CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHERS

From Classical to contemporary philosophy

Students often think that philosophy ends to Descartes. Some teachers and faculty launched the
following joke: “A good philosopher is a dead philosopher!”
Nope! Contemporary philosophy is more alive than ever: the twentieth century is a great century
for philosophy. Many thinkers have challenged the tradition of announcing new thinking, especially
phenomenology and analytic philosophy.
However, it is clear that the center of gravity has shifted: the great contemporary philosophers are
English, or almost all Americans, while at the seventeenth, they were almost all French and
German.
We propose a list of living philosophers (at the end of 2012):
1. Amartya Sen: Indian Economist, his major work is Equality of What in which he bases his
economic theory on a new conception of subjectivity around the concept of capability.
2. Peter Sloterdijk: German thinker close to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Sloterdijk is a philosophy
of science and morality to the extent he thinks self-taming of man by science.
3. Peter Singer: Australian Philosopher, he founded a new philosophy based on the rights of
animals (Animal Liberation). He advocates a moral equality between men and animals
insofar as they may suffer. This implies vegetarianism.
4. Michael Dummett: English Philosopher. Figure of analytic philosophy. His Dialogue with
Frege and Wittgenstein have influenced the philosophy of language.
5. Jürgen Habermas: Habermas is arguably the greatest living philosopher. Habermas
contributed on ethical issues (cloning / eugenics) public space (principle of publicity) or the
European construction.
6. Axel Honneth: German sociologist, his theory of recognition is in fact a manifesto for a
political philosophy practice.
7. René Girard: French philosopher, the decisive contribution lies in Girard’s theory of desire,
which structure human life through mimicry and triangularités “Every desire is the desire of
imitation of another.” Girard is a critique of Freud as Levi-Strauss.
8. Jacques Bouveresse: French philosopher inspired by the analytic tradition. He shows to
defend the tradition of the Enlightenment against the french theory (Deleuze, Foucault or
Derrida) and works to explain Wittgenstein’s thought.
9. Hilary Putnam: Putnam is the great figure of the American philosophy of mind, philosophy
of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. His theory of the brain
in a jar remain famous
10. Ruwen Ogien: moral philosopher. He advocates a minimalist morality that summarizes in
one sentence: “Do not harm others, nothing more.” Nothing too new a priori, but this has
resulted, for example, allow the use of drugs.
11. Slavoj Žižek: Slovenian Philosopher Zizek is working on identity and political ontologies.
This list of contemporary philosophers cannot be exhaustive, but it tended to show the vibrancy of
philosophy today.

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Contemporary Philosophy
The term ‘contemporary philosophy’ refers to the current era of philosophy, generally dealing with
philosophers from the late nineteenth century through to the twenty-first.
The nineteenth century also began to see a division in the approach to philosophy being taken in
different areas of western philosophy. In the United Kingdom and North America, a focus on logic,
language and the natural sciences was becoming predominant in philosophy, and this tradition
was labeled analytic philosophy. Those who did not find themselves in this analytic trend were
mostly based in Europe, and the idea of continental philosophy was born. The names are already
considered obsolete, in some senses, but many philosophers still observe a difference between the
logical and scientific approach of analytic philosophy and the existentialism, phenomenology and
other approaches of continental philosophy.
The division is a largely artificial one, as the terms were first used by universities in attempts to
form courses out of related works in philosophy.
Contemporary philosophers
1. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
2. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
3. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
4. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
5. Alexius Meinong (1853–1920)
6. Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932)
7. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
8. Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
9. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)
10. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
11. Henry M. Sheffer (1882–1964)
12. Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
13. Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
15. Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973)
16. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
17. Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)
18. Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976)
19. Alfred Tarski (1901–1983)
20. Karl Popper (1902–1994)
21. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
22. Kurt Gödel (1906–1978)
23. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)
24. W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000)
25. Albert Camus (1913–1960)
26. John Rawls (1921–2002)
27. Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996)
28. Hilary Putnam (1926— )
29. Edmund Gettier (1927— )
30. Jürgen Habermas (1929– )
31. Harry Frankfurt (1929— )
32. Jaakko Hintikka (1929— )
33. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)
34. Carl Ginet (1932— )
35. Alvin Plantinga (1932– )

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 36. John Searle (1932—)
37. Thomas Nagel (1937— )
38. Robert Nozick (1938–2002)
39. Alvin Goldman (1938– )
40. Saul Kripke (1940— )
41. Frank Jackson (1943— )
42. Jonathan Dancy (1946— )
43. Peter Singer (1946— )
44. David Chalmers (1966— )

1. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian novelist, essayist and playwright, most famous for his
works War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Vitals
Name: Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
Born: September 9, 1828, Tula, Russia
Died: November 20, 1910, Astapovo, Russia
Tolstoy was a Christian and a strong believer in literal interpretations of Jesus' teachings. His
interpretations, however, focused on an internal devotion to God, and a personal struggle for
perfection, rather than a following of the Church or a quest for guidance elsewhere.
Tolstoy strongly believed in nonviolence, and promoted nonviolent resistance to political
oppression.
Tolstoy also contributed to disccusions of aesthetics. Tolstoy believed that the purpose of art
was to convey the emotions felt by the artist. Artistic expressions that fail to inspire similar
feelings in their audience fails to truly be a work of art.
Works
 Anna Karenina
 War and Peace
 What Is Art?

2. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American logician, mathematician and scientist.
British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that Peirce was “certainly the greatest American
thinker ever”

Pragmaticism

Along with William James, Peirce is considered a father of pragmatism. However, this view
actually comes from a misinterpretation of Peirce’s early writings. As Bertrand Russell puts it,
the current conception of pragmatism “stems not from Peirce, but from what William James
thought Peirce was saying”[2]. Peirce later clarified his poition and gave it the label of
‘pragmaticism’ to try and separate his own position from James’ interpretation.

Peirce Arrow

Charles Sanders Peirce showed that a joint denial, otherwise known as a nor operation can be
used to define every other truth-functional logical operator.
The symbol for the joint denial ( ↓ ) is known as the Peirce arrow after Charles Sanders Peirce.
Peirce also demonstrated that an alternative denial could also be used for the same purpose by
1880. However, Henry M. Sheffer is partly credited with this discovery after he independantly
arrived at this result and published it in 1913. Peirce's paper demonstrating the same was not
published until 1933. The symbol for the alternative denial, ( | or ↑ ) is called the Sheffer stroke.
7. p. 276.
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3. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a philosopher and philogist from Germany. He
wrote mainly critical works that attacked the prevailing religious, cultural and philosophical
views of his time.
Vitals
Name: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Born: October 15, 1844, Prussia
Died: August 25, 1900, Germany

Nietzsche’s work has contributed greatly to the development of existentialism and so-called
continental philosophy.
Many of Nietzsche's family members were in the clergy and it was assumed that Friedrich
himself would become a minister. Though as a child, Friedrich Nietzsche followed in the
religious footsteps of his family, he grew older and found new forms of philosophy which soon
preoccupied him. He began to criticize Christianity and develop his own ideas.
In 1889, Nietzsche began to develop mental illness that would leave him under his family's care
for the rest of his life.

