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Donald Davidson was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981, following positions at Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller, Davidson constructed a philosophical system remarkable for its internal coherence: his philosophy of mind, theory of action, semantics, and epistemology are closely interconnected, articulated around the themes of events, causation, truth, and interpretation. Key Concepts Anomalous Monism (Mental Events, published in Experience and Theory, 1970): Davidson argues that mental events are identical to physical events, but that this identity does not entail the existence of strict psychophysical laws. The central argument distinguishes three theses: (1) there is causal interaction between mental and physical events; (2) causally related events are covered by deterministic laws; (3) there are no strict laws connecting mental and physical descriptions. Davidson’s solution is to hold that a single event can be described in both mental and physical terms — but that mental properties are anomalous: there are no psychophysical laws enabling reduction of the mental to the physical. This is a form of monism (physics is the only causal domain) combined with anomaly (the mental is not reducible to physical laws). ...

Duns Scotus Born around 1266 in Duns, Scotland, John Duns Scotus entered the Franciscan order and taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died prematurely in 1308. The subtlety and rigor of his distinctions earned him the title of “Subtle Doctor.” Alongside Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, he is one of the great names of high Scholasticism — and the principal Franciscan counterpoint to Thomism. His most characteristic metaphysical thesis is the univocity of being. Against Thomas Aquinas, who held that “being” is attributed to God and creatures only by analogy, Scotus maintains that the concept of being has a univocal sense, the same for the Creator and the creature — without which, he argues, no knowledge of God from the world would be possible. It is the most universal and indeterminate concept of all. ...

Edmund Husserl Born in 1859 in Prossnitz, in Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire), Edmund Husserl trained as a mathematician before turning to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano, from whom he inherited the notion of intentionality. Dissatisfied with the psychologism that reduced logic to laws of the mind, he set out to refound philosophy as a rigorous science, capable of describing experience exactly. He was a professor at Göttingen and Freiburg, where he had Heidegger as his assistant and successor. A Jew, he was stripped of his rights by Nazism and died isolated in 1938; his thousands of manuscripts survived only because a Franciscan monk smuggled them into Belgium. ...

Edward Said Edward Wadie Said (1935–2003) was a Palestinian-American literary critic and cultural theorist. He was born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate to a Palestinian Christian family, raised between Jerusalem and Cairo, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and taught comparative literature at Columbia University from 1963 until his death. His book Orientalism (1978) is regarded as the founding text of postcolonial studies: there, drawing on Foucault (discourse/power) and Gramsci (hegemony), Said argues that “the Orient” is not a neutral region of the world but a construction of Western discourse that produces its object and legitimises colonial domination. Said was also a leading public intellectual: a member of the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991, an advocate of the Palestinian cause, and an influential model of the “exilic intellectual” and dissenter. ...

Elizabeth Anscombe Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001) was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. A student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, she became one of his literary executors and translated his Philosophical Investigations (1953) into English — a rendering that remains canonical. A devout Catholic, she fused the rigour of the analytic tradition with an Aristotelian-Thomist sensibility that shaped her entire body of work. Her monograph Intention (1957) is widely regarded as the founding text of contemporary philosophy of action, while her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) is commonly identified as the starting point of the virtue ethics revival in the Anglophone world. She taught at Oxford and, from 1970, held the chair of philosophy at Cambridge once occupied by Wittgenstein. ...

Emmanuel Lévinas Lithuanian-French philosopher, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He introduced Husserl and Heidegger to France, but later critically surpassed them. A Holocaust survivor, he developed a philosophy where ethics is first philosophy — prior to ontology. Key Concepts The Face (le visage): the manifestation of the Other that addresses me and demands a response — not a physical face, but an ethical presence that says “thou shalt not kill”; the point from which all moral responsibility emerges Ethics as first philosophy: against Heidegger, for whom ontology (being) is the foundation of everything — for Lévinas, the ethical relation with the Other precedes and grounds all ontology Radical alterity (autrui): the Other cannot be reduced to the same, cannot be fully understood or assimilated — this irreducibility is the fundamental ethical fact Totality and Infinity: Western philosophy tends toward “totalization” — engulfing the different within the same. The Infinite breaks into this totality through the face of the Other, resisting capture Infinite responsibility: I am responsible for the Other asymmetrically and without reciprocity — “I am responsible even for what I did not do”; responsibility precedes freedom Il y a (there is): the experience of anonymous, impersonal, threatening being — the murmur of being before any existent; the night in which being becomes unbearable Saying and Said (le Dire / le Dit): “Saying” is ethical exposure to the Other, the act of address; the “Said” is propositional content — ethics resides in the Saying, which the Said always betrays Influenced by Husserl — phenomenology (was his student and translator) Heidegger — fundamental ontology (later critically surpassed) Bergson — philosophy of duration and life Jewish tradition (Talmud, Rosenzweig, Buber) Influenced Derrida — deconstruction and ethics (debate on violence and metaphysics) Habermas — ethics and recognition of the other Judith Butler — vulnerability and ethical responsibility Contemporary Christian and Jewish theology Postcolonial studies and recognition theory Works Existence and Existents (1947); Totality and Infinity (1961); Otherwise than Being (1974); Ethics and Infinity (1982). ...

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). Key Concepts Dichotomy of control: what depends on us vs. what does not depend on us Inner freedom as the only true freedom Prohairesis: the faculty of rational choice — sole complete good Philosophy as a way of life, not abstract theory Influenced by Zeno of Citium — Stoic doctrine Socrates — self-examination Influenced Marcus Aurelius — Meditations are notes of Stoic practice inspired by Epictetus Contemporary cognitive psychology (rational-emotive therapy by Ellis) Works He did not write. Arrian (disciple) recorded: Enchiridion (Manual); Discourses (8 books, 4 preserved). ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. Key Concepts Idols (obstacles to knowledge): of the tribe (general human defects), of the cave (individual prejudices), of the marketplace (deceptions of language), of the theater (false philosophical doctrines) New inductive method: three tables (presence, absence, degrees) + elimination of false hypotheses → “first vintage” “Knowledge is power”: science and dominion over nature coincide Anticipations vs. interpretations of nature: only interpretations (via correct method) are legitimate knowledge Influenced by William of Ockham — nominalism, elimination of superfluous entities Aristotle — but he criticizes and surpasses him Influenced Locke — tabula rasa and empiricism Hume — induction as basis of knowledge Newton — rules of philosophizing Foundation of the Royal Society (1660) — Baconian program Works Novum Organum (1620); New Atlantis (1627, scientific utopia); The Advancement of Learning (1605). ...

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 Washington D.C. 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 great-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. Phases of thought Phase Central theme Philosophy of Nature (~1797) Nature as visible Spirit, living organism Philosophy of Identity (~1801) Absolute = undifferentiated identity of subject and object Philosophy of Freedom (1809) Evil has positive reality; freedom as abyss Positive Philosophy (late) Concrete existence irreducible; critique of rationalism Key concepts Nature as objectified Spirit: the same activity of the subject, but in unconscious degree Absolute: undifferentiated identity of ideal and real, subject and object — point of indifference Evil and freedom: evil is perverse use of freedom — man can isolate himself from the whole Positive philosophy: concrete existence is prior to any system — anticipates Heidegger and Kierkegaard Influenced by Kant and Fichte — point of departure Spinoza — identity of subject/object Giordano Bruno — animated nature Böhme — evil and freedom Influenced Hegel — dialectic of identity/difference German Romanticism (Schlegel, Novalis) Nietzsche — creative will Heidegger — concrete existence and finitude Works System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). ...

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. ...