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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 Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and studied at the Tübingen seminary alongside Hölderlin and Schelling. A young enthusiast of the French Revolution, he saw in Napoleon — whom he glimpsed on horseback at Jena in 1806 — the “world-soul” on the march. After years as a private tutor, journalist, and school headmaster, he reached the chairs of Heidelberg and, above all, Berlin, where he became the most influential philosopher in the Germany of his time, until his death in 1831. His work is the most ambitious system in the history of philosophy: logic, nature, spirit, history, art, and religion articulated as moments of a single process. ...

George Berkeley An Irish philosopher born in 1685 and later the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley produced his most important philosophical works while still very young, before the age of thirty. A man of faith and action, he even crossed the Atlantic with a project to found a college in Bermuda for the American colonies. He is remembered as the second great name of British empiricism, between Locke and Hume — and the most surprising of the three, for pushing empiricism to a radical conclusion: that matter does not exist. ...

Gerd Alberto Bornheim (1929–2002), born in Caxias do Sul, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, was one of the principal introducers and interpreters of existentialism and phenomenology in Brazil. His intellectual activity spanned a broad field: beyond existentialism, he devoted himself to dialectics, to the study of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and to the philosophy of art and theatre. A professor at several institutions—among them the USP, the UFRGS, the UERJ and the PUC—he played a decisive role in the philosophical formation of several generations. His writing combines expository clarity with conceptual rigour, which made works such as his introduction to philosophising and his study of Sartre standard reading for philosophy students across the country. ...

Gilles Deleuze French philosopher; created a philosophy of difference and multiplicity that subverts the metaphysical tradition centered on identity. Produced solo works and collaborations with Félix Guattari. Key Concepts Difference in itself (Difference and Repetition, 1968): difference is not derived from identity — it is originary; identity is secondary to difference. Critique of the tradition that always subordinated difference to the Same Rhizome (with Guattari): against the arborescent model (single root, hierarchy, center), the rhizome is horizontal multiplicity without point of origin or destination — connects any point with any other. Metaphor for thought, politics, and culture Lines of flight (lignes de fuite): every social and subjective system contains forces of deterritorialization that escape dominant structures — creation of the new, resistance to control Plane of immanence: reality has no transcendence; everything is immanent to a single plane of forces and intensities — against Platonic dualism and theological transcendence Desire as production (with Guattari): against Freud (desire as lack) — desire is productive, affirmative force; capitalism captures desiring production but it always overflows Body without organs: surface of intensities without prior organization — against the organism as normative model of the body Concept of concept: philosophy creates concepts — it does not represent, contemplate, or communicate; creating concepts is the philosopher’s specific task Influenced by Bergson — duration, multiplicity, creation (Bergsonism, 1966) Nietzsche — will to power, eternal return, affirmation (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962) Spinoza — immanence and power (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1970) Hume — radical empiricism and associationism Influenced Cultural studies and queer theory Cognitive sciences and biology (self-organization) Architecture, contemporary art Post-Marxist political theory Works Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962); Bergsonism (1966); Difference and Repetition (1968); The Logic of Sense (1969); Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Guattari); A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Guattari); What is Philosophy? (1991, with Guattari). ...

Giordano Bruno Born in Nola, near Naples, in 1548, Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar, but, accused of heresy, he abandoned the habit while still young and began a wandering life that took him through Geneva, Paris, London, Germany, and Prague, teaching cosmology, the art of memory, and his own daring ideas. Back in Italy, he was arrested by the Inquisition, held in prison for eight years and, refusing to recant, burned alive in Rome, in the Campo de’ Fiori, on 17 February 1600. He has since become a symbol of freedom of thought in the face of dogma. ...

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). ...

Gorgias A native of Leontini, in Sicily, Gorgias lived, according to tradition, more than a hundred years (c. 483–375 BCE). He came to Athens in 427 BCE as ambassador of his city and dazzled the Athenians with a new oratorical style, full of figures and rhythms — becoming the most celebrated and highly paid master of rhetoric of Antiquity. Alongside Protagoras, he is the great figure of the first generation of the Sophists. ...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Born in Leipzig in 1646, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last great universal sage: at once philosopher, mathematician, logician, physicist, jurist, historian, and diplomat. He invented — independently of Newton — the infinitesimal calculus, whose notation we still use, conceived the binary arithmetic that underlies computing, and designed calculating machines. He spent much of his life in the service of the House of Hanover and died in 1716, leaving a body of work scattered across thousands of letters and few published books. Philosophically, he sought the great reconciliation of modern science, the metaphysical tradition, and faith. ...

Gottlob Frege A German mathematician born in 1848, Gottlob Frege spent almost his entire career as a professor at Jena, in relative obscurity — his genius would be fully recognized only after his death, in 1925, above all thanks to Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Today he is regarded as the founder of modern logic and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy. His first great achievement was the creation, in the Begriffsschrift (1879), of a predicate logic that retired the old Aristotelian syllogistic: with quantifiers (“for all,” “there exists”), variables, and functions, Frege gave logic the precision and expressive power it needed to analyze mathematics. His larger aim was logicism — to demonstrate that arithmetic reduces to pure logic. The project, set out in the Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was struck head-on by a letter from Russell (1902) revealing a contradiction in the system; Frege never fully recovered from the blow. ...

