Thinkers

Empedocles Empedocles (c. 494–434 BCE) was one of the most extraordinary figures of Greek philosophy: at once philosopher, physician, poet, orator, and political leader in his native city of Akragas, in Sicily. A legendary aura formed around him — he presented himself almost as a god among men, and tradition holds that he leapt into the crater of Mount Etna to confirm his divinity. He expounded his ideas in two poems, On Nature and Purifications. ...

Enrique Dussel Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1934, Enrique Dussel had a cosmopolitan formation — he studied in Argentina, Spain, France, and Germany, and also researched the history of the Church in Latin America. After a bomb attack on his home, he went into exile in Mexico in 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen and lived until his death, in 2023. He is the leading name of Latin American Liberation Philosophy and a central reference of decolonial thought. ...

Epictetus Phrygian ex-slave; the Stoic who most lived what he preached. His central distinction structures all Stoic ethics: what depends on us (eph’ hêmin: thoughts, impulses, judgments, desires) vs. what does not depend on us (ouk eph’ hêmin: body, fame, wealth, health). Inner freedom is absolute and cannot be taken by any master. “Bear and forbear” (anékhou kai apékhou). Born in Hierapolis, in Phrygia (modern Turkey), Epictetus spent his early years as a slave in Rome, in the service of Epaphroditus, a freedman connected to Nero’s court. It was in this setting that he studied under the Stoic Musonius Rufus, from whom he inherited the conviction that philosophy is worth only as much as it transforms conduct. He is said to have been lame — a condition he reportedly mentioned with serene indifference, a living example of his doctrine that disability touches the body, not the prohairesis, the will that chooses. Freed later in life, he devoted himself to teaching in Rome until the emperor Domitian expelled the philosophers from the city; he then moved to Nicopolis, in Epirus (northwestern Greece), where he founded a school that drew disciples from far and wide, including young men of the Roman elite. ...

Epicurus Born on the island of Samos around 341 BCE, Epicurus founded in Athens, in 307 BCE, the school known as the Garden (Kepos) — a community of friends that, remarkably for its time, welcomed women and slaves. He lived simply and in seclusion, and died around 270 BCE, facing with serenity the pains of a kidney ailment. His philosophy, heir to Socrates in the ideal of philosophy as an art of living, has a therapeutic aim: to free the human being from what disturbs their peace. ...

Erasmus of Rotterdam Born in Rotterdam around 1466, Erasmus (Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam) was the greatest humanist of the Northern Renaissance — the “Prince of the Humanists.” An Augustinian canon and priest, he devoted himself to letters and traveled across Europe, forming a friendship with Thomas More in England. An incomparable scholar of Greek and Latin, he made cultivated language an instrument of reform and of irony. He died in Basel in 1536, having refused both the dogmatism of the old Church and the Protestant rupture. ...

Ernst Cassirer Ernst Cassirer was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 28 July 1874 and died in New York on 13 April 1945. Trained within the Neo-Kantian tradition of the Marburg School — whose leading figures were Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp — Cassirer began his intellectual career editing Leibniz’s writings and studying the logical foundations of the exact sciences. Yet the project that would make him singular in twentieth-century philosophy was a radical expansion of the Kantian inheritance: where Kant had asked about the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge, Cassirer asked about the conditions of possibility of all human meaning — from myth to language, from art to science. This reorientation produced the monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929), a work that transformed Neo-Kantian epistemology into a philosophy of culture with full anthropological scope. ...

Farias Brito Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862–1917), born in the state of Ceará, is regarded as one of the most original thinkers in Brazilian philosophy of his period. At a time dominated by positivism and a scientifically inspired materialism, Farias Brito developed a spiritualism of his own, in which consciousness is taken as the fundamental reality and as the true starting point of philosophical reflection. His strongly metaphysical work is directed against the reduction of reality to mere material mechanism and seeks to place the problem of spirit once more at the centre of philosophy. Although less read outside specialist circles, he exerted a lasting influence on the Brazilian Catholic and spiritualist thought of the following generations. ...

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857, Geneva — 22 February 1913, Vufflens-le-Château) was a Swiss linguist, regarded as the father of modern linguistics and the theoretical wellspring of twentieth-century structuralism. Trained in the comparative tradition of Leipzig among the Neogrammarians, at the age of 21 he published the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), in which he postulated, on grounds of pure systemic coherence, “sonant coefficients” whose reality would be confirmed only decades later with the decipherment of Hittite (the laryngeals). He taught in Paris and, from 1891, in Geneva, where he delivered a course in general linguistics three times (1907; 1908–09; 1910–11). He published little in his lifetime; his decisive work is posthumous. ...

