Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His ideas, presented in a series of essays from the 1960's onwards, have been influential across a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. Davidson's work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, which is unusual within twentieth century analytic philosophy. Thus, although he acknowledged an important debt to W. V. O. Quine, Davidson's thought amalgamates influences (though these are not always explicit) from a variety of sources, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, Frank Ramsey, Immanuel Kant and the later Wittgenstein. And while often developed separately, Davidson's ideas

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J.L. Austin

John Langshaw Austin (March 26, 1911 – February 8, 1960) was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford University. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. His work in the 1950s provided both a theoretical outline and the terminology for the modern study of speech acts developed subsequently, for example, by (the Oxford-educated American philosopher) John R. Searle, William P. Alston, François Récanati, Kent Bach, and Robert M. Harnish.

After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside W
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G.E.M. Anscombe

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work, and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. Her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the language of analytic philosophy; this and subsequent articles had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Her monograph Intention is generally recognized as her greatest and most influential work, and the continuing philosophical interest in the
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Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (Ph.D., Trinity College, Cambridge University, 1929) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

Described by Bertrand Russell as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating", he helped inspire two of the twentieth century's principal philosophical movements: the Vienna Circle and Oxford ordinary language philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers in Canada and the U.S. rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations among the top five most important boo
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Blaise Pascal

Early work of Blaise Pascal of France included the invention of the adding machine and syringe and the co-development with Pierre de Fermat of the mathematical theory of probability; later, he, a Jansenist, wrote on philosophy and theology, notably as collected in the posthumous Pensées (1670).

This contemporary of René Descartes attained ten years of age in 1633, when people forced Galileo Galilei to recant his belief that Earth circled the Sun. He lived in Paris at the same time, when Thomas Hobbes in 1640 published his famous Leviathan (1651). Together, Pascal created the calculus.

A near-fatal carriage accident in November 1654 persuaded him to turn his intellect finally toward religion. The story goes that on the proverbial dark
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Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.

Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
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Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is a former professor at Princeton University and currently has a position at NYU.

Series:
* Sir Patrick Scott Mystery (as Anthony Appiah)
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William James

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

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the func
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Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prince , book of Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian political theorist, in
1513 describes an indifferent ruler to moral considerations with determination to achieve and to maintain power.

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, a philosopher, musician, and poet, wrote plays. He figured centrally in component of the Renaissance, and people most widely know his realist treatises on the one hand and republicanism of Discourses on Livy .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%...
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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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Peter Godfrey-Smith

I am currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York), and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (half-time) at the University of Sydney.

I grew up in Sydney, Australia. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and I have a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. I taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2003, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. I moved to Harvard full-time and was Professor there from 2006 to 2011, before coming to the CUNY Graduate Center. I took up a half-time position in the HPS program at the University of Sydney in 2015.

My main research interest
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Thomas Mann

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

See also:
Serbian: Tomas Man

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important
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John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century in the USA.

In 1859, educator and philosopher John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. After teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Chicago as head of a department in philosophy, psychology and educatio
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David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism.

In light of Hume's central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher "widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language." While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. He wrote The History of England which became a bestseller, and it became the standard history of England in its day.

His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a Brit
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Herbert Marcuse

German-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left", his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension. Marcuse was a major intellectual influence on the New Left and student movements of the 1960s.
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Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences o
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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, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. 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, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology, but his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal o
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Andrew Carnie

Professor of Linguistics
Faculty Director, Graduate College and Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs
University of Arizona
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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 McDowell

John H. McDowell (MA, Oxford) is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to Pittsburgh in 1986, he taught at University College, Oxford. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and Princeton University. He was the John Locke Lecturer at Oxford University in 1991. His major interests are Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, and ethics. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Anthony Kenny

Sir Anthony Kenny is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion.
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J.L. Austin

John Langshaw Austin (March 26, 1911 – February 8, 1960) was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford University. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. His work in the 1950s provided both a theoretical outline and the terminology for the modern study of speech acts developed subsequently, for example, by (the Oxford-educated American philosopher) John R. Searle, William P. Alston, François Récanati, Kent Bach, and Robert M. Harnish.

After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside W
Buy books on Amazon
G.E.M. Anscombe

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work, and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. Her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the language of analytic philosophy; this and subsequent articles had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Her monograph Intention is generally recognized as her greatest and most influential work, and the continuing philosophical interest in the
Buy books on Amazon
Andrew Carnie

Professor of Linguistics
Faculty Director, Graduate College and Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs
University of Arizona
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