Thinkers

Immanuel Kant Born in Königsberg, in East Prussia, in 1724, and never having strayed from his native city, Immanuel Kant led the methodical life of a university professor — so regular, tradition holds, that his neighbors set their clocks by his daily walk. It was, in his own words, the reading of Hume that “awakened him from his dogmatic slumber” and led him into a long decade of silence, at the end of which, already 57 years old, he published the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781). His work both closes and refounds Modernity, mediating the dispute between the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. ...

Imre Lakatos Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian-British philosopher of science and mathematics, a professor at the London School of Economics and one of the central figures in the debate on scientific rationality during the 1960s and 1970s. His work seeks an intermediate position between Popper’s falsificationism and Kuhn’s historical account: against the idea that a single refutation overturns a theory, but also against the idea that scientific change is mere irrational “conversion”. Lakatos proposed that the unit of scientific appraisal is not the isolated theory but the research programme, judged over time by its capacity to anticipate novel facts. He was also an original philosopher of mathematics, showing in Proofs and Refutations that mathematical knowledge grows through a dynamic process of conjectures, proofs, and counterexamples rather than by pure, finished deduction. ...

Iris Marion Young Iris Marion Young (2 January 1949, New York City — 1 August 2006, Chicago) was an American political philosopher and feminist theorist, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential political philosophers of her generation, she devoted herself to rethinking the categories inherited from the liberal tradition — justice, equality, citizenship — from the concrete experience of marginalized social groups. Combining critical theory, phenomenology, and feminism, Young argued that a theory of justice centered solely on the distribution of goods is blind to the structures of power, labor, and culture that produce domination. She died of cancer at the age of 57; her final work, Responsibility for Justice, was published posthumously in 2011. ...

Isaac Newton Born in England in 1643, Isaac Newton is regarded as the author of the greatest synthesis of the Scientific Revolution and one of the greatest geniuses in history. During the “miraculous years” of 1665–66, when the plague drove him from Cambridge to the countryside, he laid the foundations of three simultaneous revolutions: the infinitesimal calculus, the theory of colors, and the law of gravitation. A complex man, he also devoted himself, in secret, to alchemy and to heterodox theological studies. He was Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. ...

Isaiah Berlin Latvian-British political philosopher and historian of ideas, one of the greatest liberal thinkers of the 20th century. Famous for the distinction between negative and positive liberty, and for his defense of value pluralism against all forms of political utopianism. Born in Riga in 1909, in what was then the Russian Empire, Berlin witnessed the 1917 revolutions in Petrograd — where his family had moved in 1916 — before they returned to Riga and emigrated to England in 1921 — an experience that left a lasting mark on his distrust of promises of collective redemption. Educated and later a professor at Oxford, where he held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, he devoted himself less to building a system than to the history of ideas, recovering forgotten voices and countercurrents of modern thought. It was in this spirit that he delivered, in 1958, the celebrated inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” a text that organized the postwar political debate by showing that liberty understood as self-mastery (positive) could, taken to its extreme, license coercion in the name of the citizen’s “true self.” ...

J.L. Austin John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911, Lancaster — 8 February 1960, Oxford) was a British philosopher, a central figure of Oxford ordinary language philosophy. White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, he played a distinguished role in British military intelligence during the Second World War. He published little in his lifetime; his decisive works are posthumous, reconstructed from lectures and papers. His style was patient, anti-systematic, and attentive to fine detail: for Austin, “our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing” across many generations — and philosophy should begin by examining them. ...

Jacques Derrida Algerian-French philosopher; founder of deconstruction. He subverted the Western metaphysical tradition by showing that it is structured by hierarchical binary oppositions and by the metaphysics of presence. Born in El-Biar, on the outskirts of Algiers, into a Jewish family, Derrida trained at the École normale supérieure in Paris and began his philosophical path with a meticulous reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. His explosive entry into intellectual debate came in 1966, with the lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University, in which he questioned the notion of structure as something organized around a stable center — a gesture that distanced him from the then-dominant structuralism and opened what would come to be called post-structuralism. The following year he published, almost simultaneously, three works that fixed his vocabulary and his method, establishing deconstruction not as a doctrine but as a practice of reading attentive to the tensions that each text fails to master. ...

