Achille Mbembe

1957 CE

Otele, near Yaounde

Cameroonian philosopher from Otélé (near Yaoundé) associated with metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

Amartya Sen

1933 CE

Santiniketan (West Bengal)

Indian philosopher-economist from Santiniketan whose social-choice theory, capability approach, famine analysis, public reasoning, and theory of justice reshaped ethics, welfare economics, development, democracy, and global political philosophy.

Arne Næss

1912 CE – 2009 CE

Slemdal (Oslo)

Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and founder of deep ecology whose empirical semantics, argumentation theory, Ecosophy T, and ecological self-realization reshaped environmental ethics and political ecology.

Herbert Marcuse

1898 CE – 1979 CE

Berlin

German-American Frankfurt School philosopher and critical theorist whose work on Hegel, Marx, Freud, advanced industrial society, technological rationality, liberation, art, tolerance, repression, ecology, and the New Left shaped twentieth-century social philosophy.

Iris Marion Young

1949 CE – 2006 CE

New York City, New York

American socialist-feminist political theorist whose work on justice, oppression, democracy, body experience, structural injustice, political responsibility, and global labor justice reshaped contemporary feminist and critical social theory.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1905 CE – 1980 CE

Paris

French existentialist and phenomenological philosopher of freedom, bad faith, nothingness, political commitment, literature, existential psychoanalysis, anti-colonialism, and existential Marxism.

Judith Butler

1956 CE

Cleveland, Ohio

American poststructuralist feminist philosopher and queer theorist of gender performativity, subject formation, vulnerability, precarity, speech, ethics, assembly, nonviolence, and critical theory.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

1954 CE

London

Ghanaian-British-American analytic philosopher of cosmopolitanism, identity, race, culture, semantics, ethics, honor, religion, public philosophy, and global moral responsibility.

Martha Nussbaum

1947 CE

New York City

American philosopher of Aristotelian liberalism, capabilities justice, feminist ethics, political philosophy, moral psychology, animal justice, aesthetics, literature, law, religion, and public philosophy.

Peter Singer

1946 CE

Melbourne

Australian applied ethicist of preference utilitarianism, animal liberation, speciesism, equal consideration of interests, practical ethics, global poverty, effective altruism, bioethics, and public moral argument.