- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 in Vienna, Austria - April 29, 1951 in Cambridge, England) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking ideas to philosophy, primarily in the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. His influence has been wide-ranging, placing him among the most significant philosophers of the 20th century. - Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (Brighton, 19 August 1900-Oxford, 6 October 1976), was a philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". - Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891, Ronsdorf, Germany - September 14, 1970, Santa Monica, California) was an influential philosopher who was active in central Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism. - Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician who became a logician and philosopher. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His work has exerted a fundamental and far-reaching influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially in English-speaking countries. - Willard van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000), usually cited as W.V. Quine or W.V.O. Quine was one of the most influential philosophers and logicians of the 20th century. - Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Rorty's long and diverse career saw him working in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytical tradition he would later famously reject. - Donald Davidson
Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 - August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003, after having also held substantive teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University and the University of Chicago. His work has exerted considerable influence in nearly all areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, … - John Rawls
John Rawls (February 21, 1921 - November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of "A Theory of Justice" (1971), "Political Liberalism", "Justice as Fairness: A Restatement", and "The Law of Peoples". He is widely considered one of the most important English-language political philosophers of the 20th century, … - Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett is currently the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. - Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31 1926) is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in Western philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions and to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. - John Searle
John Rogers Searle (born July 31 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, and for his views on practical reason and the characteristics of socially constructed versus physical realities. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and the Jovellanos Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. - Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born 15 November, 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of Frisian ancestry) is a contemporary American philosopher known for his work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion and tentative support of intelligent design. His current position is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Calvinist, despite being a professor at a traditionally Catholic university. - Saul Kripke
Professor Saul Kripke (Philosophy), who had been a visiting professor at The Graduate Center since Spring 2002, now joins the faculty as a Professor of Philosophy. He is known as a brilliant logician and one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. While a high school student in Nebraska, he wrote a series of papers that transformed modal logic and remain canonical works in the field. - David Chalmers
David Chalmers is Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, is author of "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory", and is occasionally conscious. This piece was first published on the newsgroup sci.math in 1990, and can be found on his website . - Bernard Williams
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (September 21, 1929 - June 10, 2003) was a British philosopher, widely cited as the most important British moral philosopher of his time. He was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge for over a decade, and Provost of King's College, Cambridge for almost as long, before becoming Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. - Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (born 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics. He is well-known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), … - Michael Dummett
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett F.B.A., D. Litt, (born 1925) is a leading British philosopher. He has both written on the history of analytic philosophy, and made original contributions to the subject, particularly in the areas of philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. He also devised the Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the Borda count, and has written scholarly works on tarot. - Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. Nozick, schooled at Columbia, Oxford and Princeton, was a prominent American political philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. He did additional but less influential work in such subjects as decision theory and epistemology. His "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls' "A Theory of Justice", published in 1971. - J. L. Austin
John Langshaw Austin was a philosopher of language, who developed much of the current theory and terminology of speech acts. He was born in Lancaster and educated at Balliol College, Oxford University. After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. - Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher, with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics. She was born in New York, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker. She studied theatre and classics at New York University, getting a Bachelor of Arts in 1969, and gradually moved to philosophy while at Harvard, … - John McDowell
John Henry McDowell (b. 1942 in Boksburg, South Africa) is a contemporary philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and language. - Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. Fodor argues that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. - P. F. Strawson
Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (November 23 1919 - 13 February 2006) was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) from 1968 to 1987. Before that he was appointed as a college lecturer at University College, Oxford in 1947 and became a tutorial fellow the following year until 1968. - Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 - July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. His father was the noted Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars. Wilfrid was educated at Michigan, the University of Buffalo, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During WWII, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, … - Stanley Cavell
Stanley Louis Cavell (born September 1, 1926) is an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. - Scott Soames
Scott Soames (born 1946) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. He is well known for defending and expanding on the program in the philosophy of language started by Saul Kripke as well as being a major critic of two-dimensionalist theories of meaning. - R. M. Hare
Richard Mervyn Hare (March 21, 1919 - January 29, 2002) was an English moral philosopher, who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983, and then taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory. - G. E. M. Anscombe
G. E. M. Anscombe (18 March, 1919 - 5 January, 2001) (born Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, also known as Elizabeth Anscombe) was a British analytic philosopher. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work, and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his "Philosophical Investigations". She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, … - Pascal Engel
Pascal Engel is a French philosopher, working on the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of logic. He was a professor of philosophy of logic at the Sorbonne, he currently works at the University of Geneva, where he collaborates with, among others, Kevin Mulligan. He is a member of Institut Nicod. - Colin McGinn
Colin McGinn (born 1950) is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. McGinn is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern philosophy. - William Alston
William P. Alston (born 1921) is professor emeritus at Syracuse University, and has been influential as an epistemologist. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught for many years at the University of Michigan. His views on foundationalism and internalism versus externalism, among many other topics, have been very influential. Alston has also done important work in philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, … - Jason Stanley
Jason Stanley (b. October 12, 1969) is an American philosopher currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His primary interests include linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy of language. Stanley is an occasional contributor to Brian Leiter's "Leiter Reports" blog. - Robert Brandom
Robert Brandom (1950-) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his work manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. He earned his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis. - Peter Winch
Peter Guy Winch (1926-1997) was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Winch is perhaps most famous for his early book, "The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy" (1958), an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. - Richard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne (born December 26, 1934) is an eminent British professor and philosopher primarily interested in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. - Jaakko Hintikka
Jaakko Hintikka (born January 12 1929) is a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka was born in Vantaa. After teaching for a number of years at Florida State University, Stanford, University of Helsinki, and the Academy of Finland, he is currently Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. The prolific author or co-author of over 30 books and over 300 scholarly articles, he has contributed to mathematical logic, philosophical logic, the philosophy of mathematics, … - Peter van Inwagen
Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He previously taught at Syracuse University for many years and earned his PhD from the University of Rochester under the direction of Richard Taylor and Keith Lehrer. He is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. It is largely due to his work ("An Essay on Free Will": Oxford University Press, … - Peter Geach
Peter Thomas Geach (b. 29 March 1916) is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, the theory of identity, and the philosophy of religion. His early work includes the classic texts "Mental Acts", and "Reference and Generality", which defends an essentially modern conception of reference against medieval theories of supposition. His Catholic perspective is integral to his philosophy. - Anthony Kenny
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny FBA (born Liverpool, 16 March 1931) is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to Analytical Thomism, … - Philippa Foot
Philippa Ruth Foot (1920-), (born Bosanquet) is a British philosopher, most notable for her works in ethics. She is one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her work, especially her most recent work, may be seen as an attempt to modernize Aristotelian ethical theory, to show that it was adaptable to current issues, and thus that it could compete with such popular theories as modern deontological and utilitarian ethics.
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