Contemporary Philosophy

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

Friedrich Nietzsche died in 1900, yet he seems to have written his books for the twenty-first century. The German philosopher who proclaimed “God is dead” was not celebrating — he was issuing a bleak diagnosis of what happens when an entire civilization loses the foundation that organized its values. In today’s world, that diagnosis resonates with unsettling precision: we live in an era of meaning crisis, of collapsing values, of diffuse nihilism concealed beneath layers of digital entertainment, social media, and consumerism. Nietzsche did not merely predict this scenario — he described in detail what was coming. ...

Few contemporary philosophers divide opinion as sharply as Judith Butler. For some, she is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century — someone who revolutionized our understanding of gender, sexuality, and power. For others, she is the ultimate symbol of a philosophy that lost itself in the labyrinth of its own language, producing deliberately obscure texts to mask shallow ideas. To understand why Butler provokes such extreme reactions, we must first grasp what she actually says — and then have the intellectual honesty to identify where the argument falters. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Derek Parfit Derek Parfit (11 December 1942, Chengdu, China — January 2017, Oxford) was a British philosopher, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, regarded as one of the most important moral philosophers of the late twentieth century. He worked obsessively and almost ascetically, and published little — but each work left a deep mark on the philosophy of personal identity, rationality, and ethics. His Reasons and Persons (1984) is one of the landmark works of contemporary analytic philosophy. ...

Édouard Glissant Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928, Sainte-Marie, Martinique — 3 February 2011, Paris) was a poet, novelist, essayist, and philosopher, one of the major figures of Caribbean thought and of French-language postcolonial theory. A pupil at the Lycée Schœlcher, where Aimé Césaire was among his teachers, he went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnography at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. He received the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde. His entire body of work — spanning poetry, fiction, and philosophy — turns on a single intuition: that identity is grounded not in a single root but in an ever-open relation with the other. Against the philosophies of purity and origin, Glissant thought the Caribbean — land of the plantation, of uprooting and forced mixture — as the laboratory of a humanity to come. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher born in Rome in 1942, professor at the universities of Verona and Venice (IUAV), as well as at various European and American institutions. His work articulates historical-philological analysis, political philosophy, ontology, and theory of language around a genealogical project on the biopolitical paradigm of the West. He is one of the most translated and debated contemporary thinkers. Key Concepts Homo Sacer (Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995): Revisiting a figure from archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the homo sacer as one who can be killed by anyone without it constituting homicide (occidi), but who cannot be sacrificed (immolari). This figure articulates bare life (nuda vita / zōē) — the mere biological fact of living — excluded from politically qualified life (bíos). ...

Harry Frankfurt Harry Gordon Frankfurt (29 May 1929, Langhorne, Pennsylvania — 16 July 2023, Santa Monica, California) was an American philosopher, professor emeritus at Princeton University, one of the most influential figures in the philosophy of action and of free will in the twentieth century. He began as a scholar of Descartes (Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, 1970) and went on to build a concise, incisive body of work on the will, the person, and love — plus a short essay that would belatedly make him a bestselling author. ...

Homi Bhabha Homi Kharshedji Bhabha (b. 1949, Bombay — now Mumbai) is an Indian theorist of culture and literature, raised within the Parsi community of his native city and educated in Bombay and at Oxford. He holds the Anne F. Rothenberg Professorship of English and American Literature at Harvard and is, alongside Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, one of the figures who consolidated postcolonial theory as an academic field. His landmark work, The Location of Culture (1994), collects essays that shifted the focus of colonial critique: from the denunciation of domination to the analysis of the ambivalence that runs through every relation between colonizer and colonized. Writing at the crossroads of Derridean deconstruction, the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Freud, and Fanon’s colonial clinic, Bhabha seeks to show that colonial power is never as coherent or as secure as it imagines itself to be. ...

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 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. ...

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva (born 24 June 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, linguist, semiotician, and novelist. She arrived in Paris in 1965 on a doctoral fellowship and soon joined the group around the journal Tel Quel, the epicenter of the French intellectual avant-garde. She became a professor at the University of Paris VII and a practicing psychoanalyst. Her work cuts across linguistics, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, with a strong debt to Bakhtin, Saussure, and Lacan. ...