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Slavoj Žižek | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek | Slavoj Žižek ( (listen) SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek, Slovene: [ˈslaʋɔj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher", while elsewhere he has been dubbed the "Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". Žižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time", and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory". A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work.
== Life and career ==
=== Early life ===
Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family. His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise. His parents were atheists. He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture. When Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School. Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.
=== Education ===
In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.Žižek had already begun reading French structuralists prior to entering university, and in 1967 he published the first translation of a text by Jacques Derrida into Slovenian. Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which he also edited. In 1971 he accepted a job as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure, but was dismissed after his Master's thesis was denounced by the authorities as being "non-Marxist". He graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1981 with a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy for his dissertation entitled The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism. He spent the next few years in what was described as "professional wilderness", also fulfilling his legal duty of undertaking a year-long national service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.
=== Academic career ===
During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser. He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.In 1986, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under Jacques-Alain Miller, entitled "La philosophie entre le symptôme et le fantasme".Žižek wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels.
In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, Pogled s strani. The following year, he achieved international recognition as a social theorist with the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology.Žižek has been publishing in journals such as Lacanian Ink and In These Times in the United States, the New Left Review and The London Review of Books in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left-liberal magazine Mladina and newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He also cooperates with the Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, regional southeast European left-wing journal Novi Plamen, and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal Problemi. Žižek is a series editor of the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis that publishes works that "deal not only with philosophy, but also will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory".
=== Political career ===
In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, which was critical of Tito's policies, Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society. He was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he quit in protest against the JBTZ trial together with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals. Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society movements which fought for the democratization of Slovenia, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. In the first free elections in 1990, he ran as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.
=== Public life ===
In 2003, Žižek wrote text to accompany Bruce Weber's photographs in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Questioned as to the seemliness of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Žižek told The Boston Globe, "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!"Žižek and his thought have been the subject of several documentaries. The 1996 Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! is a German documentary on him. In the 2004 The Reality of the Virtual, Žižek gave a one-hour lecture on his interpretation of Lacan's tripartite thesis of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Zizek! is a 2005 documentary by Astra Taylor on his philosophy. The 2006 The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and 2012 The Pervert's Guide to Ideology also portray Žižek's ideas and cultural criticism. Examined Life (2008) features Žižek speaking about his conception of ecology at a garbage dump. He was also featured in the 2011 Marx Reloaded, directed by Jason Barker.Foreign Policy named Žižek one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for giving voice to an era of absurdity".In 2019, Žižek began hosting a mini-series called How to Watch the News with Slavoj Žižek on the RT network. In April, Žižek debated psychology professor Jordan Peterson at the Sony Centre in Toronto, Canada over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.
== Personal life ==
Žižek has been married four times and has two adult sons, Tim and Kostja. His second wife was Slovene philosopher and socio-legal theorist Renata Salecl, fellow member of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. His third wife was Argentinian model and Lacanian scholar Analia Hounie, who he married in 2005. Currently, he is married to Slovene journalist, author and philosopher, Jela Krečič.In early 2018, Žižek experienced Bell's palsy on the right side of his face. He went on to give several lectures and interviews with this condition; on March 9 of that year, during a lecture on political revolutions in London, he commented on the treatment he had been receiving, and used his paralysis as a metaphor for political idleness.Aside from his native Slovene, Žižek is a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English.
=== Taste ===
In the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, Žižek listed his 10 favourite films: 3:10 to Yuma, Dune, The Fountainhead, Hero, Hitman, Nightmare Alley, On Dangerous Ground, Opfergang, The Sound of Music, and We the Living. On this list, he clarified: "I opted for pure madness: the list contains only ‘guilty pleasures’". In his tour of The Criterion Collection closet, he chose Trouble in Paradise, Sweet Smell of Success, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Murmur of the Heart, The Joke, The Ice Storm, Great Expectations, Roberto Rossellini's History Films, City Lights, a box set of Carl Theodor Dreyer's films, Y tu mamá también and Antichrist.In an article called 'My Favourite Classics', Žižek states that Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder is the piece of music he would take to a desert island. He goes on to list other favourites, including Beethoven's Fidelio, Schubert's Winterreise, Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. He expresses a particular love for Wagner, particularly Das Rheingold and Parsifal. He ranks Schoenberg over Stravinsky, and insists on Eisler's importance among Schoenberg's followers.Žižek often lists Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Andrei Platonov as his "three absolute masters of 20th century literature". He ranks/prefers Varlam Shalamov over Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam over Anna Akhmatova, Daphne du Maurier over Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett over James Joyce.
== Thought and positions ==
Žižek and his thought have been described by many commentators as "Hegelo-Lacanian". In his early career, Žižek claimed "a theoretical space moulded by three centres of gravity: Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology", designating "the theory of Jacques Lacan" as the fundamental element. In 2010, Žižek instead claimed that for him Hegel is more fundamental than Lacan—"Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel."—while in 2019, he claimed that "For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in [the] fifty years" between Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1831). Alongside his academic, theoretical works, Žižek is a prolific commentator on current affairs and contemporary political debates.
=== Subjectivity ===
For Žižek, although a subject may take on a symbolic (social) position, it can never be reduced to this attempted symbolisation, since the very "taking on" of this position implies a separate 'I', beyond the symbolic, that does the taking on. Yet, under scrutiny, nothing positive can be said about this subject, this 'I' that eludes symbolisation; it cannot be discerned as anything but "that which cannot be symbolised". Thus, without the initial, attempted, failed symbolisation, subjectivity cannot present itself. As Žižek writes in his first book in English: "the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately."Žižek attributes this position on the subject to Hegel, particularly his description of man as "the night of the world", and to Lacan, with his description of the barred, split subject, who he sees as developing the Cartesian notion of the cogito. According to Žižek, these thinkers, in insisting on the role of the subject, run counter to "culturalist" or "historicist" positions held by thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, which posit that "subjects" are bound by and reducible to their historical/cultural(/symbolic) context.
=== Political theory ===
==== Ideology ====
Žižek's Lacanian-informed theory of ideology is one of his major contributions to political theory; his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, in which he stars, are among the well-known places in which it is discussed. Žižek believes that ideology has been frequently misinterpreted as dualistic and, according to him, this misinterpreted dualism posits that there is a real world of material relations and objects outside of oneself, which is accessible to reason.For Žižek, as for Marx, ideology is made up of fictions that structure political life; in Lacan's terms, ideology belongs to the symbolic order. Žižek argues that these fictions are primarily maintained at an unconscious level, rather than a conscious one. Since, according to psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious can determine one's actions directly, bypassing one's conscious awareness (as in parapraxes), ideology can be expressed in one's behaviour, regardless of one's conscious beliefs. Hence, Žižek breaks with orthodox Marxist accounts that view ideology purely as a system of mistaken beliefs (see False consciousness). Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, Žižek argues that adopting a cynical perspective is not enough to escape ideology, since, according to Žižek, even though postmodern subjects are consciously cynical about the political situation, they continue to reinforce it through their behaviour.
==== Freedom ====
Žižek claims that (a sense of) political freedom is sustained by a deeper unfreedom, at least under liberal capitalism. In a 2002 article, Žižek endorses Lenin's distinction between formal and actual freedom, claiming that liberal society only contains formal freedom, "freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations", while prohibiting actual freedom, "the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates." In an oft-quoted passage from a book published in the same year, he writes that, in these conditions of liberal censorship, "we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom". In a 2019 article, he writes that Marx "made a valuable point with his claim that the market economy combines in a unique way political and personal freedom with social unfreedom: personal freedom (freely selling myself on the market) is the very form of my unfreedom." However, in 2014, he rejects the "pseudo-Marxist" total derision of 'formal freedom', claiming that it is necessary for critique: "When we are formally free, only then we become aware how limited this freedom actually is."
=== Theology ===
Žižek has asserted that "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for" in The New York Times. However, he nonetheless finds extensive conceptual value in Christianity, particularly Protestantism: the subtitle of his 2000 book The Fragile Absolute is "Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?". Hence, he labels his position 'Christian Atheism', and has written about theology at length.In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Žižek suggests that "the only way to be an Atheist is through Christianity", since, he claims, atheism often fails to escape the religious paradigm by remaining faithful to an external guarantor of meaning, simply switching God for natural necessity or evolution. Christianity, on the other hand, in the doctrine of the incarnation, brings God down from the 'beyond' and onto earth, into human affairs; for Žižek, this paradigm is more authentically godless, since the external guarantee is abolished.