Nietzsche is well known for one particular declaration, “God is Dead”, which appears a number
of times in his work.

Works
Homer and Classical Philology (1868)
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873)
The Gay Science (1882)
Thus Spake Zarathurstra (1883)
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)
The Antichrist (1888)
Ecce Homo (1888)
The Will to Power (1901)
Thoughts out of Season (1909)

4. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was a German mathematician, philosopher and logician who
contributed greatly to the development of symbolic logic and the launch of analytic philosophy.
Vitals
Name: Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege
Born: November 8, 1848
Died: July 26, 1925

Logic
Frege's contributions to logic, which began with his 1879 work Begriffsschrift, brought the first
major advancement in logic since Aristotle. Frege described a new system of first-order
predicate logic that introduced quantification functions and variables for the first time in
a symbolic logic.

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 Frege, who began as a mathematician, wanted to show the logical roots of mathematics. His
system replaced Aristotelean syllogistic logic with a wider range of capabilities that allowed the
expression of mathematical truths, as well as the symbolization of informal linguistic reason.

Selected Works
 Begriffsschrift (“Concept Script”, 1879)
 Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (“The Foundations of Arithmetic”, 1848)
 Über Sinn und Bedeutung (“On Sense and Reference”, 1892)
 Über Begriff und Gegenstand (“Concept and Object”, 1892)

5. Alexius Meinong
An Austrian philosopher, Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) is best known for his theory of objects,
a detailled ontology that expresses the organization of objects, both those in and apart from
existence.

Vitals
Name: Alexius Meinong
Born: July 17, 1853
Died: November 27, 1920

Meinong’s theory considers anything to be an object (Gegenstand) if it can be considered and

examined by the mind. Therefore, Meinong counts as objects not only physical things, but also
abstract objects, such as numbers, and even things that are impossible, such as round squares.
In general, Meinong divides objects into three categories:
1. Existent objects (Existenz), which are actual objects in the physical, temporal world
2. Subsistent objects (Bestand), such as numbers, which are objects that have non-
temporal, unextended being.
3. Being-given (Gegebenheit) or absistent objects, which are objects without being, such as
a round square

While object theory, or theories of beings, in most other philosophers consider all objects to
have a sense of being, Meinong’s being-given category is not one of being at all — merely
objects of which an agent can speak, but do not have any actuality or even possibility of being.
The category of being-given was named “absistence” by South African philosopher J. N.
Findlay. Bertrand Russell offered a criticism of Meinong’s object theory, saying that it allowed
contradictions with respect to the objects without being.
Meinong was a student of philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano. His work is heavily
influenced both by Brentano’s psychological/phenomenological approach to philosophy, and
by British empiricism.

Selected Works
 Über philosophische Wissenschaft und ihre Propädeutik (1885)
 Untersuchung zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie (1904)
 Über Annahmen (1910)

6. Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) was an Italian mathematician and logician.

Vitals
Name: Giuseppe Peano
Born: August 27, 1858
Died: April 20, 1932

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 Peano's Formulario Mathematico was an encyclopedia of mathematical formulae and
theorems expressed in a symbolic language. Many of the symbols that Peano used in the
Formulario are still in use today.
In 1903, Peano announced that he had developed an auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione,
which was a version of Latin with heavily simplified grammar. Peano wrote some of his works in
Latino sine flexione afterwords.

The Peano axioms, a set of axioms for natural numbers that Peano published, is named for him.
Peano's descriptions of mathematics maintained a separation of mathematical and logical
symbolization, and made use of the symbolization developed by Gottlob Frege.
Along with Bertrand Russell, Peano can largely be credited for brining attention to the logical
system developed by Frege.

Selected Works
 Formulario Mathematico (“Formulation of mathematics”, 1895)

7. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was a German philosopher and professor who founded the school
of phenomenonology.
Vitals
Name: Edmund Husserl
Born: April 8, 1859, Prostejov, Austria
Died: April 26, 1938, Freiburg, Germany
Degrees: Ph.D. Mathematics (Vienna, 1883)
Husserl was born in what is now the Czech Republic. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics before
attending lectures by Franz Brentano, which lured him into philosophy.
Husserl was a teacher of Martin Heidegger, who also served as Husserl's assistant. Heidegger's
main work, Being and Time was originally dedicated to Husserl, although this dedication was
removed in 1941 out of fear that the Nazi party would ban it. The relationship between the two
worsened after Heidegger began to support the Nazi party.
Husserl also had significant influence on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.

8. Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher.

Vitals
Name: Henri-Louis Bergson
Born: October 18, 1859, Paris
Died: January 4, 1941
Bergson expressed the importance of experience and intuition in thought and the search for truth,
as companions no lesser than rational means of inquiry. He sought a union between the notions of
free will and causality, rejecting the rigidity of scientific views on the matter, insisting that free will
provokes a creative novelty that is not predetermined.

Duration
In order to articulate his view, Bergson presents a concept of Duration, a theory of time, free will
and consciousness. He criticizes Immanuel Kant for the view that free will must exist outside of
time and space in order to be possible. Instead, Bergson says that Kant treats time improperly. For
Bergson, time is not an extended, ordered progression, but a fluid, dynamic medium that can be
traversed by the will.

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 Because of the mobility of the Duration, it is not capable of being fully understood by the rigid
concepts of space — such as reason and related inquiry. Instead, intuition plays a key role in the
understanding that cannot be accomplished merely by reasoning from experiential data.
Bergson was also a friend of William James and is mentioned in some of James’ works.

Selected Works
 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1910)
 Creative Evolution (1910)
 Matter and Memory (1911)

9. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher,
perhaps best known as co-author of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, and for his
own Process and Reality.
Vitals
Name: Alfred North Whitehead
Born: February 15, 1861
Died: December 30, 1947
Titles: Order of Merit
Process and Reality
In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes his metaphysical system, which he calls “philosophy of
organism”. Whitehead says that the fundamental components of reality are occasions of
experience. All things are a series of experiences, and those experiences form out of reactions that
depend on previous experiences. However, these experiences are not deterministic. Instead,
process philosophy states that free will is the inherent process of the universe, with experiences
dictating what is, rather than the other way around.
Whitehead's metaphysics can be compared to that of Spinoza, who claims that God is the single
substance of which all things are made. However, for Whitehead, God consists of all experiences,
as well as all potential experiences.

