Contemporary Philosophy

Kimberlé Crenshaw Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born 1959 in Canton, Ohio) is an American legal scholar and professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. She is one of the founders of Critical Race Theory and the author who coined the concept of intersectionality, now central to gender studies, race studies, and political philosophy, but originally formulated within antidiscrimination law. The problem she starts from is practical and legal. Analyzing discrimination cases — especially DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), in which Black women were left legally unprotected because the company hired (white) women and (male) Black workers — Crenshaw showed that single-axis frameworks (discrimination either by race or by gender) rendered invisible the situation of those who stand at the intersection of more than one axis. ...

Louis Althusser Louis Althusser (16 October 1918, Birmendreïs, French Algeria — 22 October 1990, La Verrière) was a French Marxist philosopher, the leading name of structural Marxism. A professor at the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm for decades, he trained and influenced an entire generation (Foucault, Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou). A member of the French Communist Party from 1948, he devoted himself to a rigorous, “scientific” rereading of Marx against the humanist and historicist readings then dominant. His life was marked by severe mental illness: in 1980, during a psychotic episode, he killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann, and was declared unfit to stand trial. ...

Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930 in Belgium) is a Belgian-French philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst, one of the leading voices of so-called difference feminism. Holding doctorates in linguistics and in philosophy, she belonged to the Lacanian circle until the publication of her thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), whose radical critique of psychoanalysis cost her expulsion from Jacques Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris and her teaching post at the University of Vincennes. ...

María Lugones María Lugones (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 26 January 1944 — 14 July 2020, Syracuse, New York) was an Argentine-American philosopher and activist, Professor of Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Binghamton University. Her intellectual path weaves together political philosophy, feminist theory, and Latin American decolonial thought in a genuinely singular way: rather than applying Eurocentric categories to the experience of women of the Global South, Lugones set out to refound those categories from what colonization destroyed and what the resistance of the colonized preserved. Her work brings together the women-of-color feminism of North America — especially that of Gloria Anzaldúa — with the decolonial critique of Aníbal Quijano, producing a theory in which race and gender are not separate variables that add up, but dimensions fused within a single structure of colonial power. ...

Mário Ferreira dos Santos Mário Ferreira dos Santos was the most prolific Brazilian philosopher of the 20th century, author of more than fifty works seeking to build a comprehensive philosophical system — known as Concrete Philosophy — synthesising the classical Western tradition (especially Pythagoreanism, Aristotle, and Scholasticism) with original contributions in ontology, mathematics, symbolism, and theory of knowledge. Key Concepts Concrete Philosophy: The name Ferreira dos Santos gave to his systematic project. It stands opposed both to the abstract logicism of the analytic tradition and to existentialist subjectivism. The “concrete” is reality considered in the fullness of its determinations — neither raw empirical data nor pure abstraction, but the dialectical synthesis of both. ...

McTaggart John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was born in London on 3 September 1866 and spent virtually his entire career as a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge; he retired in 1923 and died in London on 18 January 1925. Shaped by the British Idealism of the late nineteenth century — alongside Francis Herbert Bradley and decisively influenced by Hegel — McTaggart developed a systematic and strikingly original metaphysics that sets itself apart from Bradley’s absolute monism on one side and the emergent naturalism that would come to dominate twentieth-century philosophy on the other. His magnum opus, The Nature of Existence (2 vols., 1921–1927), stands as one of the last grand metaphysical systems in the English-speaking philosophical tradition, built with a logical rigour that bears comparison to Hegel’s Science of Logic. In the philosophy of time, his distinction between the A-series and the B-series — published in the article “The Unreality of Time” (Mind, 1908) — became the obligatory starting point for every subsequent debate on the ontology of time. ...

Pável Florenski Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (21 January 1882 [O.S. 9 January], Yevlakh, present-day Azerbaijan — 8 December 1937, executed near Leningrad) was an Orthodox priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and art historian — one of the most wide-ranging intellects in twentieth-century Russia. His contemporaries called him “the Russian Leonardo da Vinci,” an encomiastic phrase that nonetheless accurately signals the breadth of his contributions: he studied theology in Moscow under Sergei Trubetskoy, was ordained a priest in 1911, and simultaneously taught mathematics and philosophy at the country’s leading institutions. After the Revolution of 1917, he continued working in Soviet scientific institutes — refusing to emigrate as many of his contemporaries did — until his first arrest in 1928. Deported to the Gulag, he was shot on 8 December 1937; for decades, the Soviet regime falsified the date of his death, recording it as 1943. ...

Richard Rorty Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher who taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Stanford. He began as an analytic philosopher formed in the Wittgenstein-Sellars tradition, but Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) projected him as one of the most radical critics of the Western epistemological tradition. Rorty is the principal representative of neopragmatism, which combines the American pragmatist heritage (Dewey, James) with elements of continental philosophy (Heidegger, Derrida) and late analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars). ...

Robert Nozick Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher and professor at Harvard, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) became the most systematic and rigorous libertarian response to John Rawls’s theory of justice, reorienting anglophone political-philosophical debate for decades. Beyond political philosophy, he made original contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Key Concepts Rights as Side Constraints (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974): Nozick holds that individual rights are side constraints on action — not factors to be maximised within a calculation, but limits that cannot be violated even when violation would produce better outcomes for the greatest number. Individual dignity prohibits using persons as mere means to others’ ends. ...

Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (12 November 1915, Cherbourg — 26 March 1980, Paris) was a French literary critic, semiologist, and essayist, one of the central figures of structuralism and of the post-structuralist turn. Marked in youth by tuberculosis, which kept him from a regular academic career, he built an unclassifiable body of work poised between criticism, philosophy, and literature. In 1977 he was elected to a chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. He died in 1980, weeks after being struck by a van in Paris. ...

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.” ...