1900 - 2000 CE Flashcards
Bertrand Russell
1872 - 1970
British mathematician and public philosopher.
A founder of analytic philosophy.
Wittgenstein was his student and protege.
Co-authored Principia Mathematica with Whitehead which attempted to reduce mathematics to logic.
Pacifist who championed anti-imperialism.
Giovanni Gentile
1875 - 1944
“The philosopher of fascism.”
Devised his own system of thought, which he called “actual idealism” or “actualism”, which has been described as “the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition.
Ludwig von Mises
1881 - 1973
Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism.
He is best known for his work on praxeology studies comparing communism and capitalism.
He is considered one of the most influential economic and political thinkers of the 20th century.
Walter Terence Stace
1886 - 1967
He is most renowned for his work in the philosophy of mysticism, and for books like Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) and Teachings of the Mystics (1960).
These works have been influential in the study of mysticism, but they have also been severely criticised for their lack of methodological rigour and their perennialist pre-assumptions.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889 - 1951
Considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
he “early Wittgenstein” was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world, and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems.
The “later Wittgenstein”, however, rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language game.
“His ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he was writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.”
Susanne Langer
1895 - 1985
American female philosopher best known for her theories on the influence of art on the mind.
Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979
“The Father of the New Left”.
He criticised capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.
Xavier Zubiri
1898 - 1983
Has been categorised as a “materialist open realism”, which “attempted to reformulate classical metaphysics, in a language that was entirely compatible with modern science”.
Gilbert Ryle
Critiqued Cartesian dualism for which he coined the phrase “ghost in the machine”.
He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophical problems.
Karl Popper
1902 - 1994
British philosopher of science.
Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification.
According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely “the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy”.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 - 1980
Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology).
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity and an “authentic” way of “being” became the dominant theme of Sartre’s early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness.
Joseph Campbell
1904 - 1987
American mythologist.
Wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
“Follow your bliss”.
Ayn Rand
1905 - 1982
Objectivism.
Author.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1908 - 1961
Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other.
Managed a magazine with Sartre and de Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir
1908 - 1986
French feminist activist who had a significant impact on feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Wrote The Second Sex.
Willard Van Orman Quine
1908 - 2000
“One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century”.
Closely affiliated with Harvard University.
He led a “systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself”.
J.L. Austin
1911 - 1960
Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like “I promise to do so-and-so” is best understood as doing something—making a promise—rather than making an assertion about anything.
Austin’s work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.
Albert Camus
1913 - 1960
Absurdist.
Nobel prize in literature.
J.L. Mackie
1917 - 1981
Australian philosopher.
“There are no objective values” - because of this ethics must be invented rather than discovered.
John Rawls
1921 - 2002
“A society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one”.
Principles of social justice.
Thomas Kuhn
1922 - 1996
Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic “paradigm shifts” rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community.
Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon “objectivity” alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.
Frantz Fanon
1925 - 1961
Post-colonialist.
Michel Foucalt
1926 - 1984
Addresses the relationship between power and knowledge.
Noam Chomsky
1928 -
The father of modern linguistics.
Anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Jacques Derrida
1930 - 2004
Algerian-born French philosopher.
Developed the philosophy of deconstruction.
Thomas Sowell
1930 -
Influential black conservative.
Capitalist.
Richard Rorty
1931 - 2007
“Since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”
“Ironism”; a state of mind where people are completely aware that their knowledge is dependent on their time and place in history, and are therefore somewhat detached from their own beliefs.
Jerry Fodor
1935 - 2017
Argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind.
Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool.
Tom Regan
1938 - 2017
Animal rights.
David Lewis
1941 - 2001
Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) and Counterfactuals (1973) are considered classics.
Peter Singer
1946 -
Australian moral philosopher.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
1949 -
Anarcho-capitalist.
In opposition to democracy and in favour of voluntary association and disassociation.
Cornel West
1953 -
Focuses on race, gender and class in American society.
Judith Butler
1956 -
3rd wave feminism and queer theory.
Jordan Peterson
1962 -
“Classic british liberal”.
Alain de Botton
1969 -
Co-founded The School of Life.
Nick Bostrom
1973 -
A Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, super-intelligence risks, and the reversal test.
