- 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. - 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 . - 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. - William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City, son of Henry James, Sr., … - 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. - 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, … - 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. - 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. - Alan Turing
This short on-line biography of Alan Turing is based on the entry I wrote for the British Dictionary of National Biography in 1995. The eight parts correspond roughly to the eight sections of my full biography Alan Turing : the enigma. There are no hyperlinks in the text. For links and for more images, go to the corresponding page of the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. Part 8 - Alan Turing 's Crisis - Jaegwon Kim
Jaegwon Kim (born 1934, Daegu, South Korea) is a Korean-born American philosopher, currently at Brown University. He is best known for his work on mental causation and the mind-body problem. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of events. - Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. - 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), … - Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA, (July 28, 1902 - September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. - Ned Block
Ned Block (born 1942) is a philosopher of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was a student of Hilary Putnam. Block was for many years professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and now teaches at New York University (NYU). - 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. - Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland (born 1942 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is a philosopher working at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars. He is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland and particularly noted for his work in philosophy of mind and neurophilosophy. He is a major proponent of eliminative materialism, which claims that everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, … - 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". - 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. - Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology. His work broke away from the purely positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, giving weight to subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Husserl was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf; his philosophical work influenced, among others, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Eugen Fink, Max Scheler, … - Patricia Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland (born July 16, 1943, was born in Oliver, British Columbia, Canada, which is in B.C.'s Okanagan Valley) is a Canadian-American philosopher working at the University of California, San Diego since 1984. She is currently chair of the UCSD Philosophy Department, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and an associate of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (Sejnowski Lab) at the Salk Institute. - Ruth Millikan
Ruth Garrett Millikan (1933-) is a well-known American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language. She was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and gave the "Jean Nicod Lectures" in Paris in 2002. Millikan earned her PhD from Yale University where she studied under Wilfrid Sellars. She and Paul Churchland are often considered leading proponents of "right wing" (i.e., individualistic) Sellarsianism. - René Descartes
René Descartes (March 31, 1596 - February 11, 1650), also known as "Renatus Cartesius" (latinized form), was a highly influential French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer. Dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and the "Father of Modern Mathematics", much of subsequent western philosophy is a reaction to his writings, which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day. - Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl. Merleau-Ponty was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and influenced by Martin Heidegger, but his philosophy tended to focus on the phenomenological and corporeal foundations of perception. - David Kellogg Lewis
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 - October 14, 2001) is considered to have been one of the leading analytic philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then Princeton for the remainder of his career but is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. - Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza (lived November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. - 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, … - Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman (born 1938) is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely on ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophies of language and mind. He was educated at Swarthmore College and Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy. Harman shares the belief of his Ph.D. advisor Willard Van Orman Quine that philosophy and science are continuous, as well as his skepticism about conceptual analysis. - Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic. He is best known for his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (abbreviated as "GEB") which was published in 1979, and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. - Fred Dretske
Fred Dretske is a philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1994. Dretske taught for a number of years at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Stanford University. After retiring from Stanford he moved to Duke University where he is now research professor of Philosophy. - Stephen Stich
Stephen Stich (born May 9, 1943) is a professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is also currently an Honorary Professor of the department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. For the spring of 2007, he is the Clark Way-Harrison visiting professor with the department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and moral psychology. - Tyler Burge
Tyler Burge (born 1946, Ph.D., Princeton University, 1971) is a Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He has made contributions to several areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. In the history of philosophy, he has published articles on the philosophy of Gottlob Frege. A collection of his writings on Frege, along with a substantial introduction and several postscripts by the author, has been published (Burge, 2005). - Thomas Metzinger
Thomas Metzinger (born March 12, 1958) is a German philosopher. He currently holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has been active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness as an academic endeavour. He has been particularly active in the organization of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), … - Samuel Guttenplan
Samuel D. Guttenplan (born July 26, 1944 in New York City) is a professor in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Guttenplan earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford with a dissertation directed by John McDowell. He has interests in the philosophies of mind, language, philosophical logic and ethics. Recently his writings have focused on metaphor. He is executive editor of the interdisciplinary journal "Mind & Language". - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also "Leibnitz" or "von Leibniz" (July 1 (June 21 Old Style) 1646 – November 14 1716) was a German polymath who wrote mostly in Latin and French. Educated in law and philosophy, and serving as factotum to two major German noble houses (one becoming the British royal family while he served it), Leibniz played a major role in the European politics and diplomacy of his day. - Peter Hacker
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker (born 15 July1939 in London) is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is well known for his detailed exegesis of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his outspoken criticism of neuroscience-based philosophy. - Ullin Place
Ullin Place was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. Place was born in Yorkshire and studied under Gilbert Ryle at Oxford University. There, he became acquainted with philosophy of mind in the logical behaviorist tradition, of which Ryle was probably the major exponent. Ryle's teachings profoundly influenced the thought of Place, instilling in him the fundamental idea that mind is nothing more than, … - Owen Flanagan
Owen Flanagan, Ph.D. (born 1949) is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Flanagan has done work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, ethics, contemporary ethical theory, moral psychology, as well as Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of the self. Flanagan earned his Ph.D from Boston University. Flanagan has written extensively on consciousness. - Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1972), "Mind and Nature" (1980), and "Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred" (1988), the last published posthumously and co-authored with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson. - Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche (August 6, 1638 - October 13, 1715) was a rationalist French Philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is most famous for his doctrines of vision in God and occasionalism. - Ron McClamrock
Ronald Albert McClamrock, usually known as Ron McClamrock, is an associate professor of philosophy at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. His primary areas of research are the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. In his book, "Existential Cognition: Minds in the World", …
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