=== Communism ===
Although sometimes adopting the title of 'radical leftist', Žižek also controversially insists on identifying as a communist, even though he rejects 20th century communism as a "total failure", and decries "the communism of the 20th century, more specifically all the network of phenomena we refer to as Stalinism as "maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity." Žižek justifies this choice by claiming that only the term 'communism' signals a genuine step outside of the existing order, in part since the term 'socialism' no longer has radical enough implications, and means nothing more than that one "care[s] for society"
In Marx Reloaded, Žižek rejects both 20th-century totalitarianism and "spontaneous local self-organisation, direct democracy, councils, and so on". There, he endorses a definition of communism as "a society where you, everyone would be allowed to dwell in his or her stupidity", an idea with which he credits Fredric Jameson as the inspiration.Žižek has labelled himself a "communist in a qualified sense". When he spoke at a conference on The Idea of Communism, he applied (in qualified form) the 'communist' label to the Occupy Wall Street protestors:
They are not communists, if 'communism' means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990—and remember that the communists who are still in power today run the most ruthless capitalism (in China). ... The only sense in which the protestors are 'communists' is that they care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the system. They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are now, with just a few cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything; they are reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself.
=== Electoral politics ===
In May 2013, during Subversive Festival, Žižek commented: "If they don't support SYRIZA, then, in my vision of the democratic future, all these people will get from me [is] a first-class one-way ticket to [a] gulag." In response, the center-right New Democracy party claimed Žižek's comments should be understood literally, not ironically.Just before the 2017 French presidential election, Žižek stated that one could not choose between Macron and Le Pen, arguing that the neoliberalism of Macron just gives rise to neofascism anyway. This was in response to many on the left calling for support for Macron to prevent a Le Pen victory.In 2022, Žižek expressed his support for the Slovenian political party Levica (The Left) at its 5th annual conference.
==== Support for Donald Trump's election ====
In a 2016 interview with Channel 4, Žižek said that were he American, he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election:
I'm horrified at him [Trump]. I'm just thinking that Hillary is the true danger. ... if Trump wins, both big parties, Republicans and Democratics, would have to return to basics, rethink themselves, and maybe some things can happen there. That's my desperate, very desperate hope, that if Trump wins—listen, America is not a dictatorial state, he will not introduce Fascism—but it will be a kind of big awakening. New political processes will be set in motion, will be triggered. But I'm well aware that things are very dangerous here ... I'm just aware that Hillary stands for this absolute inertia, the most dangerous one. Because she is a cold warrior, and so on, connected with banks, pretending to be socially progressive.
These views were derisively characterised as accelerationist by Left Voice, and were labelled "regressive" by Noam Chomsky, who claimed that "it was the same point that people like him said about Hitler in the early ['30s]."In 2019 and 2020, Žižek defended his views, saying that Trump's election "created, for the first time in I don't know how many decades, a true American left", citing the boost it gave Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.However, regarding the 2020 United States presidential election, Žižek reported himself "tempted by changing his position", saying "Trump is a little too much". In another interview, he stood by his 2016 "wager" that Trump's election would lead to a socialist reaction ("maybe I was right"), but claimed that "now with coronavirus: no, no—no Trump. ... difficult as it is for me to say this, but now I would say 'Biden better than Trump', although he is far from ideal." In his 2022 book, Heaven in Disorder, Žižek continued to express a preference for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, stating "Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives", while Biden lies and represents big capital more politely.
=== Social issues ===
Žižek's views on social issues such as Eurocentrism, immigration and the LGBT movement have triggered criticism and accusations of bigotry.
==== Europe and Multiculturalism ====
In his 1997 article 'Multiculturalism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', Žižek critiqued multiculturalism for privileging a culturally 'neutral' perspective from which all cultures are disaffectedly apprehended in their particularity because this distancing reproduces the racist procedure of Othering. He further argues that a fixation on particular identities and struggles corresponds to an abandonment of the universal struggle against global capitalism.In his 1998 article 'A Leftist Plea for "Eurocentrism"', he argued that Leftists should 'undermine the global empire of capital, not by asserting particular identities, but through the assertion of a new universality', and that in this struggle the European universalist value of egaliberte (Etienne Balibar's term) should be foregrounded, proposing 'a Leftist appropriation of the European legacy'. Elsewhere, he has also argued, defending Marx, that Europe's destruction of non-European tradition (eg through imperialism and slavery) has opened up the space for a 'double liberation', both from tradition and from European domination.In her 2010 article 'The Two Zizeks', Nivedita Menon criticised Žižek for focusing on differentiation as a colonial project, ignoring how assimilation was also such a project; she also critiqued him for privileging the European Enlightenment Christian legacy as neutral, 'free of the cultural markers that fatally afflict all other religions.' David Pavón Cuéllar, closer to Žižek, also criticised him.In the mid-2010s, over the issue of Eurocentrism, there was a dispute between Žižek and Walter Mignolo, in which Mignolo (supporting a previous article by Hamid Dabashi, which argued against the centrality of European philosophers like Žižek, criticised by Michael Marder) argued, against Žižek, that decolonial struggle should forget European philosophy, purportedly following Frantz Fanon; in response, Žižek pointed out Fanon's European intellectual influences, and his resistance to being confined within the black tradition, and claimed to be following Fanon on this point. In his book Can Non-Europeans Think? (foreworded by Mignolo), Dabashi also critiqued Žižek for privileging Europe; Žižek argued that Dabashi slanderously and comically misrepresents him through misattribution, a critique supported by Ilan Kapoor.
==== Transgender issues ====
In his 2016 article "The Sexual Is Political", Žižek argued that all subjects are, like transgender subjects, in discord with the sexual position assigned to them. For Žižek, any attempt to escape this antagonism is false and utopian: thus, he rejects both the reactionary attempt to violently impose sexual fixity and the "postgenderist" attempt to escape sexual fixity entirely; he aligns the latter with 'transgenderism', which he claims does not adequately describe the behaviour of actual transgender subjects, who seek a stable "place where they could recognise themselves" (ie a bathroom that confirms their identity). Žižek argues for a third bathroom: a "GENERAL GENDER" bathroom that would represent the fact that both sexual positions (Žižek insists on the unavoidable "twoness" of the sexual landscape) are missing something and thus fail to adequately represent the subjects that take them on.In his 2019 article "Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud", Žižek argued that there is "a tension in LGBT+ ideology between social constructivism and (some kind of biological) determinism", between the idea that gender is a social construct, and the idea that gender is essential and pre-social. He concludes the essay with a "Freudian solution" to this deadlock:
...psychic sexual identity is a choice, not a biological fact, but it is not a conscious choice that the subject can playfully repeat and transform. It is an unconscious choice which precedes subjective constitution and which is, as such, formative of subjectivity, which means that the change of this choice entails the radical transformation of the bearer of the choice.
Che Gossett criticized Žižek for his use of the "pathologising" term "transgenderism" throughout the 2016 article, and for writing "about trans subjectivity with such assumed authority while ignoring the voices of trans theorists (academics and activists) entirely", as well as for purportedly claiming that a "futuristic" vision underlies so-called "transgenderism", ignoring present-day oppression. Sam Warren Miell and Chris Coffman, both psychoanalytically inclined, have separately criticized Žižek for conflating transgenderism and postgenderism; Miell further criticised the 2014 article for rehearsing homophobic/transphobic clichés (including Žižek's designation of inter-species marriage as a possible "anti-discriminatory demand"), and misusing Lacanian theory; Coffman argued that Žižek should have engaged with contemporary Lacanian trans studies, which would have shown that psychoanalytic and transgender discourses were aligned, not opposed. In response to the title of the 2019 article, McKenzie Wark had t-shirts made with the transgender flag and "Incompatible with Freud" printed on them.Žižek defended his 2016 article in two follow-up pieces. The first addresses purported misreadings of his position, while the second is a more sustained defence (against Miell) of the article's application of Lacanian theory, to which Miell responded in turn. Douglas Lain also defended Žižek, claiming that context makes that it clear that Žižek is "not opposed [to] the struggle of LGBTQ people" but is instead critiquing "a phony liberal ideology that set up the terms of the LGBTQ struggle", "a certain utopian postmodern ideology that seeks to eliminate all limits, to eliminate all binaries, to go beyond norms because the imposition of a limit is patriarchal and oppressive."In a 2023 piece for Compact Magazine, Žižek took a hard stance against access to puberty blockers for trans youth, and against trans adults being sent to prisons matching their gender, citing the case of Isla Bryson, whom he referred to as "a person who identifies itself as a woman using its penis to rape two women". Both of these things, Žižek attributed to wokeness (the wider subject of the article).
=== Other ===
Žižek wrote that the convention center in which nationalist Slovene writers hold their conventions should be blown up, adding, "Since we live in the time without any sense of irony, I must add I don't mean it literally."
In 2013, Žižek corresponded with imprisoned Russian activist and Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous.