Rather than being an omnipotent, all-powerful being, God's role in Whitehead's philosophy is to
provide possibilities for the universe, which are then either accepted into experience or denied
existence. God is still omnipresent, as God experiences all of the things that come into being, or
“becoming” as process philosophers often say.
Whitehead's stance in metaphysics is somewhat surprising for a prominent logician. However, as
he was well-versed in physics, Whitehead developed his version of process philosophy in part as a
reaction to the rapidly changing landscape of physics. Witnessing the challenge to Newtonian
physics brought by Albert Einstein's relativity, as well as the bizzare new theories of quantum
mechanics, Whitehead's speculation that reality may itself bend to experience may be seen, in
part, as a reaction to the alarming developments in the scientific world.
Selected Works
 Principia Mathematica (with Bertrand Russell, 1910)
 Process and Reality (1929)
 Adventures of Ideas (1933)

10. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher and logician of the
twentieth century. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy.
Vitals
Name: Bertrand Russell

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 Born: May 18, 1872
Died: February 2, 1970
Titles: The Earl Russell, OM, FRS
Awards: Nobel Prize, Literature, 1950

As a social philosopher, Russell is best known for being a strong pacificst, offering criticism of
various governments from World War I to the Vietnam War.
Logic
Bertrand Russell was considered one of the top logicians of the twentieth century. In addition to
his own work, he is largely responsible for bringing attention to the works of Gottlob Frege,
which largely reshaped the systems of logic, and their notation, in use today. Russell also
famously highlighted a flaw in the set theory developed by Frege, in which he discovered a
contradiction known as Russell's Paradox.

Selected Works
Russell's books, articles and essays are numerous. Additionally, there are thousands of letters and
pamphlets and other writings in a complete listing of Russell's writing. McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada maintains an extensive archive of Russell's work.
 A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900)
 The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
 “On Denoting” (1905)
 Principia Mathematica (1910–1913, with Alfred North Whitehead)
 The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
 Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (1914)

 Political Ideals (1917)

 “Mysticism and Logic” (1918)
 Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (1918)
 The Analysis of Mind (1921)
 Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

11. Henry M. Sheffer (1882–1964) was an American logician, perhaps best known for the Sheffer
stroke, a logical operator named in his honour.
Vitals
Name: Henry Maurice Sheffer
Born: 1882
Died: 1964
Sheffer was born in Ukraine and came to the United States as a child. He studied philosophy at
Harvard University, and spent most of his career as a professor there.
Sheffer stroke
In 1913, Sheffer showed that an alternative denial, otherwise known as a nand operation can
be used to define every other truth-functional logical operator.
The symbol for the alternative denial ( | or ↑) is known as the Sheffer stroke after Henry M.
Sheffer.
Sheffer also demonstrated that an joint denial could be used for the same purpose,
though Charles Sanders Peirce had also made the same discoveries in 1880, but his work was
not published until 1933. The symbol for the joint denial ( ↓ ) is called the Peirce arrow.
The Sheffer stroke was used extensively by Bertrand Russell and W. V. O. Quine.

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12. Novelist Franz Kafka (1883–1924) came from a middle-class Jewish family in Prague. He lived
with his parents for most of his life, despite his hyper-sensitivity to noise.
Vitals
Name: Franz Kafka
Born: July 3, 1883, Prague
Died: June 3, 1924
Degree: Doctor of Law (Prague, 1906)
Kafka's works are known for his blunt style and absurd situations, particularly in The
Metamorphosis.

Works
A number of Franz Kafka's early works were lost or destroyed. Others, still, went unfinished
by Kafka.
 The Castle
 A Country Doctor
 A Hunger Artist
 In the Penal Colony
 The Judgement
 The Metamorphosis (Read Online)
 The Stroker (or The Man who Disappeared)
 The Trial

13. Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher. He earned an MD at the
University of Heidelberg in Germany where he later taught psychology and then philosophy
(but was relieved of this position during Nazi power because his ideas opposed theirs).
Vitals
Name: Karl Theodor Jaspers
Born: February 23, 1883, Oldenburg, Germany
Died: February 26, 1969, Basel, Switzerland
Degrees: MD (Heidelberg, 1909)
Jaspers' philosophy centered around what he called the "encompassing". This transcendent
reality, as he described, transcended that which we could percieve naturally, and contained
within it human existence. Jaspers, like Kierkegaard, recognized the missing logic of his religious
conclusion, but explained that his "leap of faith" was a choice—which is, of course, an
expression of his right.
Jaspers also valued the scientific process, and felt that it was a necessary stage in coming to
understand the encompassing. He saw understading the freedom of the individual in the
concrete world—and the obvious limits to that freedom—as the most important part of
existence, which led him to be classified as an existentialist (a classifcation he rejected due to its
apparent limitations). Jasper's limits included mortality, conscience, conflict and chance.
Jaspers was also friends with Martin Heidegger, although they became distant due to
differences of philosophy, as well as Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi party.

14. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was a highly influential philosopher (or, as some may say,
an anti-philosopher) in the areas of mathematics, language and mind.
Vitals
Name: Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Born: April 26, 1889, Vienna
Died: April 29, 1951, Cambridge
Degrees: Ph.D. (Cambridge, 1929)

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 His first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was his only work published during his
lifetime. His other lectures and essays all appeared after his death in 1951.
Wittgenstein is also famous for having largely revised his philosophy later in his life. In his
later Philosophical Investigations, he reverses many of the opinions that he had in the Tractatus.
Thus, when discussing Wittgenstein’s positions, philosophers usually refer to either early
Wittgenstein or late Wittgenstein.

Late Wittgenstein believed that philosophical problems did not represent real problems, but
problems of language. The major questions that philosophers have pondered over for hundreds
of years were caused by confusion in language. By examining the sources of confusion,
Wittenstein suggests that the problems themselves disappear, without the need of a solution
within the framework of language.
As for the assignment of meaning to words, Wittgenstein points out that the relationship
between uses of some words is analogous to the relationship of family resemblance.
Wittgenstein famously says in Philosophical Investigations that his efforts in philosophy are to
show “the fly the way out of the fly bottle” — to help philosophy escape the traps of language
in which it is currently caught.

