was born in Córdoba in 1126, at the height of the Islamic civilization of Al-Andalus. A judge (qadi), physician, and philosopher in the service of the Almohad caliphs, he became known in medieval Europe simply as “the Commentator”: his meticulous commentaries on the work of Aristotle were, for centuries, the principal gateway to Aristotelian thought for Latins and Jews. He fell from favor at the end of his life, when his works were condemned, and died in Marrakesh in 1198. ...

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) Born in 980 near Bukhara, in Persian-speaking Central Asia, Abu Ali Ibn Sīnā — Latinized as Avicenna — was a prodigy: it is said that by the age of eighteen he had already mastered the medicine of his time. He led a turbulent life, amid courts, imprisonments, and posts as vizier, yet left more than two hundred works. His Canon of Medicine was the principal medical textbook in the West for centuries, and his Book of Healing is a vast philosophical encyclopedia. He is the greatest philosopher of the medieval Islamic world, and his name is bound to a distinction that would transform Western metaphysics. ...

Baruch Spinoza (Benedict of Spinoza) Born in Amsterdam in 1632, into a family of Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin who had fled the Inquisition, Baruch Spinoza received a rabbinic education, but his ideas soon put him on a collision course with the community: in 1656 he was subjected to a herem (excommunication) of rare severity. He declined chairs and honors to preserve his independence of thought and supported himself humbly by grinding optical lenses. He died young, in 1677, and his principal works — among them the Ethics — were published only after his death. He is regarded as the most radical of the seventeenth-century rationalists. ...

bell hooks bell hooks — pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins (Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 25 September 1952 — Berea, Kentucky, 15 December 2021) — was an American writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic. She took the name of her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, and deliberately wrote it in lowercase, to shift attention from the author to the ideas. A prolific author, she wrote on feminism, race, education, mass culture, and love, always in an accessible prose addressed to a broad public. ...

Bernard Williams Bernard Williams was one of the most important British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and one of the most penetrating critics of the ambition to ground ethics in a single, impersonal theoretical system. He taught at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford. Against both utilitarianism and Kantianism, Williams insisted on the irreducible complexity of moral life, on the importance of the first-person perspective, of personal commitments and emotions, and on the inability of grand theories to capture everything that matters ethically. His writing combines classical learning, psychological sensitivity, and an elegant distrust of philosophical oversimplification. ...

Bertrand Russell Born in 1872 into an influential British aristocratic family — he was the grandson of a prime minister — Bertrand Russell had one of the longest and most varied careers in philosophy: he was a logician, mathematician, essayist, educator, and political activist, spanning nearly a century of history. He studied at Cambridge, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, and, faithful to his pacifism, was imprisoned during the First World War and led, in his nineties, the campaign against nuclear weapons (the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955). He is, with Frege and Wittgenstein, one of the founders of analytic philosophy. ...

Blaise Pascal French mathematician, physicist and philosopher. A precocious genius (invented the mechanical calculator at age 19); converted to Jansenism after his “night of fire” (1654). His philosophy is an existential wager and a confrontation with the reason of the libertines. Key Concepts The wager (Pascal’s wager): pragmatic argument about belief in God. If God exists and you believe — infinite gain; if he does not exist and you believe — finite loss. If he exists and you do not believe — infinite loss. Prudent reason bets on God — even without rational proof “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”: there is an order of the heart — intuition, love, feeling — irreducible to the demonstrative logic of Descartes Misery and grandeur of man: man is a roseau pensant (thinking reed) — fragile as nature, but his greatness lies in thinking; more noble than the universe because he knows that he dies The two infinities: between the great infinity (cosmos) and the small infinity (atom), man stands in the middle — without firm foundation either in sciences or in metaphysics Diversion (divertissement): man flees from confrontation with himself through agitation — boredom reveals the human misery that diversion hides. Critique of social superficiality Critique of Cartesianism: Descartes’ method is useful in the sciences, but illusory as a foundation for faith or morality; “Descartes useless and uncertain” Jansenism: Catholic current that emphasized the irresistible grace of Augustine; Pascal defended Port-Royal in the Provincial Letters against the Jesuits Influenced by Saint Augustine — grace, sin, predestination Montaigne — skepticism, human misery (point of departure and adversary) Descartes — rationalism (critique) Ancient Pyrrhonism — skepticism as apologetic weapon Influenced Kierkegaard — wager, paradox, subjectivity of faith Existentialism — anguish and human condition Modern Christian apologetics Decision theory and game theory (wager as precursor) Works Provincial Letters (1656–1657); Pensées (posthumous, 1670 — fragments of an unfinished apologetic); Treatise on the Arithmetic of the Triangle (1654). ...