He criticized Western military interventions in developing countries and wrote that it was the 2011 military intervention in Libya "which threw the country in chaos" and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq "which created the conditions for the rise" of the Islamic State.In an opinion article for The Guardian, Žižek argued in favour of giving full support to Ukraine after the Russian invasion and for creating a stronger NATO in response to Russian aggression, later arguing that it would also be a tragedy for Ukraine to yoke itself to western neoliberalism. He compared the struggle of Ukraine against the occupiers to the Palestinians' struggle against the Israeli occupation.
== Criticism and controversy ==
=== Inconsistency and ambiguity ===
Žižek's philosophical and political positions have been described as ambiguous, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance. While he has claimed to stand by a revolutionary Marxist project, his lack of vision concerning the possible circumstances which could lead to successful revolution makes it unclear what that project consists of. According to John Gray and John Holbo, his theoretical argument often lacks grounding in historical fact, which makes him more provocative than insightful.In a very negative review of Žižek's book Less than Nothing, the British political philosopher John Gray attacked Žižek for his celebrations of violence, his failure to ground his theories in historical facts, and his 'formless radicalism' which, according to Gray, professes to be communist yet lacks the conviction that communism could ever be successfully realized. Gray concluded that Žižek's work, though entertaining, is intellectually worthless: "Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek's work amounts in the end to less than nothing."Žižek's refusal to present an alternative vision has led critics to accuse him of using unsustainable Marxist categories of analysis and having a 19th-century understanding of class. For example, post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau argued that "Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils."In his book Living in the End Times, Žižek suggests that the criticism of his positions is itself ambiguous and multilateral:
... I am attacked for being anti-Semitic and for spreading Zionist lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist and unpatriotic traitor to my nation, for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading Bourgeois lies about Communism... so maybe, just maybe I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom."
=== Stylistic confusion ===
Žižek has been criticized for his chaotic and non-systematic style: Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention". O'Neill concurs: "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance." Noam Chomsky deems Žižek guilty of "using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever", adding that his views are often too obscure to be communicated usefully to common people.Conservative thinker Roger Scruton claims that:
To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by Lacan's gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what Hegel called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox.
=== Careless scholarship ===
Žižek has been accused of approaching phenomena without rigour, reductively forcing them to support pre-given theoretical notions. For example, Tania Modleski alleges that "in trying to make Hitchcock 'fit' Lacan, he [Žižek] frequently ends up simplifying what goes on in the films". Similarly, Yannis Stavrakakis criticises Žižek's reading of Antigone, claiming it proceeds without regard for both the play itself and the interpretation, given by Lacan in his 7th Seminar, which Žižek claims to follow. According to Stavrakakis, Žižek mistakenly characterises Antigone's act (illegally burying her brother) as politically radical/revolutionary, when in reality "Her act is a one-off and she couldn't care less about what will happen in the polis after her suicide."Noah Horwitz alleges that Žižek (and the Ljubljana School to which Žižek belongs) mistakenly conflate the insights of Lacan and Hegel, and registers concern that such a move "risks transforming Lacanian psychoanalysis into a discourse of self-consciousness rather than a discourse on the psychoanalytic, Freudian unconscious."
==== Allegations of plagiarism ====
Žižek's tendency to recycle portions of his own texts in subsequent works resulted in the accusation of self-plagiarism by The New York Times in 2014, after Žižek published an op-ed in the magazine which contained portions of his writing from an earlier book. In response, Žižek expressed perplexity at the harsh tone of the denunciation, emphasizing that the recycled passages in question only acted as references from his theoretical books to supplement otherwise original writing.In July 2014, Newsweek reported that online bloggers led by Steve Sailer had discovered that in an article published in 2006, Žižek plagiarized long passages from an earlier review by Stanley Hornbeck that first appeared in the journal American Renaissance, a publication condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the organ of a "white nationalist hate group". In response to the allegations, Žižek stated:
The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another's line of thought. Consequently, I did just that—and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend's resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck's review of Macdonald's book.... In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of 'stealing ideas'. I nonetheless deeply regret the incident.
== Works ==
=== Bibliography ===
=== Filmography ===
== In popular culture ==
Apollo 440: British electronic and alternative rock band featured samples of Žižek in the song "Love is Evil" on the 2012 album The Future's What It Used to Be.
Dying Light 2 Stay Human: 2022 videogame by Polish studio Techland features the character Stavros (otherwise known as the Fish Monk) who is most likely an homage to Žižek.
== References ==
=== Citations ===
== External links ==
Slavoj Žižek at Curlie
Slavoj Žižek on Big Think
Slavoj Žižek Faculty Page at European Graduate School
Žižek's entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Žižek bibliography at Lacanian Ink magazine
Column archive at The Guardian
Column archive at Jacobin
Appearances on C-SPAN
Slavoj Žižek on Charlie Rose
Slavoj Žižek at IMDb
Wendy Brown, Costas Douzinas, Stephen Frosh, and Zizek at the London Critical Theory Summer School – Friday Debate 2012
Slavoj Žižek on the Muck Rack journalist listing site |
Ken Wilber | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber | Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949) is an American philosopher and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a philosophy which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience.
== Life and career ==
Wilber was born in 1949 in Oklahoma City. In 1967 he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University. He became interested in Eastern literature, particularly the Tao Te Ching. He left Duke and enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln studying biochemistry, but after a few years dropped out of university and began studying his own curriculum and writing.In 1973 Wilber completed his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, in which he sought to integrate knowledge from disparate fields. After rejections by more than 20 publishers it was accepted in 1977 by Quest Books, and he spent a year giving lectures and workshops before going back to writing. He also helped to launch the journal ReVision in 1978.In 1982, New Science Library published his anthology The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes, a collection of essays and interviews, including one by David Bohm. The essays, including one of his own, looked at how holography and the holographic paradigm relate to the fields of consciousness, mysticism, and science.
In 1983, Wilber married Terry "Treya" Killam who was shortly thereafter diagnosed with breast cancer. From 1984 until 1987, Wilber gave up most of his writing to care for her. Killam died in January 1989; their joint experience was recorded in the 1991 book Grace and Grit.
In 1987, Wilber moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he worked on his Kosmos trilogy and supervised the work and functioning of the Integral Institute.Wilber wrote Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995), the first volume of his Kosmos Trilogy. A Brief History of Everything (1996) was the popularised summary of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality in interview format. The Eye of Spirit (1997) was a compilation of articles he had written for the journal ReVision on the relationship between science and religion. Throughout 1997, he had kept journals of his personal experiences, which were published in 1999 as One Taste, a term for unitary consciousness. Over the next two years his publisher, Shambhala Publications, released eight re-edited volumes of his Collected Works. In 1999, he finished Integral Psychology and wrote A Theory of Everything (2000). In A Theory of Everything Wilber attempts to bridge business, politics, science and spirituality and show how they integrate with theories of developmental psychology, such as Spiral Dynamics. His novel, Boomeritis (2002), attempts to expose what he perceives as the egotism of the baby boom generation. Frank Visser's Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (2003), a guide to Wilber's thought, was praised by Edward J. Sullivan and Daryl S. Paulson, with the latter calling it "an outstanding synthesis of Wilber's published works through the evolution of his thoughts over time. The book will be of value to any transpersonal humanist or integral philosophy student who does not want to read all of Wilber's works to understand his message."In 2012, Wilber joined the advisory board of the International Simultaneous Policy Organization which seeks to end the usual deadlock in tackling global issues through an international simultaneous policy.Wilber stated in 2011 that he has long suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, possibly caused by RNase enzyme deficiency disease.
== Integral theory ==
All Quadrants All Levels (AQAL, pron. "ah-qwul") is the basic framework of integral theory. It models human knowledge and experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of "interior-exterior" and "individual-collective". According to Wilber, it is a comprehensive approach to reality, a metatheory that attempts to explain how academic disciplines and every form of knowledge and experience fit together coherently.AQAL is based on four fundamental concepts and a rest-category: four quadrants, several levels and lines of development, several states of consciousness, and "types", topics which do not fit into these four concepts. "Levels" are the stages of development, from pre-personal through personal to transpersonal. "Lines" of development are various domains which may progress unevenly through different stages . "States" are states of consciousness; according to Wilber persons may have a temporal experience of a higher developmental stage. "Types" is a rest-category, for phenomena which do not fit in the other four concepts. In order for an account of the Kosmos to be complete, Wilber believes that it must include each of these five categories. For Wilber, only such an account can be accurately called "integral". In the essay, "Excerpt C: The Ways We Are in This Together", Wilber describes AQAL as "one suggested architecture of the Kosmos".The model's apex is formless awareness, "the simple feeling of being", which is equated with a range of "ultimates" from a variety of eastern traditions. This formless awareness transcends the phenomenal world, which is ultimately only an appearance of some transcendental reality. According to Wilber, the AQAL categories — quadrants, lines, levels, states, and types – describe the relative truth of the two truths doctrine of Buddhism. According to Wilber, none of them are true in an absolute sense. Only formless awareness, "the simple feeling of being", exists absolutely.
