Curated playlist
Analytic philosophers
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at age 10, about the fall of Barcelona.
- William JamesWilliam James argued we do not run from a bear because we are afraid. We are afraid because we run.
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap argued that most deep philosophical questions were meaningless.
- Jerry FodorPhilosopher Jerry Fodor argued that thinking works like a language inside the brain. He called it Mentalese.
- Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein, the Austro-British philosopher, published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime, and it ran to just 75 pages. He was born in Vienna on the 26th of April 1889 and died on the 29th of April 1951. Nearly…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam invented a leading theory of the mind, then spent years taking it apart.
- Bertrand RussellAt 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell went to jail for an anti-nuclear protest. Asked to behave, he said, "No, I won't."
- Robert ReichRobert Reich stands 4 feet 11 inches tall, and he has spent his working life arguing with people who hold far more power than he does. Born on the 24th of June 1946, he became an American lawyer, professor, author and political…
- John RawlsJohn Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000…
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer once told Mike Tyson to talk like a rational man. The philosopher stepped in at a 1987 party.
- David ChalmersWhy does seeing red feel like anything at all? Philosopher David Chalmers named this the hard problem of consciousness.
- John DeweyJohn Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and over his lifetime he published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and roughly 40 books. In 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, he wrote a line that would organize all that…
- Roger ScrutonRoger Scruton was standing in the Latin Quarter of Paris in May 1968, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones. The English philosopher later said that for the first time in his life he "felt a surge of…
- Peter SingerPeter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who holds the title of Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Fellow philosopher Helga Kuhse judged him almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of…