Frances Kamm Frances Myrna Kamm (b. c. 1947) is one of the most rigorous and influential moral philosophers working in the contemporary analytic tradition. She built her academic career at institutions including NYU, Rutgers, and Harvard, where she taught for many years at both the Kennedy School of Government and the philosophy department. Her central intellectual project is the development of a non-consequentialist theory of moral rights and permissible harm that is at once normatively precise and methodologically transparent. Against ethical frameworks that evaluate actions solely by their outcomes, Kamm argues that there are genuine deontological constraints — moral structures that determine what may be done to a person regardless of how much overall good such an act would produce. ...

Francis Bacon “Father of Empiricism” and of modern experimental science. Lord Chancellor of England; fell into disgrace due to corruption. His project was to renew knowledge by replacing Aristotle’s Organon with a new inductive-experimental method. Bacon writes at the transition from the Renaissance to modernity, at a time when natural philosophy was still dominated by the Scholastic Aristotelianism transmitted through the universities. Against this tradition, he diagnoses that inherited knowledge had become sterile: highly skilled at disputing and classifying, yet incapable of producing useful works or of extending human dominion over nature. The central problem, for Bacon, was not a lack of intelligence but the lack of a correct method. Aristotle’s syllogistic logic, on his reading, merely rearranges the confused notions already contained in words, without guaranteeing that those notions correspond to things; it therefore serves to win debates, not to discover new truths about the world. In response, Bacon proposes a “Great Instauration” (Instauratio Magna) of knowledge — a fresh start grounded in ordered experience and methodical observation rather than in the authority of the ancients. ...

Francis Fukuyama Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (1952–) was born in Chicago, the son of a second-generation Japanese-American Protestant minister with a doctorate in sociology and of a woman born in Kyoto, daughter of the economist Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department at Kyoto University. He earned a degree in classics from Cornell University — where he studied under Allan Bloom — and a doctorate in political science from Harvard University. He was serving on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department when he published, in the summer of 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the essay that would make him world-famous: “The End of History?”, in the journal The National Interest. Expanded into the book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the argument sparked one of the most intense intellectual debates of the late twentieth century. ...

Frantz Fanon Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony). A psychiatrist, essayist, and political militant, he is the most influential figure of African and Caribbean anticolonial philosophy. Trained in medicine and psychiatry in France (Lyon), he served as chief of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953. Confronted with the atrocities of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) and became one of the principal intellectual voices of the anticolonial cause. He died of leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961, aged 36, days after the publication of Les damnés de la terre. ...

Franz Brentano Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was an Austrian-German philosopher whose work marks one of the quiet turning points of modern philosophy. Born at Marienberg am Rhein into a Catholic family of Italian origin — he was a nephew of the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano — he took his doctorate at Tübingen in 1862 with the thesis Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (“On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle”), a study that the young Martin Heidegger read in his adolescence and that would shape an entire twentieth-century lineage of return to Aristotle. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, he completed his Habilitation at Würzburg in 1866 and resigned from the priesthood in 1873 amid the crisis opened by the dogma of papal infallibility (Vatican I, 1870). In Vienna, where he taught from 1874 to 1895, he gathered a remarkable constellation of pupils — Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, Stumpf, Ehrenfels, Marty — out of whom phenomenology, object theory, and the Lvov-Warsaw School would emerge. He lost his chair in 1880 because he married (Austrian law treated former priests as still bound by their vow of celibacy) and was reduced to Privatdozent. He retired in 1895 and lived first in Florence and then in Zurich, where he died, blind, in 1917. ...

Friedrich Nietzsche The son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Prussia, in 1844. A precocious classical philologist, he became a professor at the University of Basel at the age of 24 — before he had even completed his doctorate. His admiration for, and later break with, the composer Richard Wagner, together with his fragile health, led him to give up the chair in 1879 and to live as a solitary wanderer through Switzerland and Italy, writing his most important books. In January 1889, in Turin, he suffered a mental collapse from which he never recovered: he spent his last eleven years incapacitated, and his unpublished work was in part distorted by his sister Elisabeth — even though Nietzsche himself had vehemently rejected German nationalism and antisemitism. ...

