Authors

Probably the greatest of medieval Christian philosophers, Thomas Aquinas’s major achievement was to synthesize the apparently contradictory philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and show they were complementary to Christian belief. From Plato’s view of Universals in his...

A new interpretation of the social contract was put forward by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He turned Hobbes’s ideas (see A state of nature) on their head, arguing that humans are fundamentally good when given the freedom of a ‘state of nature’, but this...

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was a Scottish philosopher best known for his philosophical method, his theory of perception and its wide-ranging impact on epistemology, and as a developer and defender of an agent-causal theory of free will. In his works, the philosophy...

Richard J. Bernstein (1932-2022) is a renowned philosopher who is interested in the origins of values. Bernstein's 1986 book Philosophical Profiles, which was published at a time when postmodernism and deconstruction were at their peak, was a comparative review of the...

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most frequently cited academic books of all time. Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science marked not only a...

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) founded the positivist philosophical and political movement in the 1820s, and it had a significant impact on the second half of the nineteenth century. Neopositivism largely replaced positivism during the twentieth century, and the latter...

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) was widely considered one of the most significant figures in classical American pragmatism, along with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. He was a philosopher and social theorist who made important contributions to...

William James (1842-1910) was a groundbreaking thinker who worked in several different fields, including physiology, psychology, and philosophy. His twelve-hundred-page masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of all and personal reflection...

Edward T. Hall (1914-2009) is a famous anthropologist fascinated by the unique way people from different cultures interact, so he undertook anthropological research with those from different cultural backgrounds. As a project director of communications research at the...

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) was a French philosopher whose most famous work—often to his chagrin—was his 1979 The Postmodern Condition. This work examines the term "postmodernism" and its use in other fields, such as the arts and literature, to see how it has...