Mencio Note on sources: The dates of Mencius (孟子 Mèngzǐ, “Master Meng”; personal name Kē 軻) are conventional estimates — c. 372–289 BCE — based on traditional historical chronologies. The text Mèngzǐ (孟子), compiled in 7 books (piān), is considered more unified than Confucius’s Analects, although it also involved contributions from disciples in its final redaction. Mencius is honored in the Confucian tradition as the “Second Sage” (Yàshèng 亞聖), immediately below Confucius. ...
Michael Sandel Michael Sandel (b. 1953, Minneapolis) is an American political philosopher and professor of government at Harvard since 1980, known both for the rigour of his philosophical critique of Rawlsian liberalism and for the enormous public reach of his course “Justice”, one of the most popular classes in Harvard’s history. Sandel is a central figure in the so-called liberal–communitarian debate of the 1980s, although he himself resists the label. His doctoral thesis, published as Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), offered one of the sharpest philosophical critiques of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In the following decades he broadened his scope to the critique of the commodification of social life and of meritocratic ideology. ...
Michel de Montaigne Born in 1533 at his family’s château in the Périgord, Michel de Montaigne received a refined humanist education — raised to speak Latin as his first language. He served as a magistrate in the Parlement of Bordeaux, where he formed a profound friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whose death would mark him forever. Around 1571 he withdrew to the tower of his château, surrounded by books, and there, amid the bloody Wars of Religion, he began to write a work of an entirely new genre: the Essays. He is one of the fathers of modern thought and the inventor of the essay as a literary and philosophical form. ...
Michel Foucault Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where his teachers included Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. A psychologist by training as well as a philosopher, from 1970 he held the chair of “History of Systems of Thought” at the Collège de France and was a politically engaged intellectual — above all in the struggle for prison reform. He became one of the most cited figures in the human sciences worldwide. He died in Paris in 1984 of an AIDS-related illness. ...
Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (16 November 1895, Oryol — 7 March 1975, Moscow) was a philosopher of language and a theorist of literature and culture. Marginalized and almost unknown during his lifetime in the Soviet Union — arrested and sent into exile in 1929, he taught for decades at provincial universities — he was rediscovered from the 1960s onward and became one of the most influential Russian thinkers in the world across the humanities. He was the center of the so-called Bakhtin Circle, which also included Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (the authorship of some works signed by them is a matter of scholarly debate). ...
Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was born in 1689 near Bordeaux, into a family of the nobility of the robe. A magistrate and president of the Parlement of Bordeaux, he won literary fame with the Persian Letters (1721), an anonymous and witty satire that criticizes French customs and institutions through the eyes of fictional Persian travelers. After traveling through Europe — admiring above all the English constitution — he devoted some twenty years to his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), in which he founded the modern comparative science of politics. ...
Nāgārjuna Nāgārjuna (c. 150–c. 250 CE) is the founder of the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism and is regarded in many Buddhist traditions as the second Buddha. His work exercised decisive influence on Tibetan, Chinese (and thence Japanese and Korean) Buddhism, as well as on subsequent Indian philosophy. His principal work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK — Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), is one of the most commented and debated texts in the history of philosophy. ...
Nicholas of Cusa German cardinal; transitional figure between Scholasticism and the Renaissance. Used mathematics as a philosophical analogy (not as a method in the technical sense) to express the relationship between divine infinity and human finitude. Key Concepts Learned Ignorance (docta ignorantia): the human mind (finite) does not attain divine infinity; the pursuit of truth is asymptotic — we approach without ever reaching Coincidence of Opposites (coincidentia oppositorum): in God all opposites coincide — like expanding a circle until it becomes a line; in God maximum and minimum are identical Complication/Explication/Contraction: God complicates all things in himself; the universe is the explication of God; each thing is a local contraction of the whole Man as microcosm: image of God in the finite Influenced by Plotinus — the ineffable One Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite — negative theology Thomas Aquinas — but goes beyond Influenced Marsilio Ficino — Florentine Neoplatonism Giordano Bruno — infinite universe and coincidence of opposites Schelling — identity of opposites Hegel — dialectic as overcoming opposites Works On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440); On Conjectures; The Game of Spheres. ...
Nicolaus Copernicus Born in Toruń, Poland, in 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was a canon of Frombork cathedral and a man of the Renaissance: he studied in Kraków and in Italy (Bologna, Padua), devoting himself to law, medicine, and, above all, astronomy. Discreetly and prudently, over decades he matured an idea that would change the image of the world — and that he would publish only at the end of his life. ...