Friedrich Schleiermacher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 21 November 1768 and died in Berlin on 12 February 1834. Son of a Reformed army chaplain, he studied at the Moravian seminary in Barby and subsequently at Halle. He became a preacher in Berlin, held a professorship in Halle (1804–1807), and from 1810 was professor of theology and philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin — of which he was one of the principal intellectual architects, alongside Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte. ...

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling The most versatile of the German idealists; his thought passed through multiple radically distinct phases. He directly influenced Romanticism and anticipated Existentialism. Born in Leonberg, Württemberg, in 1775, Schelling studied at the Tübingen Stift alongside Hegel and Hölderlin, where enthusiasm for the French Revolution and Kantian philosophy shaped an entire generation. By his early twenties he was already publishing works of remarkable originality, and in 1798 he accepted a professorship in Jena — then the intellectual epicenter of German Idealism and Romanticism. That milieu made him a direct interlocutor of Fichte, Goethe, and the Schlegel brothers, cementing his reputation as the most promising philosopher of his age. ...

G.E. Moore British philosopher, co-founder — alongside Russell and Frege — of analytic philosophy. His critique of British idealism and his work in ethics decisively influenced the entire analytic tradition of the 20th century. Key Concepts Naturalistic fallacy: the error of defining the good in terms of natural properties (pleasure, evolution, desire). The good is simple, indefinable, and non-natural — it cannot be reduced to any empirical property. A central critique of utilitarianism and ethical naturalism Open question argument: for any natural property X, it always makes sense to ask “Is X good?” — if the good were identical to X, the question would be absurd. This proves that good ≠ X Moral intuitionism: fundamental moral values are known by direct intuition, not by inference or definition. Ethics is an autonomous science, not reducible to natural sciences Common sense realism: against the idealism of Berkeley and Hegel — the external world exists independently of the mind. Defense of common sense realism as the philosophical starting point Proof of the external world: “here is a hand, here is another” — he argues that we can prove the existence of the external world with more certainty than any abstract philosophical premise that denies it Conceptual analysis: the central task of philosophy is analysis — decomposing complex concepts into their simpler, more precise components; the program that defines analytic philosophy Intrinsic goods: certain states are good in themselves (friendship, beauty, knowledge) — independently of any consequence. A critique of hedonistic utilitarianism Influenced by Kant — deontological ethics and moral autonomy Russell — analytic program (mutual influence) Sidgwick — British moral intuitionism Influenced Russell and Wittgenstein — analytic philosophy Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Keynes) — ethics and aesthetics Contemporary metaethics (intuitionism, moral realism) Karl Popper — theory of knowledge Works Principia Ethica (1903); Ethics (1912); Philosophical Studies (1922); Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953). ...

Galileo Galilei Born in Pisa in 1564, Galileo Galilei is often called the “father of modern science.” A professor of mathematics at Pisa and Padua, in 1609 he improved the newly invented telescope and turned it to the sky — with results that shook Aristotelian cosmology: mountains and craters on the Moon, four satellites orbiting Jupiter, the phases of Venus, spots on the Sun. The heavens, after all, were not the perfect, immutable realm they had been supposed to be. ...

Gayatri Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942, Calcutta) is an Indian theorist and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. Her English translation of De la grammatologie (1976) made Derrida available to the Anglophone world and marked the beginning of one of the most influential — and resolutely non-synthetic — bodies of work in contemporary theory. Spivak combines deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial critique. She was associated with the Subaltern Studies Group, a collective of South Asian historians who, drawing on Gramsci and Ranajit Guha, proposed to rewrite colonial and national history from the standpoint of the subaltern classes. Her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) became a canonical reference of the field. In later works, Spivak extended her reflection to globalisation, pedagogy, and world literature. ...

Georg Lukács Georg (György) Lukács (13 April 1885, Budapest — 4 June 1971, Budapest) was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic who, with his 1923 work, founded what would come to be called Western Marxism. Born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family, he was formed in German neo-Kantian culture — he was close to Georg Simmel and Max Weber — before joining communism in 1918. He was People’s Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and, decades later, minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s government during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His path, crossed by successive self-criticisms and a tense relationship with Stalinism, runs from a pre-Marxist aesthetics to a Hegelian Marxism and, finally, to a vast Ontology of Social Being. ...