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. ...
Nancy Fraser Nancy Fraser (b. 20 May 1947, Baltimore) is an American critical theorist and feminist philosopher, the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor Emerita at The New School for Social Research in New York. An heir to the Frankfurt School tradition, she is one of the most influential voices in contemporary critical theory. Her most celebrated contribution was to reframe the question of justice around the tension between redistribution (the economic dimension) and recognition (the cultural dimension), warning of the risk that struggles for identity and visibility might eclipse struggles for material equality. In recent decades she has broadened that diagnosis into a sweeping critique of capitalism and its relations to feminism, ecology, and democracy. ...
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. Born in Kues (present-day Bernkastel-Kues, Germany) in 1401, Nicholas studied at the school of the Brethren of the Common Life in Deventer and earned a degree in canon law at Padua, where he came into contact with Italian humanism. He was made cardinal in 1448 and bishop of Brixen (Bressanone), playing an active role in the conciliarist controversies that shook the Church in the fifteenth century — first as an advocate of conciliar supremacy over the papacy, a position he later revised in favor of papal primacy. His ecclesiastical and intellectual trajectory reflects the spirit of the age: a mode of thought suspended between medieval tradition and the new horizons opened by the rediscovery of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts. ...
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. ...
Oswald Spengler Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880–1936) was born in Blankenburg, Germany, the son of a postal official. He trained in mathematics and natural science, taught briefly at secondary level, and then devoted himself entirely to writing as an independent author in Munich. His magnum opus, The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in two volumes — Form and Actuality (1918) and Perspectives of World History (1922) — turned him almost overnight into one of the most discussed authors of interwar Europe: the first volume appeared just months before Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and its title seemed to prophesy the collapse then under way. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...