Works
 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
 Philosophical Investigations (1953)

15. Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) was a french philosopher and christian existentialist.
Vitals
Name: Gabriel Honoré Marcel
Born: December 7, 1889, Paris
Died: October 8, 1973, Paris
He dubbed himself as a "concrete philosopher", stressing becoming more involved in one's
existence rather than forming abstract ideas. Marcel viewed philosophy as an inner reflection
rather than the formation of a doctrine.
Marcel's father was atheist, as was Marcel himself until he joined the Catholic church in 1929.
Works

16. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher and student of Edmund Husserl.
Heidegger made contributions to phenomenonology and existentialism.
Vitals
Name: Martin Heidegger
Born: September 26, 1889, Meßkirch, Germany.
Died: May 26, 1976
Being and Time
Heidegger spent most of his career dealing with the concept of being, and his most famous
work, Being and Time, is an exploration of the nature of being. Being, Heidegger thought, has
been neglected since the birth of Western philosophy. The ancient Greek philosophers began a
tradition, according to Heidegger, by describing being only by objects that are beings, rather
than attempting to understand the nature of being — that is, what it means to be.
Heidegger explains that being, unlike other verbs which are, in language, treated equally, is
something entirely different. He describes being as a phenomenological construct, highly
dependant on human understanding, saying famously, "Only as phenomenology, is ontology
possible."

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 Whereas more traditional accounts of being, and of existence, describe objects with properties
as independant from conciousness, Heidegger argues that our understanding of being is
fundamental to it.
A major part of Heidegger's account of being is Dasein. The German word Dasein means
"existence", but in Heidegger's use it more specifically refers to the understanding of beings
that understand being. Heidegger rejects the objects and subjects of previous philosophers,
such as Kant and

Descartes, and describes Dasein as being-in-the-world, (In-der-Welt-sein). Heidegger explains

that previous philosophers have mistakenly viewed the concious thinker as a subject on its own.
Instead, he says, people (or thinkers, or Dasein) are always in the world, interacting with it,
influenced by their mood and generally concerned about being, whether actively or "dimly".

Heidegger and the Nazi Party

Heidegger's contributions were largely disregarded in the years during and after World War II
due to his activity in the German Nazi party from 1933 to 1945. While his political actions may
not be honorable or respected today, many of his philiophical works are valuable contributions
when seperated from the man himeself. (Heidegger's support of the Nazi party even seems to
contradict some of his existentialist views). Heidegger objected to being labeled as an
existentialist because the title put him in the same category as Albert Camus and Heidegger's
former student Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he did not want to be associated with due to their
French political standings. Although Being and Time is dedicated to him, Heidegger eventually
rejected the phenomenology developed by Husserl, mostly due to his Jewish lineage. Heidegger
gave a series of lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche, although many saw this as a perversion of
Nietzsche's work used to support Nazi doctrine.

Still, many of the concepts were shared between all of these writers. Heidegger particularly
believed in freedom of choice, and the responsibility for one's actions that naturally followed.
Even under pressure, man is still capable of choice, he explains, and outside influence cannot be
blamed for the actions of an individual.
Heidegger can be credited for bringing attention to the works of Søren Kierkegaard. He was
also a friend of Karl Jaspers.
Works
 The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
 Being and Time
 An Introduction to Metaphysics

17. Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) was a German philosopher, best known for his views of logical
positivism.
Vitals
Name: Rudolf Carnap
Born: May 18, 1891
Died: September 14, 1970

Logical positivism is generally the epistemological view that knowledge is gained through
empiricism along with logical (including mathematical) deduction. Carnap rejects metaphysics,
believing that it is to be replaced by proper scientific inquiry, armed with logical deductions
from observation alone. Carnap originally claimed that metaphysics was a meaningless pursuit,
but later refined his view to state that it was lacking in cognitive content, and thus provides no
meaning to science.
Selected Works
 Introduction to Semantics (1942)
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  Formalization of Logic (1943)
 Meaning and Necessity: a Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (1947)
 Logical Foundations of Probability (1950)
 “Empiricism, Semantics, Ontology” (1950)

18. Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) was a British philosopher who focused on philosophy of mind, and
of language.
Vitals
Name: Gilbert Ryle
Born: August 19, 1900, Brighton, England
Died: October 6, 1976, Whitby, England

He famously coined the term “the ghost in the machine” to refer to the soul in
the dualism promoted by René Descartes. Ryle believed that the mind is not a distinct entity,
seperate from the body, and that mental processes are merely a description of the physical
processes within the physical brain.
Ryle also introduced the term “category mistake” when describing the problems of dualism. He
saw mind-body dualism as redundant in its description, and that when speaking of mind as a
seperate entity, philosophers were making a mistake of category by placing mental events on
the same level as physical ones.

In The Concept of Mind, Ryle provides other examples of category mistakes to illustrate his
point. He supposes that someone is being shown around a university. During the tour, the
person is shown the various academic departments, libraries, museums, sports fields,
classrooms and offices. The person then responds, “I've seen the departments, libraries,
museums, sports fields, classrooms and offices … but where is the university?”. In this example,
the person commits a category mistake by supposing that the abstract concept of the
university is something separate, in the same category (or on an equal level of existence) as
the classrooms, libraries, etc.
Works
 The Concept of Mind (1949)
 Plato's Progress (1966)
 On Thinking (1979)

19. Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) was a Polish logician and mathematician, most famous in
philosophy for his semantics of logic and development of set theory. He is considered to be
one of the most important logicians of all time.
Vitals
Name: Alfred Tarski
Born: January 14, 1901
Died: October 26, 1983
Tarski developed a system by which a semantics from a metalanguage (such as English) can
be applied to an object language of symbolic logic, allowing logicians to examine not only the
syntactic relationship between logical expressions, but the semantics as well.
Tarski's model theory provides the ability for notions that are symbolized by logic and
mathematics to themselves be derived from the object languages of logic. His method
involves creating models for logical expressions, in which certain propositions or predicate
symbols are considered to be true or false on a given model or interpretation.
From this, Tarski developed the notion of logical consequence as a relation between some
premises and a conclusion, stating that the conclusion is the logical consequence of its
premises if and only if every model of those premises (that is, every interpretation which
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 makes those premises true) is also a model of the conclusion (one which makes the conclusion
true).
Selected Works
 Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences (1941)
 “The Semantical Concept of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics” (1944)
 A decision method for elementary algebra and geometry (1948)
 Cardinal Algebras (1949)

20. Karl Popper (1902–1994) is best known as one of the most prominent philosophers of science.
Vitals
Name: Karl Popper
Born: July 28, 1902
Died: September 17, 1994

Popper says that in order for a theory to be scientific in nature, it must be potentially
falsifiable — that is, any hypothesis is only scientific in nature if it there is some logical
possibility that would falsify that hypothesis. On the other hand, unfalsifiable things, such as
logical truths or religious claims, are not scientific in nature — there is no way to prove them
to be false.
According to Popper, scientific claims are never fully verified, they are only corroborated very
consistently by experience. As long as there remains a logical possibility that any claim is false,
it cannot be claimed to be true with perfect confidence. Hence, science must admit, and
always be aware of, the problem of induction. Rather than making claims which may turn out
to be false, it is the duty of science to propose falsifiable hypothesis and then, over the course
of time, test them and adjust theories accordingly.

