Curated playlist
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? How does meaning arise at all in human experience? Crowell is an American philosopher and…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
- 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. That alignment of the Chinese zodiac was not lost on the family. His mother named him Lee Jun-fan, a name she…
- 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 eight decades he pursued an answer so radical it would alienate friends, baffle…
- 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. Blade Runner opened four months later. His daughter had to bury his ashes next to the grave of his twin…
- 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. Few thinkers of the twentieth century managed to shape radical politics from inside a government…
- 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. That detail carries a kind of compressed prophecy: here was a child in Philadelphia,…
- 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 August 1910, he had left a mark on American intellectual life that no single label…
- 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 attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. That detail says…
- 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 does it mean to exist as a black person in a world that systemically denies that…
- 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 collapsed, his nerves still frayed from years of burying soldiers in the mud of…
- 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 philosophy lectures, working out ideas that most adults never bother to think through. That…
- 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 Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- 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 Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting…
- 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 left to biologists. He disagreed with both camps. Born in New York City on the…
- 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 outrunning history. His father Tivadar was a lawyer, an Esperanto author, and a…
- 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 Psychological Association and delivering what amounted to a final lecture on his life's…
- 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 year, and a singular mission: to rescue Friedrich Nietzsche from decades of…
- 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 eventually celebrated a belated bar mitzvah at the age of sixty-seven. The same man…
- Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus walked into the RAND Corporation in 1964 with a commission that seemed routine: review the latest work in artificial intelligence. What he produced instead was a document described as "famously combative" that would make him…
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin bought chemistry supplies at age 10, made his own fireworks in Los Angeles, and got in trouble because fireworks were illegal. That detail captures something essential about the man. He was constitutionally incapable of…
- 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 that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- 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 Black families who dared to move there in the 1950s. That was the neighborhood where…
- 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. served as pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. By the time West was a teenager in Sacramento,…
- 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 Royal Navy destroyed the German battleship Bismarck. He had no idea that his own…
- 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 America ever produced. He never finished a college degree. Tuberculosis interrupted his…
- 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 it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…