David Benatar

David Benatar (born 1966) is a South African philosopher, academic and author. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which he argues that coming into existence is a serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings.

Benatar is vegan, and has taken part in debates on veganism. He has argued that humans are "responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought

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Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."
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L.G. Capellan

L.G. Capellan is a voracious researcher of digestive problems, with extensive experience and knowledge about gastritis and bile reflux. In 2013, he was diagnosed with chronic gastritis, acid reflux, and bile reflux—digestive problems that he suffered from for several years until he decided to take his health in his own hands and do things on his own.

He spent more than 5 years researching a solution to his chronic gastritis and bile reflux. This included dedicating thousands of hours to reading medical and scientific research, articles on blogs and websites, and gastritis success stories on online health forums. His deep research provided him with a new understanding of what he had to do, how, and in what order to heal his gastritis and dige
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Carlo Michelstaedter

Carlo Michelstaedter (3 June 1887 - 17 October 1910) was an Italian writer, philosopher, and man of letters.

Carlo Michelstaedter was born in Gorizia, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian County of Gorizia and Gradisca, as the youngest of four children in a well-to-do Italian-speaking Jewish family. From his father Alberto, the head of an insurance office and president of the Gabinetto di Lettura goriziano, he received a push towards literary study; from his mother Emma Luzzatto, a great love for family and country.

He was a scrappy and introverted boy, but by the end of high school (completed in Gorizia), he developed into a brilliant, athletic, intelligent youth. He enrolled in the department of mathematics in Vienna, but soon moved to Flore
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Magnus Vinding

Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022), and Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures (2024).

His next book will be Compassionate Purpose: Personal Inspiration for a Better World.
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Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe [pronounced ZAP-fe] was a Norwegian philosopher, author and mountaineer. He was well known for his somewhat pessimistic view of human existence and his philosophy is widely considered to be pessimistic, much like the earlier work of Arthur Schopenhauer, by whom he was inspired. His thoughts regarding the error of human existence are presented in the essay, The Last Messiah (original: Den sidste Messias, 1933). This essay is a shorter version of his best-known work, the philosophical treatise, On the tragic (original: Om det tragiske 1941). He called his brand of thought, biosophy, which he defined as "thinking on life".

(Source: wikipedia)
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Philipp Mainländer

Philipp Mainländer (October 5, 1841 – April 1, 1876) was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main.

In his central work Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption or The Philosophy of Salvation) — according to Theodor Lessing, "perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature" — Mainländer proclaims that life is absolutely worthless, and that "the will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."

Coherently with his philosophy, very shortly after the publication of the first volume of his main work, he ended his life by hanging himself.
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Philip Nitschke

Philip Nitschke is an Australian humanist, author, former physician, and founder and director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_...
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John Gray

John Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
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Peter Singer

Peter Singer is sometimes called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" although he thinks that if that is true, it doesn't say much for all the other living philosophers around today. He has also been called the father (or grandfather?) of the modern animal rights movement, even though he doesn't base his philosophical views on rights, either for humans or for animals.

 In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. (He has since slipped to 36th.) He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethic
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Derek Humphry

Derek Humphry was a British and American journalist and author notable as a proponent of legal assisted suicide and the right to die. In 1980, he co-founded the Hemlock Society and, in 2004, after that organization dissolved, he co-founded Final Exit Network. From 1988 to 1990, he was president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies and was most recently the president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization (ERGO).
He was the author of several related books, including Jean's Way (1978), The Right to Die: Understanding Euthanasia (1986), and Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying (1991).
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Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker. He is known for works such as Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), and The Psychopath Test (2011).
He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming a faux-naïf character in his stories. He produces informal but sceptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. He has published nine books and his work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, City Life and Time Out. He has made several BBC Television documentary films and two documentary series for Channel 4.
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Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
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Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist and feminist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. They are currently a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s they held several teaching and research appointments, and were involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Their research ranges from literary theory, modern philosoph
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Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer was an American social writer and philosopher. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005.

Early life

Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1902 (or possibly 1898), the son of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, immigrants from Alsace. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. When
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Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present day Gdańsk, Poland) and was a German philosopher best known for his work The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer attempted to make his career as an academic by correcting and expanding Immanuel Kant's philosophy concerning the way in which we experience the world.

He was the son of author Johanna Schopenhauer and the older brother of Adele Schopenhauer.
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Peter Singer

Peter Singer is sometimes called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" although he thinks that if that is true, it doesn't say much for all the other living philosophers around today. He has also been called the father (or grandfather?) of the modern animal rights movement, even though he doesn't base his philosophical views on rights, either for humans or for animals.

 In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. (He has since slipped to 36th.) He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethic
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Sam Harris

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Sam Harris (born 1967) is an American non-fiction writer, philosopher and neuroscientist. He is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004), which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), a rejoinder to the criticism his first book attracted. His new book, The Moral Landscape, explores how science might determine human values.

After coming under intense criticism in response to his attacks on dogmatic religious belief, Harris is cautious about revealing details of his personal life and history. He has said that he was raised by a Jewish mother and a Quaker father, and he told Newswe
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Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS, was a Welsh philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, and prominent rationalist. Although he was usually regarded as English, as he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

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Emil M. Cioran

Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.

A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
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Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."
Buy books on Amazon
Philipp Mainländer

Philipp Mainländer (October 5, 1841 – April 1, 1876) was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main.

In his central work Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption or The Philosophy of Salvation) — according to Theodor Lessing, "perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature" — Mainländer proclaims that life is absolutely worthless, and that "the will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."

Coherently with his philosophy, very shortly after the publication of the first volume of his main work, he ended his life by hanging himself.
Buy books on Amazon
Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe [pronounced ZAP-fe] was a Norwegian philosopher, author and mountaineer. He was well known for his somewhat pessimistic view of human existence and his philosophy is widely considered to be pessimistic, much like the earlier work of Arthur Schopenhauer, by whom he was inspired. His thoughts regarding the error of human existence are presented in the essay, The Last Messiah (original: Den sidste Messias, 1933). This essay is a shorter version of his best-known work, the philosophical treatise, On the tragic (original: Om det tragiske 1941). He called his brand of thought, biosophy, which he defined as "thinking on life".

(Source: wikipedia)
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Fyodor Dostoevsky

Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский (Russian)

Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.

Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929),

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .

Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of worl
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John Gray

John Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
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Nolen Gertz

Nolen Gertz is Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente, and the author of Nihilism (MIT Press, 2019), Nihilism and Technology (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014).

He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research in 2012. His research interests include applied ethics, social and political philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics. He has written for the media analyses of military robots, humanitarian drones, and Facebook. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and on the ABC Australia website. He has been interviewed by the BBC
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Ben Connelly

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as Ben Connelly.
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