Selected Works
 The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
 The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
 Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
 Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972)
 Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interaction (1994)

21. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French writer and philosopher who is one of the leading
figures in 20th-century existentialism.
Vitals
Name: Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
Born: June 21, 1905, Paris
Died: April 15, 1980, Paris
Degrees: Ph.D. Philosophy (Paris)
He imagines men as lonely creatures in a meaningless world. He emphasizes the importance of
choice and responsibility. Sartre's influences include many of the German philosophers,
especially Heidegger, of whom he was a student. He also had a close relationship with femenist
writer Simone de Beauvoir.
Sartre was offered various awards, including the Légion d'honneur and a Nobel Prize, both of
which he declined.

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22. Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was an Austrian-American mathematician and philosopher, and one
of the most important logicians in history.
Vitals
Name: Kurt Gödel
Born: April 28, 1906
Died: January 14, 1978
Awards: Albert Einstein Award (1951)
Incompleteness Theorems
Gödel is perhaps best known for his two incompleteness theorems which demonstrate the
limits of existing systems of logic and mathematics.
The first theorem states that any sound axiomatic system of number theory is incomplete —
that is, there are true things that can be expressed in the system but are unprovable (or
undecidable).
The second theorem states that any theory sophisticated enough to formally express its own
soundness (i.e., consistency) within its system can do so if and only if it is unsound (i.e.,
inconsistent).
Selected Works
 The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis
with the Axioms of Set Theory (1940)

23. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French author and philosopher.

Vitals
Full Name: Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Born: January 9, 1908, Paris
Died: April 14, 1986, Paris

Simone de Beauvoir was also close friend and lover to Jean-Paul Sartre and was a frequent
editor of his works.
In addition to Sartre, de Beauvoir had a great interest in the works of many other philosophical
thinkers of her time, including Albert Camus. On her own, she is most recognized for her
work The Second Sex which most clearly establishes de Beauvoir’s feminist views.
 Works

24. Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) was an analytic philosopher and logician. Quine made
contributions to the discussion of epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of
mind and logic.
Quine is best known for his naturalism, namely his physicalist theory of mind and his
behaviourism with regards to language. He is known for his naturalized epistemology in
particular, in which he rejects traditional methods of epistemology in favour of examining the
empirical data around human stimulation and formation of knowledge.
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
In a 1951 paper, Quine asserted that there is no important distinction between analytic and
synthetic statements, arguing that there is no real distinction between those beliefs which are
believed and asserted confidently, and those statements which are said to be necessarily true.
Selected Works
25. French writer from Algeria, Albert Camus was famous for his deep, yet concise, literary pieces.
Vitals
Name: Albert Camus

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 Born: November 7, 1913, Mondovi, Algeria
Died: January 4, 1960, Sens, France
Awards: Nobel Prize for Literature (1957)

In addition to his novels, essays and plays, Camus was a journalist, and during World War II, a
member of the French resistance against German occupation. His philosophy, which is
described in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, centers around the absurdity of the human
condition. Camus was labeled as an existentialist but rejected the title.
Camus brings a certain humanism to the existing existentialism of his time. While all of his
characters are aware (or quickly become aware) of the absurd, they all rebel against their
circumstances. Camus illustrates his views with his stories of characters who live by that
philosophy.
Biography
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on November 7, 1913. A year later, his father was
killed fighting in France. Camus lived a poor childhood, but he was not unhappy. He studied
philosophy at the University of Algiera and became a journalist. He also opened the Théâtre
de l'équipe, a small performing arts group.
Camus went to Paris and worked for Paris Soir, a city newspaper. He then went home and then
returned to Paris a second time, where he published L'Étranger (The Stranger) and La Mythe de
Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus). When Nazi Germany occupied France during World War II,
Camus wrote for Combat, a resistance newspaper.
Camus continued to write, and gained fame writing some of his famous works, including La
Peste (The Plague), and La Chute (The Fall). He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for
Literature.
In 1960, Camus was killed in a car accident while returning to Paris. His final novel, La Premier
Homme (The First Man), was found, unfinished, when he died. This book didn't appear publicly
until 1994.
Works
 The Stranger (Novel, 1942)
 The Myth of Sisyphus (Essay, 1942)
 The Misunderstanding (Play, 1943)
 Caligula (Play, 1944)
 The Plague (Novel, 1947)
 The State of Seige (Play, 1948)
 The Just Assasins (Play, 1950)
 The Rebel (Essay, 1951)
 The Fall (Novel, 1956)
 Exile and the Kingdom (Short Stories, 1957)
 Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Political Essays, 1960)
 The First Man (Autobiographical Novel, Unfinished 1960)
 A Happy Death (Novel, 1971 - written in 1920s)

26. John Rawls (1921–2002) was an American political philosopher, and a professor at Cornell,
MIT and Harvard.
Vitals
Name: John Rawls
Born: February 21, 1921
Died: November 24, 2002
Degrees: B.A. (Princeton, 1943)
Ph.D. (Princeton, 1950)

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 Service: U.S. Army, Private (1943–1946)
Awards: Schock Prize (1999)
National Humanities Medal (1999)
Rawls is most famous for A Theory of Justice, in which he argues for a version of the social
contract which defines “justice as fairness”.

The Original Position

Rawls believed that the social contract must be drawn up from an original position in which
everyone decides on the rules for society from behind a veil of ignorance.

The veil of ignorance is essentially a manner of blinding oneself from ones own social status. It
is only from behind this veil that one can truly develop a fair society. When considering
whether or not slavery is permissible, for example, one must not know whether one is going to
be a slave or a slave-owner.
From this original position, Rawls believes that two principles of justice arise. The first is
the liberty principle, the idea that all people should have access to their basic liberties —
freedom of speech, political freedoms, personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest —
insofar as those liberties are compatible with the same liberties of other people.
The second principle, the difference principle, states that inequalities in social and economic
distribution must be arranged so that they provide the greatest benefit to those with the least
advantage. That is, if goods are being distributed in a society, those who need them most
should be given priority to receieve them.
Rawls claims that we must arrive at this conclusion from the original position because we do
not want factors beyond our control to dictate the opportunities we have in life. If we are born
at a disadvantage, into a poor family, for example, we must be given the opportunity to
overcome it in a way that puts us on equal ground with those who did not have to overcome
the same obstacles.
An asteroid in the solar system's main belt was named in honour of John Rawls, called 16561
Rawls.
Selected Works
 A Theory of Justice (1971)
 Political Liberalism (1993)

