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93 entries

Thinkers Index

Who the curriculum engages with, roughly chronological. The line under each name says what the person held, not what they are best known for. Dates are printed only where they are settled; a 'c.' means the scholarship is not agreed.

  1. Plato

    c. 428–348 BCE

    Held that the objects of knowledge are eternal Forms, and that the sensible world only ever resembles them

  2. Aristotle

    384–322 BCE

    Located form in particular substances rather than a separate realm, and built the first systematic logic and the first virtue ethics

  3. Augustine of Hippo

    354–430

    Argued that evil is a privation rather than a substance, which set the shape of Christian theodicy for a thousand years

  4. Boethius

    c. 477–524

    Proposed that God's knowledge is timeless rather than foreknowledge, so it does not remove the contingency of future acts

  5. Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

    c. 980–1037

    Distinguished essence from existence and argued from contingent beings to a necessary existent

  6. Anselm of Canterbury

    c. 1033–1109

    Gave the first ontological argument: what exists in reality is greater than what exists in the understanding alone

  7. Al-Ghazali

    c. 1058–1111

    Pressed the kalam version of the cosmological argument and attacked the philosophers' claim that the world is eternal

  8. Maimonides

    1138–1204

    Held that positive claims about God's nature fail, so theological language works by negation

  9. Thomas Aquinas

    1225–1274

    Argued for God from motion, causation, contingency, gradation and governance, and held that God is simple, with no distinction between attributes

  10. John Duns Scotus

    c. 1266–1308

    Held that being is said univocally of God and creatures, and introduced haecceity as the principle of individuation

  11. William of Ockham

    c. 1287–1347

    Denied that universals exist outside the mind, treating them as names that apply to many particulars

  12. Thomas Hobbes

    1588–1679

    Argued that life without a sovereign is intolerable, so rational agents contract into absolute political authority

  13. René Descartes

    1596–1650

    Held that mind and body are distinct substances, and tried to rebuild knowledge from the one belief doubt cannot touch

  14. Baruch Spinoza

    1632–1677

    Held that there is exactly one substance, so thought and extension are two attributes of the same thing

  15. John Locke

    1632–1704

    Grounded personal identity in continuity of consciousness rather than soul or body, and derived property rights from labour

  16. Blaise Pascal

    1623–1662

    Argued that belief in God is the rational bet under uncertainty, shifting the question from evidence to decision

  17. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

    1646–1716

    Held that everything has a sufficient reason, and that identity of indiscernibles rules out two things sharing every property

  18. George Berkeley

    1685–1753

    Denied that matter exists: to be is to be perceived, and physical objects are collections of ideas

  19. Thomas Reid

    1710–1796

    Held that some beliefs are properly basic, so demanding a proof of the external world misunderstands how justification works

  20. David Hume

    1711–1776

    Denied that we perceive necessary connection in causes, denied that ought follows from is, and denied that testimony can establish a miracle

  21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    1712–1778

    Held that legitimate authority comes from the general will, not from consent to be ruled by another

  22. Immanuel Kant

    1724–1804

    Grounded morality in a test of universalisability rather than consequences, and held that some substantive knowledge is a priori

  23. Jeremy Bentham

    1748–1832

    Held that the right act maximises pleasure over pain, counting each person for one, and dismissed natural rights as rhetoric

  24. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

    1770–1831

    Held that categories of thought develop historically through their own contradictions rather than sitting fixed

  25. Arthur Schopenhauer

    1788–1860

    Held that the world as it is in itself is blind will, and that existence is therefore not worth the suffering it costs

  26. John Stuart Mill

    1806–1873

    Defended utilitarianism with higher and lower pleasures, and held that the only ground for coercing an adult is harm to others

  27. Søren Kierkegaard

    1813–1855

    Held that faith is not the conclusion of an argument but a commitment made without one

  28. Karl Marx

    1818–1883

    Held that labour under capitalism alienates the worker from the product, the act, and other people, and that ideology makes this look natural

  29. Charles Sanders Peirce

    1839–1914

    Treated belief as a habit of action and truth as what inquiry would converge on in the long run

  30. Friedrich Nietzsche

    1844–1900

    Held that moral systems have histories and interests behind them, and that tracing those undercuts their claim to authority