Jacques Ellul Jacques Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France, on 6 January 1912, and died in Pessac, in the Bordeaux metropolitan area, on 19 May 1994. Trained in law, history, and sociology, he spent decades as professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the Faculty of Law and Economic Science of the University of Bordeaux. In 1932 he underwent what he described as a “very brutal, very sudden” religious conversion, an episode that led him to join the Reformed Church of France and to sustain, throughout his life, a body of work he insisted must be read dialectically as two poles of a single thought: the sociological analysis of modern technique and Christian theological reflection. During the Second World War he took part in the French Resistance; in 2001, seven years after his death, he was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” for having helped Jews escape Nazi persecution. ...

Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan (13 April 1901, Paris — 9 September 1981, Paris) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, the most influential figure in psychoanalysis after Freud and a decisive link between psychoanalysis and structuralism. Under the banner of the “return to Freud,” he proposed rereading the Freudian discovery in light of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Lévi Strauss, purging it of the biologism and ego-psychology he saw as betrayals. His Seminar, held from 1953, and his Écrits (1966) became an inescapable — and notoriously difficult — reference. After breaking with the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963, he founded the École freudienne de Paris the following year, only to dissolve it himself in 1980. ...

Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929, Reims — 6 March 2007, Paris) was a French sociologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist, known above all for his theory of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. Trained in German studies, he began his career as a teacher of German and a translator — he rendered into French texts by Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss, among others. From 1966 he taught sociology at Nanterre (Paris X), the epicenter of the May 1968 unrest, under the influence of Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes. ...

Jean-François Lyotard Jean-François Lyotard (10 August 1924, Versailles — 21 April 1998, Paris) was a French philosopher, one of the central voices in the debate over postmodernity. Trained in philosophy at the Sorbonne, he taught at the lycée of Constantine in colonial Algeria, an experience that shaped his political engagement. Over his career he taught at Nanterre, at the experimental University of Vincennes (Paris VIII), and later at North American universities; he was closely associated with the Collège international de philosophie (founded in 1983 by Derrida, Châtelet, Faye, and Lecourt), which he went on to direct from 1984 to 1986. ...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Born in Geneva in 1712 and motherless from birth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was largely self-taught and led a wandering life before rising to prominence in Paris, where he kept company with the Encyclopedists — from whom he would later break dramatically. Recognition came in 1750, when he won the Dijon Academy’s competition with a discourse that already announced his most provocative thesis: that the arts and sciences, far from improving humanity, corrupt morals. Persecuted after the publication of Emile, condemned and forced into exile, he ended his life tormented, in 1778, leaving behind the Confessions. He is the great critic of the Enlightenment from within the Enlightenment itself. ...

Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher, novelist, and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong intellectual and romantic companion. A stay in Berlin in the 1930s brought him into direct contact with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, which would become the foundation of his thought. A prisoner of war in 1940–41 and later a central figure of postwar Parisian intellectual life, he made philosophy a public and engaged activity: he founded the review Les Temps Modernes, drew close to Marxism, and, faithful to his refusal of institutional honors, declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. His death, in 1980, brought tens of thousands into the streets of Paris. ...

Jeremy Bentham Founder of Utilitarianism. English jurist and philosopher; radical social reformer. His skeleton (Auto-Icon) is displayed at University College London, in accordance with his will. Trained for the bar, Bentham soon abandoned the practice of law to devote himself to its critique. His first target was the English common law and, in particular, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which he accused of cloaking privilege and arbitrariness in solemn language. Against that tradition Bentham proposed a single, clear, measurable standard for evaluating laws and institutions: the principle of utility, according to which the worth of any action, law, or policy is measured by the amount of happiness — understood as pleasure and the absence of pain — that it produces for those affected. Morals and legislation would thus cease to rest on tradition, intuition, or supposed natural rights (which he dismissed as “nonsense upon stilts”) and become the object of a rational, secular calculation grounded in the empirical observation of human motives. ...

Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia, the son of a Lutheran schoolteacher and cantor, in a pietist household that shaped his religious sensibility and his lasting interest in language and popular culture. In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he attended the lectures of Kant — then a young Privatdozent (an untenured lecturer without a chair), still far from the critical philosophy that would make his name — and formed a decisive friendship with Johann Georg Hamann, who instilled in him a deep suspicion of abstract rationalism and an enduring interest in the relationship between language, thought, and faith. Between 1764 and 1769 he worked as a schoolteacher and pastor in Riga, a cosmopolitan Baltic port that sharpened his interest in the diversity of languages and popular customs. A sea voyage to France in 1769, recorded in the Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, and his meeting with the young Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770, drew him into the nascent Sturm und Drang movement. In 1776, at Goethe’s invitation, he took up the post of general superintendent (court preacher) in Weimar, where he remained until his death in 1803, forming with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland the circle later known as Weimar Classicism. ...

Johann Gottlieb Fichte First post-Kantian to overcome the thing-in-itself. Founder of German Idealism; first rector of the University of Berlin (1811). The Addresses to the German Nation (1808) made him a symbol of German cultural nationalism. Of humble origins, Fichte came to philosophy through his reading of Kant, which he described as an intellectual liberation. His first work, published anonymously in 1792, was taken by the public to be a writing of Kant himself; once the misunderstanding was cleared up, his reputation was secured, and in 1794 he took the chair of philosophy at Jena, then the most vibrant center of German thought. There he developed the Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), an attempt to refound the whole of critical philosophy upon a single unconditioned principle — the Ego — and to eliminate the dogmatic residue that, in his view, the Kantian thing-in-itself still retained. ...

Johannes Kepler Born in Weil der Stadt, Germany, in 1571, Johannes Kepler was a fascinating spirit of transition: a devout Protestant, he studied theology at Tübingen but devoted his life to astronomy, convinced that to decipher the order of the heavens was to read the mind of God. He worked as assistant to the great observer Tycho Brahe in Prague and, on inheriting his data of the highest precision — especially on Mars — had at his disposal the material that would make his discoveries possible. ...

John Dewey American philosopher, the greatest exponent of pragmatism in the 20th century. He reformulated pragmatism as instrumentalism: knowledge is an instrument for solving practical problems. A philosopher of democracy and education, he exerted monumental influence on modern pedagogy. Trained in the atmosphere of Hegelian idealism that dominated North American academic philosophy in the late nineteenth century, Dewey gradually moved away from that starting point as he absorbed Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism and the experimental method of the natural sciences. The decisive turn came during his years at the University of Chicago, where he founded a laboratory school designed to test, in educational practice, his ideas about the continuity between thought and action. From that experience grew the conviction at the heart of his entire work: that the separation between theory and practice, between knowing and doing, is an error inherited from a philosophical tradition that privileged contemplation over living experience. For Dewey, thinking is not the mirroring of a ready-made world but an intervention in it, a way of reorganizing situations that have become problematic. ...

John Locke John Locke was born in Wrington, England, in 1632, was educated at Oxford, and practiced medicine before becoming secretary and physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, which brought him into the orbit of high English politics. Caught up in the struggles between Parliament and the absolutist Stuart crown, he went into exile in Holland during the reign of James II and returned only in 1689, with the Glorious Revolution, which enshrined the parliamentary order he would help to justify philosophically. He is regarded as the father of classical liberalism and one of the greatest influences on empiricism and modern political thought. ...

John Rawls American political philosopher; A Theory of Justice (1971) relaunched normative political philosophy after decades of dominance by positivism and utilitarianism. The most influential work of 20th-century political philosophy. A professor at Harvard for most of his career, Rawls wrote at a time when many regarded political philosophy as dead, reduced to conceptual analysis or to a history of doctrines. His central problem was to find a conception of justice for the basic institutions of society — the constitution, the economy, the family — that could be accepted by free and equal citizens without appealing to a single comprehensive worldview. Against the dominant utilitarianism, which was willing to sacrifice the well-being of some for the sake of the aggregate sum, Rawls insisted that each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the general welfare cannot override. To articulate this intuition he revived the contractualist tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, but at a higher level of abstraction: the agreement is not about a concrete government, but about the very principles that should govern the basic structure. ...