Nikolai Berdiáev Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (18 March 1874, Kyiv — 24 March 1948, Clamart, France) was a Russian religious and political philosopher, often described as a “Christian existentialist.” Of aristocratic origin, he began as a Marxist — he was even internally exiled under the tsarist regime for his activities — but broke early with materialism toward idealism and Orthodoxy. He took part in the critical collection Vekhi (1909). Expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922, in the episode of the “philosophers’ ships,” he lived in Berlin and then in Clamart, near Paris, where he edited the journal Put and became the best-known voice of Russian thought in exile. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. ...
Nishida Kitaro Note on romanisation: Japanese names are given in Hepburn romanisation, with the original characters in parentheses on first occurrence. Macrons (ō, ū) indicate long vowels. In the Japanese convention, the family name (Nishida) precedes the given name (Kitarō); the Japanese order is followed here, in keeping with current editorial practice for modern Japanese philosophers. Nishida Kitarō (西田 幾多郎) is the founder of the Kyoto School and the most influential modern Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century. A Rinzai Zen practitioner from his youth — under the masters Setsumon and Kōshū — he was trained in philosophy at the Imperial University of Tokyo and lectured at Kyoto Imperial University, where he gathered around himself the generation that would give body to the so-called “school.” His project may be described as the attempt, without comparable precedent in modern Japan, to articulate Buddhist meditative experience with the vocabulary and rigour of European (chiefly German) philosophy — without reducing one to the other. ...
Parmenides Born in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, and active in the first half of the fifth century BCE, Parmenides is the founder of ontology — the inquiry into being as being — and the greatest figure of the so-called Eleatic school. He expounded his thought in a philosophical poem, On Nature, of which fragments survive: in it, a young man is carried in a chariot to a goddess who reveals the truth to him. ...
Paul Feyerabend Paul Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher of science and one of the most provocative thinkers of the twentieth century. Trained in Vienna and based for decades at Berkeley, he began close to logical empiricism and to Popper’s critical rationalism — he even studied under Popper at the London School of Economics — before becoming one of his sharpest critics. His best-known work, Against Method (1975), defends epistemological anarchism: the thesis that there is no single, universal, ahistorical scientific method capable of explaining the success of science. Examining real episodes from the history of science, above all the case of Galileo, Feyerabend argues that progress has often required breaking the methodological rules then in force. His provocation became synonymous with a radical defence of pluralism and intellectual freedom against every dogmatism — including the scientific one. ...
Paul Ricoeur French philosopher, one of the greatest hermeneuticians of the 20th century. He synthesized Husserl’s phenomenology with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and analytic philosophy of action. His work traverses the conflict of interpretations, the theory of narrative, and the ethics of the self. Key Concepts Hermeneutics of suspicion vs. of trust: two great interpretive traditions — that of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud — texts conceal something) and that of trust (the religious and poetic tradition — texts reveal something). Mature hermeneutics oscillates between the two Narrative identity (identité narrative): personal identity is not a fixed substance but is narratively constructed — we are the characters of the stories we tell about ourselves (idem vs. ipse: identity as sameness vs. selfhood) Time and narrative: human time only becomes comprehensible when narrated — narrative (historiography and fiction) configures temporal experience and gives it meaning (mimesis in three phases: prefiguration, configuration, refiguration) Living metaphor: metaphor is not merely a rhetorical ornament — it creates new meanings by bringing distant semantic fields together; it “redescribes reality” Conflict of interpretations: there is no neutral interpretation — every reading involves a position; hermeneutics must assume the conflict between perspectives rather than eliminating it Oneself as another (soi-même comme un autre): selfhood (who I am) is always mediated by the other — alterity constitutes the self; a proposal for an ethics of solicitude and justice Little ethics: “aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions” — articulating the ethical perspective (teleological) with the moral perspective (deontological) Influenced by Husserl and Heidegger — phenomenology Gadamer — philosophical hermeneutics Freud — psychoanalysis and suspicion Marx and Nietzsche — hermeneutics of suspicion Analytic philosophy of action (Austin, Strawson) Influenced Narrative and biblical theology Philosophy of law and legal hermeneutics Historiography and philosophy of history Habermas — ethics and communication Works Philosophy of the Will (1950–60); Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965); The Conflict of Interpretations (1969); The Rule of Metaphor (1975); Time and Narrative (3 vols., 1983–85); Oneself as Another (1990); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000). ...