  31. Gottlob Frege

    1848–1925

    Invented quantificational logic, separated sense from reference, and held that numbers are objects

  32. Alexius Meinong

    1853–1920

    Held that there are objects that do not exist, so quantification and existence come apart

  33. Franz Brentano

    1838–1917

    Held that directedness at an object marks the mental off from the physical

  34. Edmund Husserl

    1859–1938

    Made the structure of experience itself the subject matter, bracketing the question of whether its objects exist

  35. William James

    1842–1910

    Held that where evidence is genuinely inconclusive and the choice is forced, belief may be settled on other grounds

  36. John Dewey

    1859–1952

    Treated inquiry as problem-solving within a practice rather than the pursuit of certainty

  37. Bertrand Russell

    1872–1970

    Analysed definite descriptions as quantifier phrases, so 'the present King of France is bald' comes out false rather than meaningless

  38. G. E. Moore

    1873–1958

    Held that good is indefinable, and that any attempt to define it in natural terms commits a fallacy

  39. Ludwig Wittgenstein

    1889–1951

    Held first that language pictures facts, later that meaning is use, and that a private inner language is impossible

  40. Martin Heidegger

    1889–1976

    Held that the question of what it is to be had been forgotten in favour of cataloguing what there is

  41. Rudolf Carnap

    1891–1970

    Distinguished questions internal to a linguistic framework from external questions about which framework to adopt, and held only the first have answers

  42. Gilbert Ryle

    1900–1976

    Held that dualism is a category mistake, and that mental terms describe dispositions to behave

  43. Alfred Tarski

    1901–1983

    Defined truth for a formal language in a stronger metalanguage, and showed no consistent language can define its own truth predicate

  44. Karl Popper

    1902–1994

    Held that theories are never confirmed, only not yet refuted, so falsifiability marks science off from what imitates it

  45. Frank Ramsey

    1903–1930

    Showed that degrees of belief must satisfy the probability axioms on pain of accepting a set of bets that loses whatever happens

  46. Carl Hempel

    1905–1997

    Set out the paradox that a green leaf confirms 'all ravens are black', which any theory of confirmation has to answer

  47. Kurt Gödel

    1906–1978

    Proved that any consistent system strong enough for arithmetic contains truths it cannot prove, and cannot prove its own consistency

  48. Hannah Arendt

    1906–1975

    Held that politics is action among plural equals in public, not the administration of a population

  49. Simone de Beauvoir

    1908–1986

    Held that woman is constituted as the Other against which man is defined as the norm

  50. W. V. O. Quine

    1908–2000

    Rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction, held that theories face experience as wholes, and made ontological commitment a matter of what the bound variables must range over

  51. A. J. Ayer

    1910–1989

    Held that a statement is meaningful only if verifiable or analytic, which made moral and theological claims expressions of attitude

  52. Alan Turing

    1912–1954

    Replaced the question whether a machine thinks with a question about whether its conversation is distinguishable from a person's

  53. Wilfrid Sellars

    1912–1989

    Attacked the given: experience cannot justify belief unless it already has conceptual content

  54. Roderick Chisholm

    1916–1999

    Defended an internalist account of justification and posed the problem of the criterion

  55. Donald Davidson

    1917–2003

    Held that mental events are physical events, though no strict law connects mental and physical descriptions

  56. J. L. Mackie

    1917–1981

    Argued that objective values would be metaphysically queer, so moral claims are systematically false

  57. P. F. Strawson

    1919–2006

    Held that responsibility is grounded in the reactive attitudes, which no metaphysical thesis about determinism could dislodge

  58. G. E. M. Anscombe

    1919–2001

    Held that moral obligation without a lawgiver is incoherent, and that ethics should return to the virtues

  59. Philippa Foot

    1920–2010

    Introduced the trolley case to separate killing from letting die, and grounded virtue in facts about human flourishing

  60. John Rawls

    1921–2002

    Held that principles of justice are the ones parties would choose behind a veil of ignorance, yielding equal liberty plus a difference principle

  61. Thomas Kuhn

    1922–1996

    Held that normal science proceeds within a paradigm and that paradigm shifts are not settled by evidence alone