27. Thomas Kuhn was an American professor of history and philosophy, who wrote and lectured
about the history and philosophy of science.
Vitals
Name: Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Born: July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio
Died: June 17, 1996
Degrees: M.S. Physics (Harvard 1946)
Ph.D. Physics (Harvard 1949)

His most important work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1964), focuses on the notion of
paradigm shifts in science. According to Kuhn, science does not progress in a linear fashion,
but rather through a series of revolutions in which our understanding of science abruptly and
radically changes. Revolutions inspired by Copernicus, Newton and Einstein are examples of
paradigm shifts.
During the periods between paradigm shifts, scientists are engaged in the more mundane
exercise of applying the knowledge of the current paradigm to current situations, and finding
new data to enforce it. Data that seem to contradict the paradigm are seen as errors on the
part of the everyday scientist, rather than anything that may be wrong with the paradigm itself.
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 Works
 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

28. Hilary Putnam (1926– ) is an American philosopher, best known for his work in epistemology,
Vitals
Name: Hilary Whitehall Putnam
Born: July 31, 1926
Degrees: Ph.D. (UCLA, 1951)
BA (University of Pennsylvania) philosophy of language and philosophy of science.
Mind: Brain in a Vat

Putnam offers a well-known thought experiment on the issue of scepticism: the brain in a vat.
In it, he supposes that a brain in a vat, which is fed sensory data identical to that it would
normally receive, has now way of knowing whether it is a brain in a vat or a brain in a skull.
Essentially, the problem highlights the epistemic problem of confirming the existence of an
external world.
Selected Works
 The “Innateness Hypothesis” and Explanatory Models in Linguistics (1967)
 Philosophy of Logic (1971)
 Reason, Truth, and History (1981)
 Representation and Reality (1988)
 Renewing Philosophy (1992)
 Words and Life (1994)
 Enlightenment and Pragmatism (2001)
 Ethics Without Ontology (2002)
29. Edmund L. Gettier III (1927– ) is an American philosopher and professor. He is best known for
his contribution to epistemology.
Vitals
Name: Edmund Gettier
Born: 1927
Degrees: Ph.D. (Cornell, 1961)
Gettier is best known for a very short but surprisingly groundbreaking article, “Is Justified True
Belief Knowledge?” In this article, he presents what would become known as the Gettier
counterexamples, which challenged the accepted definition of knowledge. Since Plato,
philosophers have generally considered knowledge to be justified true belief. The
counterexamples presented by Gettier are those of beliefs that seem to have justification in
their belief, and inferences based on those beliefs which turn out to be true by some degree of
chance.
The Gettier counterexamples sparked a renewed interest in epistemology and a new question
of epistemic luck, as many began the attempt to either save the defininition of knowledge from
Gettier, or expand it. Others, still, have found further counterexamples which question further
the definition of knowledge.
Gettier taught at Wayne State University from 1957 until 1967, when he moved to the
University of Massachusettes at Amherst, where he remains as a Professor Emeritus.
Selected Works
 Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (1963)

30. Jürgen Habermas (1929– ) is a German philosopher and sociologist.

Vitals
Name: Jürgen Habermas
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 Born: June 18, 1929, Düsseldorf

Habermas is perhaps best known for his theory of communicative reason, a theory of
human rationality which credits communication as the original cause of reason.
Communicative reason places the human faculty and conception of reason within the
structures of communication, rather than as something immediately inherent to the
individual or present as a feature of the universe.
Selected Works
 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)
 Toward a Rational Society (1967)
 The Theory of Communicative Action (1981)
 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985)

31. Harry Frankfurt (1929— ) is perhaps best known to the public for his recent books, On
Bullshit and On Truth. On Bullshit was originally written in 1986 as a paper, and was published
in 2005 as a book. The brief text became a bestseller, and Frankfurt wrote On Truth as a follow
up. The first book is a philosophical investigation into the specific sort of deception, while the
follow-up discusses the apparent decline in society’ value of the truth. Frankfurt received some
fame by appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart twice as a guest, once for each of these
books.
Vitals
Name: Harry G. Frankfurt
Born: May 29, 1929
Degrees: Ph.D. (John Hopkins, 1954)
Free will and responsibility
In philosophy, Frankfurt is perhaps best known for his ideas on the topic of free will and moral
responsibility. He provided the Frankfurt counterexamples to the principle of alternative
possibilities (PAP). These examples featured people who had no real choice of whether or not
they would perform some morally impermissible act, but nevertheless demonstrated some
sense of free will in their decision.
Frankfurt is a professor emeritus at Princeton University, and has also taught at Yale and
Rockefeller universities.
Selected Works
 “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (1969)
 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person” (1971)
 On Bullshit (2005)
 On Truth (2006)
32. Jaakko Hintikka (1929– ) is a Finnish logician and philosopher, and professor of philosophy at
Boston University.
Vitals
Name: Jaakko Hintikka
Born: January 12, 1929
Degrees: Ph.D. (University of Helsinki)
Awards: Wihuri International Prize (1976)
Rolf Schock Prize (2005)
Epistemic Logic
Hintikka presented a method of doing epistemic logic, a contextual logic meant to symbolize
sentences about knowledge and belief. In his 1962 book Knowledge and Belief, he provides
new operators which closely resemble those of modal logic:
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  Ka := a knows that…
 Pa := It is possible, for all a knows, that…
 Ba := a believes that…
 Ca := It is compatible with everything a knows that…
Selected Works
 Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions (1962)
 Models for Modalities (1969)
 The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic (1989)
 The Philosophy of Mathematics Revisted (1996)

33. Born in French Algeria, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) became a prominent figure in
continental philosophy, and is known as the founder of deconstruction.
Vitals
Name: Jacques Derrida
Born: July 15, 1930, French Algeria
Died: October 8, 2004, Paris
Selected Works
 De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology, 1967)
 La dissémination (Dissemination, 1972)
 Glas (1974)

34. Carl Ginet (1932— ) is an American philosopher.

Vitals
Name: Carl Ginet
Born: 1932 (Casper, Wyoming)
Degrees: Ph.D. (Cornell University, 1960)
BA (Occidental College, 1954)
Carl Ginet is also credited with the barn-façades counterexample to both
the traditional and causal definitions of knowledge. The barn example first appears in Alvin
Goldman’s paper, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge” as a challenge to Goldman’s
own causal theory.
Selected Works
 “Might We Have No Choice?” (1966)
 “An Incoherence in the Tractatus” (1973)
 Knowledge, Perception, and Memory (1975)
 “The Fourth Condition” (1988)
 On Action (1990)

35, Alvin Plantinga (1932– ) is an American philosopher, and professor at the University of Notre
Dame. He is known for his contributions to epistemology and metaphysics, and, as a Christian,
for his philosophy of religion and defense of Christian beliefs.
Vitals
Name: Alvin Carl Plantinga
Born: November 5, 1932
Degrees: Ph.D. (Yale University, 1958), MA (University of Michigan, 1955), BA (Calvin
College, 1954)

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 Christian philosophy
Plantinga argues that one can have knowledge of God without justification, in the same way
that one can have knowledge of the existence of other minds. He argues that one may doubt
both from scepticism, but ultimately one must accept both in order to be consistent.
Additionally, Plantinga also argues that there is no “problem of evil”, and that there is no
logical contradiction between the existence of an omnipoetent, benevolent god and the evil
that occurs in the world. Plantinga argues that God created human beings with free will, and
that free will is necessary for good to exist. Thus, in order for there to be good, God must
allow some evil to exist in the world, otherwise there would be no free creatures capable of
moral good.