Paulo Freire Born in Recife in 1921, amid the poverty of the Brazilian Northeast, Paulo Freire is the most cited and translated Brazilian thinker in the world, and the Patron of Brazilian Education. His philosophy was born of practice: in 1963, in the pioneering Angicos experiment, he taught rural workers to read in a few weeks with a method that joined the reading of the word to the reading of the world. Seen as a threat, he was imprisoned and exiled after the 1964 coup, passing through Bolivia, Chile, the United States, and Switzerland; he would return to Brazil only in 1980. He brought together phenomenology, Marxism, and existentialism in a theory that is at once a pedagogy and a political philosophy of emancipation. ...
Peter Singer Australian philosopher, professor at Princeton University. He is the most influential living utilitarian philosopher and one of the founders of the contemporary animal rights movement. His book Animal Liberation (1975) introduced the concept of speciesism and transformed the ethical debate on the treatment of animals. He defends a preference utilitarianism (later revised toward hedonistic utilitarianism) and applies moral philosophy to practical issues: global poverty, euthanasia, abortion, the environment, and effective altruism. ...
Philippa Foot Philippa Foot (1920–2010) was one of the most influential British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and a central figure in the revival of virtue ethics. Educated and long based at Oxford, she also taught for extended periods in the United States. Her intellectual career amounts to a sustained challenge to the non-cognitivism and emotivism that dominated post-war Anglophone metaethics: against the thesis of a radical separation between fact and value, Foot sought to show that moral judgements have cognitive content and are rooted in facts about human life. Her work culminates in the neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism of Natural Goodness (2001). She was also a figure of civic conscience: she was among the founders of Oxfam, the organisation devoted to fighting hunger and poverty. ...
Philo of Alexandria Note on dating: Philo’s dates are not known with precision; his life is estimated between c. 25/15 BCE and c. 45/50 CE, with the firmly dated embassy he led to Caligula in 39/40 CE — recounted in Legatio ad Gaium — serving as the principal point of reference. Philo of Alexandria — in Latin Philo Iudaeus, “Philo the Jew” — was a Hellenistic Jewish thinker from one of the wealthiest and most influential families of the Jewish diaspora in Alexandria. A Roman citizen, a contemporary of Jesus, Seneca, and the early Julio-Claudian emperors, he wrote entirely in Greek and stood at the crossroads of two traditions: biblical Judaism and Greek philosophy — especially Middle Platonism, Stoicism, and Pythagoreanism. In 38 CE Alexandria was the scene of violent anti-Jewish attacks under the governor Aulus Avillius Flaccus (narrated in In Flaccum), and in 39/40 CE Philo led the delegation of Alexandrian Jews that travelled to Rome to lay their grievances before Caligula. A caveat: Philo is often imprecisely labelled “Neoplatonist.” Strictly speaking, he is pre-Neoplatonist — earlier than Plotinus by more than two centuries — and is best situated within Middle Platonism. ...
Pico della Mirandola Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Italian prodigy philosopher; knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Proposed to hold a debate in Rome with 900 theses from all philosophical traditions — Pope Innocent VIII condemned some of them. Died at age 31. Key Concepts Dignity of Man (Oration on Human Dignity, 1486): man is the only being without a fixed nature — God placed him at the center of the world without determined form so that he might shape himself; it is the highest expression of human freedom and creativity; text considered the “manifesto of the Renaissance” Philosophical eclecticism: attempt to synthesize Plato, Aristotle, Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Christian theology, and Arabic philosophy; truth is one and all traditions participate in it Kabbalah: first Christian to use the Kabbalah as a theological argument — sacred letters and numbers confirm Christianity Concordism: Plato and Aristotle agree when correctly interpreted (against the Platonic-Aristotelian dispute of the time) Magic and astrology: natural magic (mastery of the forces of nature) is the noblest of sciences; distinguishes natural magic from goetia (witchcraft) Influenced by Marsilio Ficino — master and mentor in Florence Plato and Aristotle — seeks to reconcile both Jewish Kabbalah — Elia del Medigo Hermeticism — Corpus Hermeticum Influenced Late Renaissance humanism Tradition of philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy) Giordano Bruno — philosophical syncretism and magic Debate on human dignity in modernity Works Oration on Human Dignity (1486); Heptaplus (1489, Kabbalistic interpretation of Genesis); On Being and Unity (1492); 900 Conclusions (1486). ...
Plato Student of Socrates and the most influential philosopher of antiquity, Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family around 428 BCE. His master’s execution in 399 BCE marked him deeply and turned him away from the political career his lineage had reserved for him. After years of travel — which tradition links to contact with the Pythagoreans of southern Italy and to his failed attempts to educate the tyrants of Syracuse — he founded the Academy around 387 BCE, the first institution of higher learning in the West, which would endure for more than nine centuries. His work has reached us almost intact, almost entirely in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the central character. ...