H.L.A. Hart British legal philosopher, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford (1952–1968); The Concept of Law (1961) is the most influential work of 20th-century legal positivism and reshaped the terms of debate over the nature, validity, and bindingness of law. Key Concepts Primary and secondary rules: the central distinction of The Concept of Law. Primary rules impose duties of conduct (do not kill, keep contracts). Secondary rules are meta-rules about primary rules, subdivided into: (a) the rule of recognition — the criterion that identifies which norms belong to the legal system; (b) rules of change — procedures for creating, altering, and repealing primary rules; (c) rules of adjudication — confer authority on officials to settle disputes Rule of recognition: the norm that defines the criteria of legal validity in a given system — it is not itself valid or invalid but exists as a social fact, accepted by officials from an “internal point of view.” It answers “what is law?” without appealing to morality Internal point of view: whoever accepts a rule as a standard of conduct and criticism — not merely from fear of sanctions — adopts the internal point of view. Understanding law requires grasping this standpoint, not merely describing external behaviour (as Austinian behaviourism did) Open texture: general language inevitably has clear cases of application and a penumbra of uncertainty where the norm does not determine the outcome. In hard cases judges exercise discretion — they choose, within limits, which interpretation to adopt. Hart denies that law always has a ready-made answer (the criticism Dworkin will level against him) Conceptual separation of law and morality: unlike natural law theory, the legal validity of a norm depends on formal criteria (membership in the system), not on its moral content. An unjust norm may be valid; a morally correct norm may not be law. This does not imply that law ought not to be criticised morally — only that such criticism operates on a distinct plane Minimum content of natural law: despite the separation, Hart concedes that any legal system that aspires to survival must incorporate a nucleus of norms (protection of life, property, keeping of promises) imposed by the contingencies of human nature — the “minimum content of natural law” Hart–Fuller debate (1958): in the Harvard Law Review, Hart and Lon Fuller conducted the most celebrated exchange in 20th-century anglophone legal philosophy. Against Fuller’s thesis that law has an “inner morality,” Hart insists that validity and morality are conceptually distinct Influenced by Jeremy Bentham — precursor of legal positivism, critic of natural law John Austin — command theory and the notion of law as the sovereign’s command (Hart critiques and supersedes Austin) Ludwig Wittgenstein — philosophy of language, meaning as use, open texture J.L. Austin — Oxford ordinary-language philosophy Hans Kelsen — normativist positivism (Hart engages critically with the Grundnorm) Influenced Ronald Dworkin — Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and Law’s Empire (1986) are the principal philosophical response to Hart Joseph Raz — The Concept of a Legal System (1970) and the authority thesis Neil MacCormick — institutional positivism The entire tradition of anglophone analytical jurisprudence Works Causation in the Law (1959, with Tony Honoré); The Concept of Law (1961; 2nd posthumous ed. 1994, with “Postscript”); Law, Liberty, and Morality (1963); The Morality of the Criminal Law (1964); Punishment and Responsibility (1968); Essays on Bentham (1982); Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (1983). ...

Hannah Arendt German-American political philosopher, Jewish, student of Heidegger and Jaspers. Thinker of totalitarianism, political freedom, and human action. One of the most original voices of the 20th century. Key Concepts The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism) is a radically new phenomenon — not classical tyranny; it is based on total terror, ideology, and the destruction of public space and human singularity The Human Condition (vita activa, 1958): three fundamental activities: Labor: metabolism with nature, production of the necessary (animal laborans) Work: fabrication of durable objects, artificial world (homo faber) Action: the initiation of the genuinely new among humans — the only directly political activity; reveals who one is (not what) Banality of Evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963): Adolf Eichmann was not a monster, but a bureaucrat without thought; radical evil does not require perversity — mere absence of reflection (thoughtlessness) suffices Public space: politics as a space of appearance among equals, where words and actions reveal identity — against the privatization of political life Natality (counterpart to Heideggerian mortality): each human being is a new beginning — the capacity to initiate something radically new is the basis of political freedom Influenced by Heidegger — fundamental ontology, analysis of existence (but criticizes his Nazi engagement) Karl Jaspers — existentialism and communication Aristotle — vita activa, politics as the highest mode of life Kant — judgment, sensus communis, political philosophy Influenced Contemporary political philosophy Studies on totalitarianism and democracy Theory of moral judgment Judith Butler — precariousness and political life Works The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); The Human Condition (1958); Between Past and Future (1961); Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); On Revolution (1963); The Life of the Mind (posthumous, 1978). ...