== Other ideas ==
=== Mysticism and the great chain of being ===
One of Wilber's main interests is in mapping what he calls the "neo-perennial philosophy", an integration of some of the views of mysticism typified by Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy with an account of cosmic evolution akin to that of the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo. He rejects most of the tenets of Perennialism and the associated anti-evolutionary view of history as a regression from past ages or yugas. Instead, he embraces a more traditionally Western notion of the great chain of being. As in the work of Jean Gebser, this great chain (or "nest") is ever-present while relatively unfolding throughout this material manifestation, although to Wilber "... the 'Great Nest' is actually just a vast morphogenetic field of potentials ..." In agreement with Mahayana Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta, he believes that reality is ultimately a nondual union of emptiness and form, with form being innately subject to development over time.
=== Theory of truth ===
Wilber believes that the mystical traditions of the world provide access to, and knowledge of, a transcendental reality which is perennial, consistent throughout all times and cultures. This proposition underlies the whole of his conceptual edifice, and is an unquestioned assumption. Wilber juxtaposites this generalization to plain materialism, presented as the main paradigm of regular science.In his later works, Wilber argues that manifest reality is composed of four domains, and that each domain, or "quadrant", has its own truth-standard, or test for validity:
"Interior individual/1st person": the subjective world, the individual subjective sphere;
"Interior collective/2nd person": the intersubjective space, the cultural background;
"Exterior individual/3rd person": the objective state of affairs;
"Exterior collective/3rd person": the functional fit, "how entities fit together in a system".
=== Pre/trans fallacy ===
Wilber believes that many claims about non-rational states make a mistake he calls the pre/trans fallacy. According to Wilber, the non-rational stages of consciousness (what Wilber calls "pre-rational" and "trans-rational" stages) can be easily confused with one another. In Wilber's view, one can reduce trans-rational spiritual realization to pre-rational regression, or one can elevate pre-rational states to the trans-rational domain. For example, Wilber claims that Freud and Jung commit this fallacy. Freud considered mystical realization to be a regression to infantile oceanic states. Wilber alleges that Freud thus commits a fallacy of reduction. Wilber thinks that Jung commits the converse form of the same mistake by considering pre-rational myths to reflect divine realizations. Likewise, pre-rational states may be misidentified as post-rational states. Wilber characterizes himself as having fallen victim to the pre/trans fallacy in his early work.
=== Wilber on science ===
Wilber describes the state of the "hard" sciences as limited to "narrow science", which only allows evidence from the lowest realm of consciousness, the sensorimotor (the five senses and their extensions). Wilber sees science in the broad sense as characterized by involving three steps:
specifying an experiment,
performing the experiment and observing the results, and
checking the results with others who have competently performed the same experiment.He has presented these as "three strands of valid knowledge" in Part III of his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul.What Wilber calls "broad science" would include evidence from logic, mathematics, and from the symbolic, hermeneutical, and other realms of consciousness. Ultimately and ideally, broad science would include the testimony of meditators and spiritual practitioners. Wilber's own conception of science includes both narrow science and broad science, e.g., using electroencephalogram machines and other technologies to test the experiences of meditators and other spiritual practitioners, creating what Wilber calls "integral science".According to Wilber's theory, narrow science trumps narrow religion, but broad science trumps narrow science. That is, the natural sciences provide a more inclusive, accurate account of reality than any of the particular exoteric religious traditions. But an integral approach that uses intersubjectivity to evaluate both religious claims and scientific claims will give a more complete account of reality than narrow science.Wilber has referred to Stuart Kauffman, Ilya Prigogine, Alfred North Whitehead, and others who also articulate his vitalistic and teleological understanding of reality, which is deeply at odds with the modern evolutionary synthesis.
=== Later work ===
In 2005, at the launch of the Integral Spiritual Center, a branch of the Integral Institute, Wilber presented a 118-page rough draft summary of his two forthcoming books. The essay is entitled "What is Integral Spirituality?", and contains several new ideas, including Integral post-metaphysics and the Wilber-Combs lattice. In 2006, he published "Integral Spirituality", in which he elaborated on these ideas, as well as others such as Integral Methodological Pluralism and the developmental conveyor belt of religion.
"Integral post-metaphysics" is the term Wilber has given to his attempts to reconstruct the world's spiritual-religious traditions in a way that accounts for the modern and post-modern criticisms of those traditions.The Wilber-Combs Lattice is a conceptual model of consciousness developed by Wilber and Allan Combs. It is a grid with sequential states of consciousness on the x axis (from left to right) and with developmental structures, or levels, of consciousness on the y axis (from bottom to top). This lattice illustrates how each structure of consciousness interprets experiences of different states of consciousness, including mystical states, in different ways.Wilber attracted a lot of controversy from 2011 to the present day by supporting Marc Gafni. Gafni was accused in the media of sexually assaulting a minor. Wilber has in fact publicly supported Gafni on his blog. A petition begun by a group of Rabbis has called for Wilber to publicly dissociate from Gafni.
Wilber is on the advisory board of Mariana Bozesan's AQAL Capital GmbH, a Munich-based company specialising in integral Impact Investing using a model based on Wilber's Integral Theory.
== Influences ==
Wilber's philosophy has been influenced by Madhyamaka Buddhism, particularly as articulated in the philosophy of Nagarjuna. Wilber has practiced various forms of Buddhist meditation, studying (however briefly) with a number of teachers, including Dainin Katagiri, Taizan Maezumi, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, Alan Watts, Penor Rinpoche and Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. Advaita Vedanta, Trika (Kashmir) Shaivism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Ramana Maharshi, and Andrew Cohen can be mentioned as further influences. Wilber has on several occasions singled out Adi Da's work for the highest praise while expressing reservations about Adi Da as a teacher. In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber refers extensively to Plotinus' philosophy, which he sees as nondual. While Wilber has practised Buddhist meditation methods, he does not identify himself as a Buddhist.According to Frank Visser, Wilber's conception of four quadrants, or dimensions of existence is very similar to E. F. Schumacher's conception of four fields of knowledge. Visser finds Wilber's conception of levels, as well as Wilber's critique of science as one-dimensional, to be very similar to that in Huston Smith's Forgotten Truth. Visser also writes that the esoteric aspects of Wilber's theory are based on the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo as well as other theorists including Adi Da.
== Reception ==
Wilber has been categorized as New Age due to his emphasis on a transpersonal view and, more recently, as a philosopher. Publishers Weekly has called him "the Hegel of Eastern spirituality".Wilber is credited with broadening the appeal of a "perennial philosophy" to a much wider audience. Cultural figures as varied as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Deepak Chopra, Richard Rohr, and musician Billy Corgan have mentioned his influence. Paul M. Helfrich credits him with "precocious understanding that transcendental experience is not solely pathological, and properly developed could greatly inform human development". However, Wilber's approach has been criticized as excessively categorizing and objectifying, masculinist, commercializing spirituality, and denigrating of emotion. Critics in multiple fields cite problems with Wilber's interpretations and inaccurate citations of his wide ranging sources, as well as stylistic issues with gratuitous repetition, excessive book length, and hyperbole.Frank Visser writes that Wilber's 1977 book The Spectrum of Consciousness was praised by transpersonal psychologists, but also that support for him "even in transpersonal circles" had waned by the early 1990s. Edward J. Sullivan argued, in his review of Visser's guide Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion, that in the field of composition studies "Wilber's melding of life’s journeys with abstract theorizing could provide an eclectic and challenging model of 'personal-academic' writing", but that "teachers of writing may be critical of his all-too-frequent totalizing assumptions". Sullivan also said that Visser's book overall gave an impression that Wilber "should think more and publish less."Steve McIntosh praises Wilber's work but also argues that Wilber fails to distinguish "philosophy" from his own Vedantic and Buddhist religion. Christopher Bache is complimentary of some aspects of Wilber's work, but calls Wilber's writing style glib.Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has praised Wilber's knowledge and work in the highest terms; however, Grof has criticized the omission of the pre- and peri-natal domains from Wilber's spectrum of consciousness, and Wilber's neglect of the psychological importance of biological birth and death. Grof has described Wilber's writings as having an "often aggressive polemical style that includes strongly worded ad personam attacks and is not conducive to personal dialogue." Wilber's response is that the world religious traditions do not attest to the importance that Grof assigns to the perinatal.