Modal Ontological Argument

Plantinga has offered one of many formalizations of Anselm’s ontological argument in modal
logic, the logic of neccessity and possibility. His argument may be summarized as follows:
1. Premise: In some possible world, Δ, a being has maximal excellence if, and only if,
that being is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent at Δ
2. Premise: A being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence at every possible
world.
3. Premise: Maximal greatness is possible.
4. So, it is possibly neccessary that an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent
being exists.
5. So, it is necessary that an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being exists.
6. Therefore, an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent exists.

Plantinga’s argument assumes a modal logic of S5, in which (4) is possible—that is, things that
are possibly neccessary are necessary. The main objection to his argument, however, is with
(3), that maximal greatness is possible as Plantinga has defined it.
Selected Works
 God and Other Minds (1967)
 The Nature of Necessity (1974)
 Warranted Christian Belief (2000)

36. John Searle (1932—) is an analytic philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University
of California, Berkeley. He is known for his contributions to the philosophy of mind and
philosophy of language.
Chinese Room
John Searle is well known for producing the chinese room argument against strong artificial
intelligence (AI). Strong AI theorists often suggest that if an artificial intelligence were created
that could perform all of the functions of a human being, it would have experiences and
understanding, just as humans do.
To argue against this, Searle first gives the example of a computer that has been built to read
Chinese characters. The computer then takes these characters, and following its programming,
produces a meaningful output in Chinese. The computer is sophisticated enough to fool any
Chinese speaker into believing that they are communicating with another Chinese-speaking
human. A strong AI theorist would argue that the computer's ability to take Chinese characters,
interperet them and produce meaningful results implies that the
computer understands Chinese.

20
 Searle challenges this assertion by giving an alternative version of the machine. This time, an
English-speaking person is sitting in a closed room, and has a book, written in English, with the
same instructions that the computer's program has. The person is supplied with all of the
materials they would need to write Chinese characters, and the book instructs them, based on
the shapes of the characters provided to them, how to draw the forms of Chinese characters as
a response. Chinese-speakers are then able to slip messages through or under the door, where
the English speaker follows his English instructions based on the character and, properly
following them, produces meaningful responses in Chinese, just as the computer does. A
Chinese-speaker is similarly fooled into believing that the room (or the person in it) speaks
Chinese.

Searle points out the obvious: that the person performing the task in the Chinese Room does
not understand Chinese, despite the fact that the procedures he follows are essentially
equivalent to those of the computer.

Selected Works
 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969)
 Expression and Meaning (1979)
 The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
 Rationality in Action (2001)

37. Thomas Nagel (1937—) is an American philosopher and professor at New York University. He
has made contributions to philosophy of mind, ethics and political philosophy.
Vitals
Name: Thomas Nagel
Born: July 4, 1937
Degrees: B.A. (Cornell, 1958)
B.Phil. (Oxford, 1960)
Ph.D. (Harvard, 1963)
D.Litt. (Honuorary, Oxford, 1963)
Awards: Rolf Schock Prize (2008)
Balzan Prize (2008)
Nagel was born into a Jewish family in Yugoslavia, but moved to the U.S. where he went to
school. He studied at Cornell and Oxford, and completed a Ph.D. at Harvard under the
supervision of John Rawls.
Nagel is perhaps most famous for his 1974 paper, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”. In it, Nagel
argues that there is something fundamentally important about conciousness that is often
overlooked — namely, that an organism has mental states and is conscious if there is
something it is like to be that organism. A pure reduction of mental states to physical brain
states is therefore incomplete — we must account for what it is like to be in mental states.
Selected Works
 The Possibility of Altruism (1970)
 What Is it Like to Be a Bat? (1974 Essay)
 Equality and Partiality (1991)
 The Last Word (1997)
38. Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was an American social and political philosopher and a professor
at Harvard.
Vitals
Name: Robert Nozick
Born: November 16, 1938
Died: January 23, 2002
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 Degrees: B.A. (Columbia, 1959)
Ph.D. (Princeton, 1963)
Political Philosophy
Nozick's most influential work is Anarchy, State and Utopia. This 1974 book is largely a
response to A Theory of Justice from John Rawls.
While Rawls sought an egalitarian view of justice that saw the government correcting
arbitrary social inequalities, Nozick strongly argued that the role of a government should be
minimal. All the state should be concerned with is “the narrow functions of protection against
force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on” (“Anarchy, State and Utopia”, xi).
Nozick claimed that human beings rights were so strong that the idea of a government
having any power over people was highly questionable. As a result, the only thing a
government ought to be able to do is to provide protection for certain individual rights from
other people.
Nozick argues for a libertarian political philosophy in which people are generally free, and the
government's only role, and the only reason against anarchy, is for the protection of people.
Such a state would arise naturally out of anarchy, but nothing beyond this minimalist agency
could be justified.
Epistemology
Nozick also contributed to epistemology with his tracking theory of knowledge. Nozick
offered conditions for knowledge that deal with Gettier counterexamples to the traditional
definition of knowledge by ensuring that knowledge reliably keeps track of the truth.
Selected Works
 Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)
 Philosophical Explanations (1981)
 The Examined Life (1989)
39. Alvin Goldman (1938– ) is an American professor of philosophy, best known for his
contributions to epistemology.
Vitals
Name: Alvin I. Goldman
Born: 1938
Degrees: Ph.D. (Princeton University, 1965)
MA (Princeton University, 1962)
BA Summa cum laude (Columbia University, 1960)
Goldman currently teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Epistemology
Goldman contributed to epistemology a causal theory of knowledge, which provided a new
account of what knowledge is, in response to the Gettier counterexamples.
Goldman also presented a commonly-used counterexample invented by Carl Ginet, which,
unlike Gettier’s examples, does not rely on an inference from a false premise. Ginet’s example
is known as the barn-façades example, and presented Goldman’s causal theory with a
counterexample.
Goldman is also interested in the social aspects of epistemology, and currently serves as editor
of Episteme, A Journal of Social Epistemology.
Selected Works
 Action (1965)
 “A Causal Theory of Knowing” (1967)
 A Theory of Human Action (1970)
 “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge” (1976)
 “What is Justified Belief?” (1979)
 Epistemology and Cognition (1986)

