Curated category
20th-century American philosophers
- Steven CrowellSteven Crowell has spent his career asking questions that most people never think to ask: what does it mean for something to count as a reason?
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- Bruce LeeBruce Lee was born in San Francisco on the 27th of November, 1940, during the hour of the Dragon, in the year of the Dragon.
- John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. spent his entire life asking a single question: what is music? He was born on the 5th of September, 1912, in Los Angeles, and for nearly…
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous.
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society.
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
- William JamesWilliam James was born at the Astor House in New York City on the 11th of January 1842, and by the time he died in Chocorua, New Hampshire on the 26th of…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and…
- Lewis GordonLewis Ricardo Gordon was born on the 12th of May 1962, and he has spent his career asking a question that most philosophical traditions have avoided: what…
- Paul TillichPaul Tillich arrived in the United States in 1933 at age 47, without fluent English, his university post stripped by the Nazi regime, his first marriage long…
- William Barrett (philosopher)William Christopher Barrett walked into City College of New York at the age of fifteen. He was not a typical freshman. He was a teenager sitting in…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in…
- Jerry FodorJerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best…
- George SorosGeorge Soros was born György Schwartz on the 12th of August 1930 in Budapest, into a prosperous Jewish family that would spend the next decade and a half…
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner died on the 18th of August 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just ten days after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American…
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)Walter Kaufmann arrived at Princeton University in 1947 as a young philosopher with a freshly minted Harvard doctorate, a dissertation completed in under a…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and…
- Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus walked into the RAND Corporation in 1964 with a commission that seemed routine: review the latest work in artificial intelligence.
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin bought chemistry supplies at age 10, made his own fireworks in Los Angeles, and got in trouble because fireworks were illegal.
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little…
- Angela DavisAngela Davis grew up on a street her Birmingham neighbors called "Dynamite Hill" - a name earned through the bombings of homes belonging to middle-class…
- Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr.
- I. J. GoodI. J. Good walked into Hut 8 at Bletchley Park on the 27th of May 1941, fresh from completing his doctorate at Cambridge, on the very day that Britain's…
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…