== Quotes ==
== Bibliography ==
=== Books ===
The Spectrum of Consciousness, 1977, anniv. ed. 1993: ISBN 0-8356-0695-3
No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth, 1979, reprint ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-743-6
The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development, 1980, 2nd ed. ISBN 0-8356-0730-5
Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, 1981, new ed. 1996: ISBN 0-8356-0731-3
The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (editor), 1982, ISBN 0-394-71237-4
A Sociable God: A Brief Introduction to a Transcendental Sociology, 1983, new ed. 2005 subtitled Toward a New Understanding of Religion, ISBN 1-59030-224-9
Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm, 1984, 3rd rev. ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-741-X
Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (editor), 1984, rev. ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-768-1
Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development (co-authors: Jack Engler, Daniel Brown), 1986, ISBN 0-394-74202-8
Spiritual Choices: The Problem of Recognizing Authentic Paths to Inner Transformation (co-authors: Dick Anthony, Bruce Ecker), 1987, ISBN 0-913729-19-1
Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life of Treya Killam Wilber, 1991, 2nd ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-742-8
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, 1st ed. 1995, 2nd rev. ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-744-4
A Brief History of Everything, 1st ed. 1996, 2nd ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-740-1
The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, 1997, 3rd ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-871-8
The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader, 1998, ISBN 1-57062-379-1
The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, 1998, reprint ed. 1999: ISBN 0-7679-0343-9
One Taste: The Journals of Ken Wilber, 1999, rev. ed. 2000: ISBN 1-57062-547-6
Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy, 2000, ISBN 1-57062-554-9
A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality, 2000, paperback ed.: ISBN 1-57062-855-6
Speaking of Everything (2-hour audio interview on CD), 2001
Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free, 2002, paperback ed. 2003: ISBN 1-59030-008-4
Kosmic Consciousness (12½ hour audio interview on ten CDs), 2003, ISBN 1-59179-124-3
With Cornel West, commentary on The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and appearance in Return To Source: Philosophy & The Matrix on The Roots Of The Matrix, both in The Ultimate Matrix Collection, 2004
The Simple Feeling of Being: Visionary, Spiritual, and Poetic Writings, 2004, ISBN 1-59030-151-X (selected from earlier works)
The Integral Operating System (a 69-page primer on AQAL with DVD and 2 audio CDs), 2005, ISBN 1-59179-347-5
Executive producer of the Stuart Davis DVDs Between the Music: Volume 1 and Volume 2.
Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World, 2006, ISBN 1-59030-346-6
The One Two Three of God (3 CDs – interview, 4th CD – guided meditation; companion to Integral Spirituality), 2006, ISBN 1-59179-531-1
Integral Life Practice Starter Kit (five DVDs, two CDs, three booklets), 2006, ISBN 0-9772275-0-2
The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything, 2007, ISBN 1-59030-475-6
The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction, 2007, ISBN 9781611806427
Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening, 2008, ISBN 1-59030-467-5
The Pocket Ken Wilber, 2008, ISBN 1-59030-637-6
The Integral Approach: A Short Introduction by Ken Wilber, eBook, 2013, ISBN 9780834829060
The Fourth Turning: Imagining the Evolution of an Integral Buddhism, eBook, 2014, ISBN 9780834829572
Integral Meditation: Mindfulness as a Way to Grow Up, Wake Up, and Show Up in Your Life, 2016, ISBN 9781611802986
The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision For The Future of the Great Traditions, 2017, ISBN 978-1-61180-300-6
Trump and a Post-Truth World, 2017, ISBN 9781611805611
Integral Buddhism: And the Future of Spirituality, 2018, ISBN 1611805600
Integral Politics: Its Essential Ingredients , eBook, 2018
Grace and Grit, 2020, Shambala, ISBN 9781611808490
=== Audiobooks ===
A Brief History of Everything. Shambhala Audio, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59030-550-8
Kosmic Consciousness. Sounds True Incorporated, 2003. ISBN 9781591791249
=== Adaptations ===
Wilber's account of his wife Treya's illness and death, Grace and Grit (1991), was released as a feature film starring Mena Suvari and Stuart Townsend in 2021.
== See also ==
The Cultural Creatives
Edward Haskell
Higher consciousness
Nicolai Hartmann
Noosphere
Shambhala Publications
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Sources ==
== Further reading ==
Allan Combs, The Radiance of Being: Understanding the grand integral vision: living the integral life, Paragon House, 2002
Geoffrey D Falk, Norman Einstein: the dis-integration of Ken Wilber, Million Monkeys Press, 2009
Lew Howard, Introducing Ken Wilber: concepts for an evolving world, Authorhouse, 2005, ISBN 1-4208-2986-6
Peter McNab, Towards an Integral Vision: using NLP and Ken Wilber's AQAL model to enhance communication, Trafford, 2005
Jeff Meyerhoff, Bald Ambition: a critique of Ken Wilber's theory of everything, Inside the Curtain Press, 2010
Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Jonathan Reams, Olen Gunnlaugson (ed.), Integral education: new directions for higher learning. SUNY Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4384-3348-6
Raphael Meriden, Entfaltung des Bewusstseins: Ken Wilbers Vision der Evolution, 2002, ISBN 88-87198-05-5
Brad Reynolds, Embracing Reality: The Integral Vision of Ken Wilber: A Historical Survey and Chapter-By-Chapter Review of Wilber's Major Works, J. P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004, ISBN 1-58542-317-3
----- Where's Wilber At?: Ken Wilber's Integral Vision in the New Millennium, Paragone House, 2006, ISBN 1-55778-846-4
Donald Jay Rothberg, Sean M Kelly, Ken Wilber and the future of transpersonal inquiry: a spectrum of views 1996
----- Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations With Leading Transpersonal Thinkers, 1998, ISBN 0-8356-0766-6
Frank Visser, Ken Wilber: Thought As Passion, SUNY Press, 2003, ISBN 0-7914-5816-4, (first published in Dutch as Ken Wilber: Denken als passie, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2001)
Joseph Vrinte, Perennial Quest for a Psychology with a Soul: An inquiry into the relevance of Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical yoga psychology in the context of Ken Wilber's integral psychology, Motilal Banarsidass, 2002, ISBN 81-208-1932-2
== External links ==
Ken WilberOfficial website
Interview with Ken Wilber, Salon.com
Ken Wilber books – Shambhala Publications
Complete online bibliography of Ken Wilber's publicationsCriticismKen Wilber, his Critics, and the Integral
Integral World, Criticism of the writings of Ken Wilber
Mark Manson, The Rise and Fall of Ken Wilber
The Skeptic's Dictionary Newsletter 38, Ken Wilber
Integral egos gone wild: Wilber and Cohen relish worship |
John Dupré | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dupr%C3%A9 | John A. Dupré (born 3 July 1952) is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Dupré, together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison, are often grouped together as the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science.
In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
== Education and career ==
Dupré was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and taught at Oxford, Stanford University and Birkbeck College of the University of London before moving to Exeter.
In 2010 Dupré was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition of his work on Darwinism, and is a former president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. In 2018 he was elected Vice-President (and President-Elect) of the Philosophy of Science Association (USA). In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
== Philosophical work ==
=== Pluralistic metaphysics ===
Dupré advocates a pluralistic model of science as opposed to the common notion of reductionism. Physical Reductionism suggests that all science may be reduced to physical explanations due to causal or mereological links that obtain between the objects studied in the higher sciences and the objects studied by physics. For example, a physical reductionist would see psychological facts as (in principle) reducible to neurological facts, which is in turn are reducible to biological facts. Biology could then be explained in terms of chemistry, and chemistry could then be explained in terms of physical explanation. While reductionism of this sort is a common position among scientists and philosophers, Dupré suggests that such reduction is not possible as the world has an inherently pluralistic structure.
=== Determinism ===
A classical argument for reductionism relies on a particular conception of causality, according to which each event must have a sufficient physical cause. Physical interactions are therefore sufficient to account for all causal interactions. Under this assumption, psychological or biological facts must be eliminable in favour of physical facts, given that the physical conditions do all the causal work. This makes all the other, non-physical conditions causally superfluous.
Dupré tries to escape this problem by rejecting determinism, and the assumption that there is a physical cause for each and every event. In place of Determinism, Dupré proposes a conception of indeterministic, probabilistic causality. His ideas are influenced by Nancy Cartwright.
=== Philosophy of biology ===
Dupré is an important critic of biological research programs in the life science community. In particular, he criticises evolution-biological stories and how they are related in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Dupré argues that such projects must remain speculative and reflect on the prejudices of the researchers as circumstances in the world.