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  Simulating Minds (2006)

40. Saul Kripke (1940—) is a logician and professor of philosophy best known for his
contributions to logic, epistemology and philosophy of language.
Vitals
Name: Saul Kripke
Born: November 13, 1940, Nebraska
Degrees: B.A. Mathematics (Harvard)
Several honourary degress
Awards: Schock Prize, Logic and Philosophy, 2001
Kripke semantics
Kripke semantics is a method of providing semantics for non-classical logical systems. In the
1930s, Alfred Tarski provided a model theory for classical logics, but until Kripke, no such
theory existed for modal logic. To remedy this, Kripke created the possible world semantics,
which described the modal operators of neccessity and possibility in the context of truth in
multiple possible worlds.
Kripke described a model in modal logic as an object consisting of a set of possible worlds, W,
a set of binary relations between them, R and a relation between individual worlds and
formulae that are true in those worlds, ⊩. Such a model is expressed through the notation 〈
W, R, ⊩〉.
Thus, necessity and possibility can be semantically defined: Something is necessarily true in
some world when it is true in all worlds accessible to that world, and something is possibly
true in a world when it is true in at least one possible world accessible to it.
Kripke's semantics have drawn a renewed interest in modal logic and many developments in
their study. It has also brought questions from those such as Quine, who ask to what one is
referring when discussing possible worlds, and whether or not such semantics commit one to
affirming their existence.
Works
 Naming and Necessity (Lectures, 1972)
 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982)

41. Australian philosopher Frank Jackson (1943— ) has contributed to the areas of philosophy of
mind, epistemology and metaphysics.
Vitals
Name: Frank Cameron Jackson
Born: 1943
Degrees: Ph.D. (La Trobe University

Jackson is a Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University, and a regular visiting
professor at Princeton University. His father, Allan Jackson, was a student of Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

Mary’s Room
Jackson is often cited for his knowledge argument against physicalism in philosophy of
mind. Mary’s Room thought experiment in philosophy of mind.
The argument supposes that a woman, Mary, spends her life in a room where she was unable
to see any colour, but nevertheless learns all of the physical facts about colour and colour
perception. Jackson then considers what happens when Mary leaves the room and sees colour

23
 for the first time. Since it seems obvious that Mary learns something knew upon seeing colour,
the existence of something apart from the physical world is demonstrated.
Initially, Jackson used Mary’s Room in order to support his dualist response to the mind-body
problem, but later decided that the knowledge argument is more intuitive than it is scientific,
and it is actually misleading.
Selected Works
 Perception: A Representative Theory (1977)
 “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982)
 “Weakness of Will” (1984)
 “What Mary didn't Know” (1986)
 Conditionals (1987)
 “Functionalism and Broad Content” (1988)
 From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis (1997)

42. Jonathan Dancy (1946)

43. Peter Singer (1946— ) is a well-known moral philosopher, best known for his utilitarian stance
on ethics.
Vitals
Name: Peter Albert David Singer
Born: July 6, 1946
Degrees: B.Phil (Oxford, 1971)
MA (University of Melbourne, 1969)
BA (University of Melbourne, 1967)
The central idea of Peter Singer’s utilitarian moral philosophy is as follows: If you can prevent
the misery of others without causing similar misery or sacrifice for yourself, you ought to.
World poverty
Singer is known in part for his stance against world poverty. Singer criticizes the gap between
the wealthy and the poor, claiming that the fact that some people live with great wealth while
others are unable to meet their basic needs is morally impermissible. It is well within the
means of the developed, wealthy people of the world to prevent the widespread poverty in
other areas, and the wealthy would not have to make a sacrifice anywhere near the level that
the poor currently endure. Singer holds that our prefrence of our own comfort over everyone
else’s is unethical, and perhaps even irrational.

Animal Liberation
Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation has become an important text outside of the
philosophical community among those promoting animal welfare. In Animal Liberation, Singer
says that society is guilty of “speciesism”—in that it favours the well-being of the human
species, with nearly universal disregard for all of the other species on the planet.
Selected Works
 Animal Liberation (1975)
 Practical Ethics (1979)
 Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)
 One World: The Ethics of Globalisation (2002)
 The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (2009)

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45. The Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1966— ) is best known for his work in philosophy
of mind. He is a professor at the Australian National University.
Vitals
Name: David John Chalmers
Born: April 20, 1966
Degrees: Ph.D. (Indiana University, 1993)
Chalmers first addresses the difference between the two types of problems in the science of
the mind. The easy problems, he says, are the ones that have to do with how the brain
functions and handles specific tasks. The hard problem, however, is how and why the brain
gives rise to consciousness at all. Although many theories address the weak problems,
Chalmers does not agree that the hard problem is addressed at all by the scientific community.
He then argues for a version of property dualism. In making is his point, Chalmers invokes
the Mary’s Room thought experiment from Frank Jackson. He supposes that if someone (Mary,
in the example) spends her whole life without seeing colour, yet learns all of the physical and
neurological facts about it, she still learns something new about colour when she sees it for the
first time with her own eyes.

Chalmers believes that this argument proves the existence of a non-physical fact about
consciousness. Therefore, there must be something beyond the physical world as it is known
that must account for consciousness. He points out that physics attempts to provide a “theory
of everything”, but it will continually fail to do so as long as it fails to include consciousness in
its considerations.
As with previous unexplained phenomena, Chalmers supposes that the solution is to add a
fundamental feature in order to close the explanatory gap between physics and consciousness.
He argues that there must be some new mental properties, what he calls “psychophysical laws”,
that must be accounted for, and that those properties must not be reducible to the physical
properties of the brain.
Chalmers doesn”t suppose to know what those things are, however. He speculates that it may
be the case that information theory will come into play — that information-bearing systems
give rise to a certain experiential property. The more complex the system, the greater that
experiential property becomes, until it becomes conscious.
A potential problem with this speculation, which Chalmers acknowledges, is that it may imply
the consciousness of things that we would not normally consider to have consciousness at all.
For instance, Chalmers wonders if this means that a thermostat may have some experiential
properties, even if they are especially dull. He does not commit to the notion that they do, but
the possibility remains in the more speculative area of his thought.
Selected Works
 The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996)
 “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience” (1995)

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