Boethius “The last Roman and the first Scholastic.” He translated and commented on the Logic of Aristotle into Latin, transmitting it to the Middle Ages. The Isagoge of Porphyry — which Boethius translated and commented on — (introduction to the Categories) launched the debate of universals that will dominate Scholasticism. Imprisoned and condemned to death by Theodoric, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison — one of the most widely read works of the Middle Ages. ...

Bonaventure Giovanni di Fidanza, known as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Franciscan theologian and philosopher; cardinal and Minister-General of the Franciscan Order. Contemporary and cordial adversary of Thomas Aquinas. Called the Doctor Seraphicus. Bonaventure trained at the University of Paris, then the great center of Latin scholasticism, where he studied the liberal arts and afterward theology under the Franciscan master Alexander of Hales. There he taught at the same time as Thomas Aquinas, in a period when the massive arrival of the works of Aristotle — many of them mediated by the Arabic commentaries of Averroes — was forcing Christian theologians to decide how much of the new natural philosophy they could absorb without compromising the faith. Bonaventure embodies the Augustinian and Franciscan response to that challenge: rather than fully naturalizing reason as Aquinas did, he upheld the primacy of divine illumination and inner experience, refusing to treat philosophy as an autonomous knowledge severed from the wisdom that leads to God. ...

Buddha Note on sources and dating: The dates of Siddhārtha Gautama (also called Śākyamuni, “the sage of the Śākya clan”) are a matter of scholarly controversy. The traditional chronology places him at c. 563–483 BCE, but revised research of recent decades favours a “short chronology,” locating his death around 400 BCE (an approximate lifespan of c. 480–400 BCE). Equally important: the Buddha’s teachings were transmitted orally for generations and were only set down in writing centuries later, above all in the Pāli Canon (Tipiṭaka, Sanskrit Tripiṭaka). These texts are therefore not writings of the Buddha himself but later records of the monastic community, and reconstructing what he historically taught is a delicate philological task. ...

Byung-Chul Han Byung-Chul Han (한병철, b. 1959, Seoul) is a South Korean philosopher based in Germany. He studied metallurgy in Seoul before moving to Germany, where he completed his philosophy studies in Freiburg and Munich with a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger. He was professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin and has become one of the most widely translated voices of contemporary cultural criticism thanks to a series of short, aphoristic, densely phenomenological books. His central thesis is that contemporary society has moved from Foucault’s “disciplinary society” to a Leistungsgesellschaft — an achievement or performance society — in which the subject, dispensed from external coercion, exerts upon itself a violence all the more effective because voluntary. Han draws on Heidegger, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and East Asian thought (especially Zen Buddhism) to diagnose our age. ...

Clarence Irving Lewis (1883–1964) was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard (1906), where his teachers included William James and Josiah Royce — the former’s pragmatism and the latter’s absolute idealism would permanently mark his philosophy. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1911 to 1920, before returning to Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1953 as Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. His work joins two fields that at first glance seem distant — formal logic and epistemology — around a single concern: how concepts and deductive systems, though conventional in origin, can still organize experience objectively. ...

Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt is one of the most influential — and most controversial — jurists and political theorists of the twentieth century. Born in Plettenberg, Westphalia, on 11 July 1888, and died in the same city on 7 April 1985, Schmitt produced a vast and systematically coherent body of work spanning legal theory, theory of the state, political philosophy, and international law. His membership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in May 1933 and his intellectual activity during the Third Reich mean that his reception is inevitably marked by ethical and political tension. His subsequent estrangement from regime structures (around 1936, following attacks from the SS) did not dispel the controversy. Nonetheless, the analytical rigour of his work continues to generate first-order philosophical and legal debate. ...

Carneades of Cyrene Carneades of Cyrene (c. 214/213–129/128 BC) was the most prominent head (scholarch) of the New Academy in Athens and the central figure of Academic Skepticism. Born in Cyrene in North Africa, he emigrated to Athens and remained there for his entire philosophical career, leading an Academy that had taken a radically skeptical turn since Arcesilaus. Carneades left no writings — an apparently deliberate choice consistent with his position that no thesis should be held dogmatically. His thought reaches us primarily through three mediations: his disciple Clitomachus of Carthage, who recorded his lectures in more than four hundred books; Cicero, who in the Academica and De Natura Deorum presents and debates Academic positions; and Sextus Empiricus, who preserved several of his arguments against the Stoics. ...

Carol Gilligan Carol Gilligan (born 1936 in New York) is an American psychologist and feminist, a professor at New York University (and earlier at Harvard). She is chiefly responsible for the formulation of the ethics of care, one of the most discussed contributions to contemporary moral philosophy, poised on the border between developmental psychology and ethics. Her starting point was a methodological critique. Working alongside the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose stages of moral development placed reasoning by abstract, universal principles at the top of the scale, Gilligan observed that these stages had been built from male samples and that, within them, women tended to “score” lower. Rather than conclude that there was a female deficiency, she reversed the question: what if there were here another moral voice, equally legitimate, that Kohlberg’s scale could not hear? ...

Chandra Mohanty Chandra Talpade Mohanty was born in 1955 in India and is currently Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education, and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, at Syracuse University in the United States. Her intellectual trajectory sits at the intersection of feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and anticapitalist thought, and it cannot be separated from the lived experience of migration and the critical positioning between the Global North and the Global South. Educated in the United States, Mohanty built a body of work that systematically questions the ethnocentric assumptions embedded in mainstream Western feminism — not in order to abandon the feminist project, but to radicalize it from the standpoint of historical, geographical, and class difference. ...

Charles Sanders Peirce American logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist. Founder of pragmatism and modern semiotics. One of the most original minds in the history of philosophy, though neglected in his lifetime. His work profoundly influenced William James, John Dewey, and the entire analytic and continental tradition of the 20th century. Trained in chemistry at Harvard University and employed for decades by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce never secured a permanent academic post — due in part to personal difficulties and to the hostility of influential academic figures such as the astronomer Simon Newcomb; it was William James who, paradoxically, supported him in his years of hardship and became his greatest publicist. This institutional marginality did not prevent him from developing, across hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, a philosophical architecture of extraordinary depth: an original phenomenology, advanced formal logic, a comprehensive theory of signs, and an evolutionary metaphysics. ...

Charles Taylor Charles Taylor (b. 1931, Montreal) is a Canadian philosopher and professor emeritus at McGill University, widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in contemporary political and moral philosophy. Trained at Oxford, where he wrote his doctorate under Isaiah Berlin, Taylor brings together the continental hermeneutic tradition — especially Hegel, Heidegger, and Gadamer — and Anglo-American analytic debate in a rare synthesis. A Catholic convert, he is often associated with communitarianism, though he resists rigid labels. His work investigates the historical conditions of modern identity, the limits of naturalism in the human sciences, and the place of the religious in secular societies. He received the Templeton Prize in 2007 and the Kyoto Prize in 2008. ...