Dupré is also concerned with the handling of biological taxonomy. Biological classifications are made by humans, and are thus open to criticism and modification. This applies in particular to the classifications of humans – for instance after race or sex. Dupré's arguments in this area reflect and mirror the sentiments and criticism of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
== Works ==
Books
The Disorder of Things. Metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1993, ISBN 0-674-21260-6
Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-19-924806-0
Humans and Other Animals. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2002, ISBN 0-19-924709-9
Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-19-280337-5
Darwin's Legacy: German translation Darwins Vermächtnis, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2005, ISBN 978-3-518-29504-5;
Darwin's Legacy: Spanish translation El legado de Darwin. Qué significa hoy la evolución, Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2006, ISBN 978-84-96859-10-4
Value-Free Science: Ideal or Illusion (with Harold Kincaid and Alison Wylie). New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-530896-9
The Constituents of Life (the Spinoza lectures). Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008, ISBN 978-90-232-4380-9
with S. B. Barnes, Genomes and What to Make of Them. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008,ISBN 978-0-226-17295-8
with S. Parry, Nature After the Genome. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4443-3396-1
Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. Oxford University Press, 2012.
with D. J. Nicholson. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford University Press, 2018.Journal articles
Dupré, John (June 1998). "Against reductionist explanations of human behaviour". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes. 72 (1): 153–172. doi:10.1111/1467-8349.00040. JSTOR 4107016.Appearances
Such That Cast philosophy podcast http://suchthatcast.com/dupre/#more-463
Philosophy TV in conversation with Alex Rosenberg on Non-reductive physicalism. https://vimeo.com/15442250
== References ==
== External links ==
Dupré's homepage |
Judith Butler | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler | Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender studies writer whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS).Butler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in discourse.
Butler has spoken on many contemporary political issues, including Israeli politics and in support of LGBT rights.
== Early life and education ==
Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of their maternal grandmother's family was murdered in the Holocaust. Butler's parents were practicing Reform Jews. Their mother was raised Orthodox, eventually becoming Conservative and then Reform, while their father was raised Reform. As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where they received their "first training in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that they began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by Butler's Hebrew school's Rabbi because they were "too talkative in class". Butler also claimed to be "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, they responded with three questions preoccupying them at the time: "Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?"Butler attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984. They spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, they joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty.Butler serves on the editorial or advisory board of several academic journals, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
== Overview of major works ==
=== Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988) ===
In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative. Butler asserts that because gender identity is established through behavior, there is a possibility to construct different genders via different behaviors.
=== Gender Trouble (1990) ===
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages. Gender Trouble discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.Butler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe that feminists should "focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement." Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors". The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, has been one of the foundations of queer theory.
=== Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991) ===
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories is a collection of writings of gay and lesbian social theorists. Butler's contribution argues that no transparent revelation is afforded by using the terms "gay" or "lesbian" yet there is a political imperative to do so. Butler employs "the concepts of play/performance, drag, and imitation" to describe the formation of gender and sexuality as continually created subjectivities always at risk of dissolution from non-performance."
=== Bodies That Matter (1993) ===
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice. Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, which is a form of citationality:
Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.
=== Excitable Speech (1997) ===
In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. They argue that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state's power to censor.Deploying Foucault's argument from the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid. As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th-century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality they sought to control. Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic "I" is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".
=== Precarious Life (2004) ===
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence opens a new line in Judith Butler's work that has had a great impact on their subsequent thought, especially on books like Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) or Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), as well as on other contemporary thinkers. In this book, Butler deals with issues of precarity, vulnerability, grief and contemporary political violence in the face of the War on terror and the realities of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and similar detention centers. Drawing on Foucault, they characterize the form of power at work in these places of "indefinite detention" as a convergence of sovereignty and governmentality. The "state of exception" deployed here is in fact more complex than the one pointed out by Agamben in his Homo Sacer, since the government is in a more ambiguous relation to law —it may comply with it or suspend it, depending on its interests, and this is itself a tool of the state to produce its own sovereignty. Butler also points towards problems in international law treatises like the Geneva Conventions. In practice, these only protect people who belong to (or act in the name of) a recognized state, and therefore are helpless in situations of abuse toward stateless people, people who do not enjoy a recognized citizenship or people who are labelled "terrorists", and therefore understood as acting on their own behalf as irrational "killing machines" that need to be held captive due to their "dangerousness".Butler also writes here on vulnerability and precariousness as intrinsic to the human condition. This is due to our inevitable interdependency from other precarious subjects, who are never really "complete" or autonomous but instead always "dispossessed" on the Other. This is manifested in shared experiences like grief and loss, that can form the basis for a recognition of our shared human (vulnerable) condition. However, not every loss can be mourned in the same way, and in fact not every life can be conceived of as such (as situated in a condition common to ours). Through a critical engagement with Levinas, they will explore how certain representations prevent lives from being considered worthy of being lived or taken into account, precluding the mourning of certain Others, and with that the recognition of them and their losses as equally human. This preoccupation with the dignifying or dehumanizing role of practices of framing and representations will constitute one of the central elements of Frames of War (2009).
=== Undoing Gender (2004) ===
Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of their other books. Butler revisits and refines their notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". They argue that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if their desires differ from normality. Butler states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.In Butler's discussion of intersex issues and people, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically reassigned from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's three children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer died by suicide in 2004.
=== Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) ===
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. Butler theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject's formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.
Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection.
You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament (page 78).
Instead Butler argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.
=== Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) ===
In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler discusses the power of public gatherings, considering what they signify and how they work. They use this framework to analyze the power and possibilities of protests, such as the Black Lives Matter protests regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014.
=== The Force of Nonviolence (2020) ===
In The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, Butler connects the ideologies of nonviolence and the political struggle for social equality. They review the traditional understanding of "nonviolence," stating that it "is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power." Instead of this understanding, Butler argues that "nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field."
== Reception ==
Butler's work has been influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. Their contribution to a range of other disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, literary, film, and performance studies as well as visual arts, has also been significant. Their theory of gender performativity as well as their conception of "critically queer" have heavily influenced understandings of gender and queer identity in the academic world, and have shaped and mobilized various kinds of political activism, particularly queer activism, internationally. Butler's work has also entered into contemporary debates on the teaching of gender, gay parenting, and the depathologization of transgender people.Some academics and political activists see in Butler a departure from the sex/gender dichotomy and a non-essentialist conception of gender—along with an insistence that power helps form the subject—an idea whose introduction purportedly brought new insights to feminist and queer praxis, thought, and studies. Darin Barney of McGill University wrote that:
Butler's work on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness, feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics has changed the way scholars all over the world think, talk and write about identity, subjectivity, power and politics. It has also changed the lives of countless people whose bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have made them subject to violence, exclusion and oppression.
In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Butler first prize in its fourth annual "Bad Writing Competition", which set out to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."Some critics have accused Butler of elitism due to their difficult prose style, while others claim that Butler reduces gender to "discourse" or promotes a form of gender voluntarism – Doctrine prioritizing will over intellect. Susan Bordo, for example, has argued that Butler reduces gender to language and has contended that the body is a major part of gender, in opposition to Butler's conception of gender as performative. A particularly vocal critic has been feminist Martha Nussbaum, who has argued that Butler misreads J. L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no "normative theory of social justice and human dignity." Finally, Nancy Fraser's critique of Butler was part of a famous exchange between the two theorists. Fraser has suggested that Butler's focus on performativity distances them from "everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves. ... Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?" Butler responded to criticisms in the preface to the 1999-edition Gender Trouble by asking suggestively whether there is "a value to be derived from...experiences of linguistic difficulty."More recently, several critics — such as semiotician Viviane Namaste
— have criticised Judith Butler's Undoing Gender for under-emphasizing the intersectional aspects of gender-based violence. For example, Timothy Laurie notes that Butler's use of phrases like "gender politics" and "gender violence" in relation to assaults on transgender individuals in the United States can "[scour] a landscape filled with class and labour relations, racialised urban stratification, and complex interactions between sexual identity, sexual practices and sex work", and produce instead "a clean surface on which struggles over 'the human' are imagined to play out".German feminist Alice Schwarzer speaks of Butler's "radical intellectual games" that would not change how society classifies and treats a woman; thus, by eliminating female and male identity Butler would have abolished the discourse about sexism in the queer community. Schwarzer also accuses Butler of remaining silent about the oppression of women and homosexuals in the Islamic world, while readily exercising their right to same-sex-marriage in the United States; instead, Butler would sweepingly defend Islam, including Islamism, from critics.EGS philosophy professor Geoffrey Bennington, translator for many of Derrida's books, criticised Butler's introduction to the 1997 translation of Derrida's 1967 Of Grammatology.
=== Non-academic ===
Before a 2017 democracy conference in Brazil, Butler was burnt "in effigy".Bruno Perreau has written that Butler was literally depicted as an "antichrist", both because of their gender and their Jewish identity, the fear of minority politics and critical studies being expressed through fantasies of a corrupted body.