  62. Michael Dummett

    1925–2011

    Argued from a use theory of meaning to intuitionistic logic, rejecting bivalence for undecidable statements

  63. Michel Foucault

    1926–1984

    Held that what counts as knowledge is shaped by power, and traced punishment from spectacle to discipline

  64. Hilary Putnam

    1926–2016

    Argued that meanings are not in the head, and later that reference cannot be fixed by theory alone

  65. Edmund Gettier

    1927–2021

    Showed with two short cases that justified true belief can fail to be knowledge

  66. Noam Chomsky

    1928–

    Showed that the linguistic input a child receives underdetermines the grammar they acquire, which sank behaviourism about language

  67. Bernard Williams

    1929–2003

    Held that impartial moral theories demand that agents abandon the projects that give them reason to go on, and that luck reaches into moral assessment

  68. Jaakko Hintikka

    1929–2015

    Built the first systematic logic of knowledge and belief, and devised inductive systems that let a universal generalisation be confirmed at all

  69. Judith Jarvis Thomson

    1929–2020

    Argued that even granting the fetus a right to life, that right does not entail a right to use another person's body

  70. Jürgen Habermas

    1929–

    Grounds legitimacy in what could be agreed under conditions of undistorted discussion

  71. John Searle

    1932–

    Argued with the Chinese Room that symbol manipulation is not understanding, whatever the program does

  72. Alvin Plantinga

    1932–

    Held that belief in God can be properly basic, and that free will answers the logical problem of evil

  73. Amartya Sen

    1933–

    Shifted the measure of justice from resources to what people are actually able to do and be

  74. Richard Swinburne

    1934–

    Argued that theism is a simpler hypothesis than its rivals and made the whole case in probabilistic form, with simplicity carrying the prior

  75. Jerry Fodor

    1935–2017

    Held that thinking is computation over a language-like system of mental representations

  76. Thomas Nagel

    1937–

    Held that no physical account captures what it is like to be a bat, and that morality cannot be reduced to a view from nowhere

  77. Robert Nozick

    1938–2002

    Held that a distribution is just if it arose from just acquisition and transfer, so patterned principles require constant interference

  78. Alvin Goldman

    1938–

    Held that a belief is justified when the process producing it is reliable, whether or not the believer can say so

  79. T. M. Scanlon

    1940–

    Held that an act is wrong if it violates a principle no one could reasonably reject

  80. Saul Kripke

    1940–2022

    Gave modal logic its possible-worlds semantics, and argued that names are rigid designators, which makes some necessary truths knowable only a posteriori

  81. David Lewis

    1941–2001

    Held that possible worlds are as real as this one, differing only in that we are here, and analysed causation counterfactually

  82. Derek Parfit

    1942–2017

    Held that personal identity is not what matters in survival, and exposed the repugnant conclusion in population ethics

  83. Daniel Dennett

    1942–2024

    Held that consciousness has no inner theatre, and that qualia as usually described do not exist

  84. Allan Gibbard

    1942–

    Treats normative judgement as the acceptance of norms rather than the description of facts

  85. Marilyn McCord Adams

    1943–2017

    Held that evils which appear to ruin a life must be defeated within that life rather than outweighed by goods distributed anywhere else

  86. Frank Jackson

    1943–

    Argued with the case of Mary the colour scientist that complete physical knowledge leaves something out, then later withdrew the conclusion

  87. Simon Blackburn

    1944–

    Defends a quasi-realism on which moral talk earns the trappings of truth without moral facts

  88. Peter Singer

    1946–

    Holds that equal interests count equally regardless of species, and that distance does not reduce an obligation to help

  89. Kit Fine

    1946–

    Argued that essence is not reducible to modality, and put grounding at the centre of metaphysics

  90. Martha Nussbaum

    1947–

    Specifies a list of central human capabilities a just society must secure to a threshold

  91. Christine Korsgaard

    1952–

    Holds that normativity comes from the agent's own reflective endorsement of what they have reason to do

  92. Judith Butler

    1956–

    Holds that gender is constituted by repeated performance rather than expressing a prior inner fact

  93. David Chalmers

    1966–

    Separated the hard problem of why processing feels like anything from the tractable problems, and takes panpsychism seriously as an answer