Hans-Georg Gadamer German philosopher; principal representative of philosophical hermeneutics in the 20th century. Student of Heidegger; his work Truth and Method (1960) reformulated the problem of understanding as a fundamental philosophical question. Key Concepts Philosophical hermeneutics: understanding is not a scientific method — it is the mode of being of historical Dasein; not something we do, but something that happens to us Hermeneutic circle: understanding a text requires pre-understanding (of the whole), which is revised by the parts, which are illuminated by the revised whole — ascending spiral, not vicious circle Prejudice (Vorurteil): rehabilitates prejudices (pre-judgments) as a condition of all understanding — they are not obstacles to overcome, but structures of openness to the world; the Enlightenment erred in denouncing all prejudice Tradition and authority: tradition transmits sedimented truths that critical reason cannot simply discard — it is a condition of our hermeneutic situation Fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung): in understanding a text from the past, the interpreter’s horizon and the text’s horizon fuse; there is no “pure” access to the original meaning (against Dilthey’s historicism) Language as universal medium: “Being that can be understood is language”; all human experience is mediated by language — hermeneutics is the universal dimension of philosophy Dialogue: authentic conversation is the model of understanding — the other tells us something we did not know; the question opens the horizon Influenced by Heidegger — being-in-the-world, historicity, language Hegel — dialectics and historical mediation Plato — Socratic dialogue as model Friedrich Schleiermacher — romantic hermeneutics (critical starting point) Wilhelm Dilthey — hermeneutics of human sciences (supersedes) Influenced Paul Ricoeur — hermeneutics of text and narrative Habermas — famous debate on tradition vs. critique (Gadamer-Habermas) Literary theory (reception: Jauss, Iser) Philosophy of law and bioethics Works Truth and Method (1960); Reason in the Age of Science (1976); Praise of Theory (1983); The Heritage of Europe (1989). ...

Henri Bergson French philosopher; Nobel Prize in Literature (1927). Criticized scientific mechanism and intellectualism, proposing intuition as a superior philosophical method and duration as the real time of consciousness. Enormous influence in the early twentieth century. Key Concepts Duration (durée): the time lived by consciousness is radically different from the measurable time of science — it is continuous and heterogeneous flux, not succession of discrete instants. The clock spatializes time, falsifying it Intuition: the philosophical method par excellence — intellectual sympathy that inserts itself into the interior of the object, grasping it in its becoming; superior to analytical intelligence, which fragments and spatializes Intelligence vs. intuition: intelligence evolved to act upon matter (carving out, measuring, fabricating); only intuition grasps the living in its duration. Philosophy must overcome intelligence by itself Élan vital (Creative Evolution, 1907): immanent vital force that drives evolution — neither teleological nor mechanistic, but creative and unpredictable; life is continuous invention of new forms Memory (Matter and Memory, 1896): distinction between habit-memory (motor, corporal) and pure memory (image of the past as it was); the present is the tip of the past — no pure present exists Laughter (Laughter, 1900): we laugh at what is mechanical superimposed upon the living — rigidity where we expect flexibility. Comedy is social diagnosis Influenced by Kant — criticism and limits of knowledge (but overcomes idealism) Herbert Spencer — evolution (starting point for critique) William James — pragmatism and experience of time Influenced Merleau Ponty — body and perception Deleuze — Bergsonism (1966): the concept of duration and multiplicity as the basis of his ontology of difference William James — mutual exchange Literary modernism (Proust, the time of memory) Husserl — parallelisms in the critique of objective time Works Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889); Matter and Memory (1896); Laughter (1900); Creative Evolution (1907); Introduction to Metaphysics (1903); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). ...

Heraclitus Born in Ephesus, in Ionia, and active around 500 BCE, Heraclitus belonged to an ancient aristocratic family. Proud and solitary in temperament, he wrote in a style of enigmatic aphorisms that earned him, already in antiquity, the epithet “the Obscure.” Some 126 fragments survive — dense, paradoxical, and of extraordinary poetic force. His central intuition is that of universal becoming: nothing remains, everything transforms ceaselessly — “panta rhei,” “everything flows.” Hence his most famous image: one cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing upon those who enter it. As the symbol of this perpetual flux, Heraclitus chose fire as the principle (arché): reality is like a flame that endures precisely because it is always consuming and renewing itself. ...

Herbert Marcuse Born in Berlin in 1898, Herbert Marcuse fought in the First World War, studied philosophy with Heidegger and Husserl at Freiburg, and joined the Institute for Social Research. Exiled in the United States during Nazism — where he would live for the rest of his life — he became a university professor and, in the 1960s, the “guru of the New Left”: his ideas directly inspired the student movements of 1968, and Angela Davis was his student. ...

Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the most versatile and intellectually honest philosophers of the twentieth century. Over a career spanning six decades, mostly at Harvard, Putnam pursued an unusual philosophical itinerary: he defended positions that he later criticised with the same energy with which he had established them. He was a functionalist and then rejected functionalism; a scientific realist and then proposed “internal realism”; a sympathiser with logical positivism and then its critic. This willingness for self-criticism is one of the hallmarks of his philosophical style. ...

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. ...

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. ...