== Political activism ==
Much of Butler's early political activism centered around queer and feminist issues, and they served, for a period of time, as the chair of the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Over the years, Butler has been particularly active in the gay and lesbian rights, feminist, and anti-war movements. They have also written and spoken out on issues ranging from affirmative action and gay marriage to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay. More recently, Butler has been active in the Occupy movement and has publicly expressed support for a version of the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel.They emphasize that Israel does not, and should not, be taken to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion. Butler has criticized some forms of Zionism for weaponizing the victimhood role. Butler states that this weaponization can result in widespread misuse of the accusation "antisemitism", which may in fact trivialize the accusation's gravity and weight.On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in against the 2006 Lebanon War at the University of California, Berkeley. Another widely publicized moment occurred in June 2010, when Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day (CSD) Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony. They cited racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism in general and from anti-Muslim excuses for war more specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, Butler went on to name several groups that they commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, they said:
People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible – that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.
Butler is an executive member of FFIPP – Educational Network for Human Rights in Israel/Palestine. They are also a member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. In mainstream US politics, they expressed support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
=== Adorno Prize affair ===
When Butler received the 2012 Adorno Prize, the prize committee came under attack from Israel's Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman; the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff; and the German Central Council of Jews. They were upset at Butler's selection because of Butler's remarks about Israel and specifically Butler's "calls for a boycott against Israel". Butler responded saying that "[Butler] did not take attacks from German Jewish leaders personally". Rather, they wrote, the attacks are "directed against everyone who is critical against Israel and its current policies".In a letter to the Mondoweiss website, Butler asserted that they developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought and that it is "blatantly untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating".
=== Comments on Hamas and Hezbollah ===
Butler was criticized for statements they had made about Hamas and Hezbollah. Butler was accused of describing them as "social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left." They were accused of defending "Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive organizations" and supporting their tactics.Butler responded to these criticisms by stating that their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah were taken completely out of context and, in so doing, their established views on non-violence were contradicted and misrepresented. Butler describes the origin of their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah in the following way:
I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to "the global left" and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left. My second point was then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand.
=== Comments on Black Lives Matter ===
In a January 2015 interview with George Yancy of The New York Times, Butler discussed the Black Lives Matter movement. They said:
What is implied by this statement [Black Lives Matter], a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? If black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be...When people engage in concerted actions across racial lines to build communities based on equality, to defend the rights of those who are disproportionately imperiled to have a chance to live without the fear of dying quite suddenly at the hands of the police. There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.
The dialogue draws heavily on their 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
=== Avital Ronell sexual harassment case ===
On May 11, 2018, Butler led a group of scholars in writing a letter to New York University following the sexual harassment suit filed by a former NYU graduate student against his advisor Avital Ronell. The signatories acknowledged not having had access to the confidential findings of the investigation that followed the Title IX complaint against Ronell. Nonetheless, they accused the complainant of waging a "malicious campaign" against Ronell. The signatories also wrote that the presumed "malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare" for a highly regarded scholar. "If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed." Butler, the chief signatory, invoked their title as President Elect of the Modern Language Association. James J. Marino, a professor at Cleveland State University and a member of the MLA, started a petition to demand Butler's resignation or removal from their post. He argued that "Protesting against one instance of punishment is only a means to the larger end of preserving senior faculty's privilege of impunity. ... [Butler] was standing up for an old, corrupt, and long-standing way of doing business. The time for doing business that way is over. We should never look back." Some three months later, Butler apologized to the MLA for the letter. "I acknowledged that I should not have allowed the MLA affiliation to go forward with my name," Butler wrote to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I expressed regret to the MLA officers and staff, and my colleagues accepted my apology. I extend that same apology to MLA members."
=== Comments on the anti-gender movement and trans-exclusionary radical feminism ===
Butler said in 2020 that trans-exclusionary radical feminism is "a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen." In 2021, drawing from Umberto Eco who understood "fascism" as "a beehive of contradictions", they noted that the term fascism "describes" the "anti-gender ideology". They cautioned self-declared feminists from allying with anti-gender movements in targeting trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people. Butler also explored the issue in a 2019 paper in which they argued that "the confusion of discourses is part of what constitutes the fascist structure and appeal of at least some of these [anti-gender] movements. One can oppose gender as a cultural import from the North at the same time that one can see that very opposition as a social movement against further colonization of the South. The result is not a turn to the Left, but an embrace of ethno-nationalism."
==== The Guardian interview ====
On September 7, 2021, The Guardian published an interview of Butler by Jules Gleeson that included Butler's view of trans-exclusionary feminists. In response to a question about the Wi Spa controversy, The Press Gazette stated that Butler in the Guardian article stated that "The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times." Within a few hours of publication, three paragraphs including this statement were removed, with a note explaining "This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place."The Guardian was then accused of censoring Judith Butler for having compared TERFs to fascists. British writer Roz Kaveney called it "a truly shocking moment of bigoted dishonesty", while British transgender activist and writer Juno Dawson, among others, observed that The Guardian had inadvertently triggered the Streisand effect, in which an attempt to censor yields the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of a topic. The next day, The Guardian acknowledged "a failure in our editorial standards".
== Personal life ==
Butler is a lesbian, legally non-binary, and, as of 2020, said they use both they/them and she/her pronouns but prefer to use "they" pronouns. Butler indicated that they were "never at home" with being assigned female at birth.They live in Berkeley with their partner Wendy Brown and son, Isaac.
== Selected honors and awards ==
Butler has had a visiting appointment at Birkbeck, University of London (2009–present).
1999: Guggenheim Fellowship
2001: David R Kessler Award for LGBTQ Studies, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies
2007: Elected to the American Philosophical Society
2008: Mellon Award for their exemplary contributions to scholarship in the humanities
2010: "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World", Utne Reader
2012: Theodor W. Adorno Award
2013: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, University of St. Andrews
2013: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, McGill University
2014: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, University of Fribourg
2014: Named one of PinkNews's top 11 Jewish gay and lesbian icons
2015: Elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy
2018: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, University of Belgrade
2018: Butler delivered the Gifford Lectures with their series entitled 'My Life, Your Life: Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence'
2019: Elected as Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
== Publications ==
Butler's books have been translated into numerous languages; Gender Trouble has been translated into twenty-seven languages. They have co-authored and edited over a dozen volumes—most recently, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), coauthored with Athena Athanasiou. Over the years Butler has also published many influential essays, interviews, and public presentations. Butler is considered by many to be "one of the most influential voices in contemporary political theory," and the most widely read and influential gender studies academic in the world.The following is a partial list of Butler's publications.
=== Books ===
Butler, Judith (1999) [1987]. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-15998-2. [Their doctoral dissertation.]
Butler, Judith (2006) [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-38955-6.
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-90365-3.
Butler, Judith; Benhabib, Seyla; Fraser, Nancy; Cornell, Drucilla (1995). Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-91086-6.
Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-91587-8.
Butler, Judith (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-2812-6.
Butler, Judith (2000). Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-51804-8.
Butler, Judith; Laclau, Ernesto; Žižek, Slavoj (2000). Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-85984-278-2.
Butler, Judith; Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth; Puigvert, Lídia (2003). Women & Social Transformation. New York: P. Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-6708-5.
Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-544-9.
Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-49962-7.
Butler, Judith (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 978-0-8232-4677-9.
Butler, Judith; Spivak, Gayatri (2007). Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books. ISBN 978-1-905422-57-9.
Butler, Judith; Asad, Talal; Brown, Wendy; Mahmood, Saba (2009). Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley, CA: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California Distributed by University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-9823294-1-2.
Butler, Judith (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?. London New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-333-9.
Butler, Judith; Habermas, Jürgen; Taylor, Charles; West, Cornel (2011). The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-1-283-00892-1.
Butler, Judith; Weed, Elizabeth (2011). The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott's Critical Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-00153-5.
Butler, Judith (2012). Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-51795-9.
Butler, Judith; Athanasiou, Athena (2013). Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-0-7456-5381-5.
Butler, Judith (2015). Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 978-0-8232-6467-4.
Butler, Judith (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-96775-5.
Butler, Judith; Gambetti, Zeynep (2016). Leticia, Sabsay (ed.). Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-6279-1.
Butler, Judith (2020). The Force of Nonviolence. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-1-78873-276-5.
Butler, Judith (2022). What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-20828-4.
=== Book chapters ===
Butler, Judith (1982), "Lesbian S & M: the politics of dis-illusion", in Linden, Robin Ruth (ed.), Against sadomasochism: a radical feminist analysis, East Palo Alto, California: Frog in the Well, ISBN 978-0-9603628-3-7.
——— (1990), "The pleasures of repetition", in Glick, Robert A.; Bone, Stanley (eds.), Pleasure beyond the pleasure principle: the role of affect in motivation, development, and adaptation, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-04793-6.
