Charles Sanders Peirce

1839 CE – 1914 CE

Cambridge, Massachusetts

American logician, scientist, and founder of pragmaticism whose work joined the pragmatic maxim, semiotic theory, fallibilism, abduction, probability, categories, scientific method, and evolutionary metaphysics.

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.

John Dewey

1859 CE – 1952 CE

Burlington, Vermont

American pragmatist philosopher of instrumentalism, democratic experimentalism, progressive education, inquiry, experience, logic, ethics, aesthetics, public life, science, and naturalistic religion.

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.

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.

Saul Kripke

1940 CE – 2022 CE

Bay Shore, New York

American analytic philosopher and logician known for Kripke semantics, rigid designation, necessary a posteriori truth, truth theory, and rule-following skepticism.

W. V. O. Quine

1908 CE – 2000 CE

Akron, Ohio

American analytic philosopher and logician whose naturalized epistemology, ontological relativity, indeterminacy of translation, extensionalism, and mathematical logic reshaped twentieth-century philosophy.

William James

1842 CE – 1910 CE

New York City, New York

American philosopher and psychologist whose pragmatism, radical empiricism, stream-of-consciousness psychology, pluralism, and philosophy of religion reshaped modern philosophy.