——— (1991), "Imitation and gender insubordination", in Fuss, Diana (ed.), Inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories, New York: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-90237-3.
——— (1993), "Kierkegaard's speculative despair", in Solomon, Robert C.; Higgins, Kathleen M. (eds.), The age of German idealism, Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VI, London New York: Routledge, pp. 363–395, ISBN 978-0-415-30878-6.
——— (1997), "Imitation and gender insubordination", in Nicholson, Linda (ed.), The second wave: a reader in feminist theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 300–316, ISBN 978-0-415-91761-2.
——— (1997), "Gender is burning: questions of appropriation and subversion", in McClintock, Anne; Mufti, Aamir; Shohat, Ella (eds.), Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives, Minnesota, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 381–395, ISBN 978-0-8166-2649-6.
——— (2001), "Sexual difference as a question of ethics", in Doyle, Laura (ed.), Bodies of resistance: new phenomenologies of politics, agency, and culture, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, ISBN 978-0-8101-1847-8.
——— (2001), "Appearances aside", in Post, Robert (ed.), Prejudicial appearances: the logic of American antidiscrimination law, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 73–84, ISBN 978-0-8223-2713-4.
——— (2005), "Subjects of sex/gender/desire", in Cudd, Ann; Andreasen, Robin O. (eds.), Feminist theory: a philosophical anthology, Oxford, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 145–153, ISBN 978-1-4051-1661-9.
——— (2009), "Ronell as gay scientist", in Davis, Diane (ed.), Reading Ronell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ISBN 978-0-252-07647-3. A collection of essays on the work of Avital Ronell.
Blanchet, Nassia; Blanchet, Reginald (April 3, 2010). "Interview with Judith Butler". Hurly-Burly: The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis. 3.
——— (2011), "Lecture notes", in Ronell, Avital; Joubert, Joseph (eds.), Georges Perros (Issue 983 of Collection Europe), Paris: Europe, ISBN 978-2-35150-038-5. Details.
——— (2016), "Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance", in Butler, Judith; Gambetti, Zeynep; Sabsay, Leticia (eds.), Vulnerability in Resistance, Duke University Press, pp. 12–28, ISBN 978-0-8223-6290-6
———; Hark, Sabine (2018), "Defamation and the Grammar of Harsh Words", in Sweetapple, Christopher (ed.), The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary Germany, Applied Sexology, Psychosocial-Verlag, pp. 203–207, doi:10.30820/9783837974447, ISBN 978-3-8379-7444-7, ISSN 2367-2420
——— (2021), "Bodies that Still Matter", in Halsema, Annemie; Kwastek, Katja; van den Oever, Roel (eds.), Bodies That Still Matter. Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 177–195, ISBN 9789463722940
== Notes ==
== See also ==
Hypatia transracialism controversy
== References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Biography – University of California, Berkeley
Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous on YouTube approach the notion of affinity through a discussion of "Disruptive Kinship," co-sponsored by Villa Gillet and the School of Writing at The New School for Public Engagement.
Interview of Judith Butler about their new book "Frames of War" on New Statesman
Review of "Giving an Account of Oneself. Ethical Violence and Responsibility", by Judith Butler, Barcelona Metropolis Autumn 2010. (in English)
"Dictionary of Literary Biography on Judith P. Butler (page 3)"
Interview with Judith Butler about politics, economy, control societies, gender and identity (2011)
Ahmed, Sara (2016). "Interview with Judith Butler". Sexualities. 19 (4): 482–492. doi:10.1177/1363460716629607. S2CID 147584494Interview on Gender Trouble and Butler's relation to the field of queer studies.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
Judith Butler in conversation with Wesleyan University president Michael Roth on YouTube |
Jeff Malpas | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Malpas | Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher and emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Known internationally for his work across the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas is also at the forefront of contemporary philosophical research on the concept of "place" (topography or topology), as first and most comprehensively presented in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography—now in its second edition—and further developed in numerous subsequent works.
== Education ==
BA, History and Philosophy (1980); MA, Philosophy (1982, with First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland (NZ); and PhD (1986) from the Australian National University (thesis: "Agreement and Interpretation").
== Career ==
Malpas joined the University of Tasmania in 1999 and, there, was actively engaged for twenty years. During that time, he held both academic and administrative positions, including professor and chair of philosophy, Australian Research Council (ARC) Professorial Fellow, and Director of University Collections. He founded the University of Tasmania's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics (later, the Inglis Clark Centre for Civil Society), and served as its director for five years. In 2011, Malpas was recognised as distinguished professor and continued with a university-wide appointment that spanned a broad range of disciplines, including architecture, geography, and environmental studies, and involved collaborative research projects in those as well as other disciplines, such as archaeology, design, the creative arts, history, sociology, anthropology, and medical humanities. His supervision of sixty doctoral students reflects similarly diverse disciplines and topics. Upon retirement, in 2018, he was made Emeritus Distinguished Professor. Prior to his work at the University of Tasmania, Malpas held an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship at Heidelberg University and was founder and head of the philosophy programme at Murdoch University (Western Australia). He also held positions at the University of New England (Australia) and the University of Auckland, and has been a visiting scholar at universities in the United States, Germany, England, and Sweden. He continues to hold positions as Visiting Distinguished Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne and honorary professor at the University of Queensland. Current endeavours primarily focus on select research, publication, and consultancy activities, as well as commenting on issues of contemporary ethics and politics.
== Thinking and writing ==
Malpas's philosophical work is situated amid five major themes: (1) German Post-Kantian philosophy (especially Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer), (2) twentieth-century American philosophy (especially Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty), (3) hermeneutics and philosophy of language, (4) philosophy of place and space (including philosophy of art and philosophy of architecture, among others), and (5) the critique of modernity (including the critique of contemporary bureaucracy and management).
In its connections to both the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas’s work can be seen as also providing a connection between them. His readings of Heidegger and Gadamer are characterised by an emphasis on argumentative reconstruction and clarity of exposition, while his interpretation and development of Davidson’s thought emphasises the broader philosophical and meta-philosophical elements of the Davidsonian position (and, so, places greater emphasis on Davidson’s later writings as providing the framework for reading Davidson’s work as a whole).
Malpas has devoted considerable attention to the idea of the transcendental, particularly as it links with hermeneutic themes, and places special emphasis on notions of ground and limit. He sees the transcendental as providing an important point of connection between philosophers such as Davidson, Gadamer, and Heidegger, even as it also connects to Malpas’s own development of what he has termed “philosophical topography.”
The latter idea not only draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic resources but also is heavily indebted to analytic approaches in philosophy of mind and of language. Distinguishing his work, in this realm, is the detailed conceptual analysis of topographical and spatial notions, the methodological implications that it associates with the focus on place, and the topographical analysis of self and identity. As developed in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Malpas sees place as “a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity.” He argues for an “externalist” conception of self and mind, according to which human lives are indissolubly linked to the places in which those lives are lived. Indeed, he posits that the importance of place lies, not so much in the experience that one might have of place (or of a particular place), but in the fact that it is in place that all experience, thought, and identity are made possible—that place is that in and through which all things are grounded and all things happen.
Two of his subsequent volumes—Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (2012)—provide more specific analyses of the notions of place and “topology” found in the work of Martin Heidegger (who, himself, refers to his thinking as a “topology of Being”). And, even more specifically, Malpas examines a central aspect of Heidegger’s topological thinking—particularly as related to architecture and other spatial disciplines—in his Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (2021). His readings represent a distinctive position within the Heidegger literature.
Moreover, Malpas's engagement with the idea of place undergirds his thinking and writing about ethics, and especially about a perceived loss of ethical commitment in contemporary culture and society—the result, he contends, of the rise of corporatized, bureaucratic models within public life and institutions, and, with that, an ideology of compliance that undermines ethical conduct. In response to such loss, he proposes that ethics be seen as grounded in a prior commitment to the communities of which we are a part—fundamentally, therefore, as grounded in place.
== Teaching and invited presentations ==
Although his positions have been primarily in research, Malpas has also taught across nearly all areas of philosophy, from ethics to logic, and has additionally lectured in related fields, including architecture, landscape architecture, geography, and other spatial disciplines. He has also presented invited papers for at least twelve international university audiences. Beyond academe, he has been invited to lead workshops and seminars for groups in government and business.
== Engagement and critique by others ==
The main charge levelled against Malpas’s “philosophical topography” is that the notion of place is inherently regressive and conservative—as typified in an article by [1] John Wylie, for example. Malpas has responded to such charges, contesting the assumptions about both place and belonging on which they rest, as well as their reliance on certain ideological presuppositions rather than genuine engagement with the issues at stake.Malpas’s emphasis on mortality and finitude as essential to the human, and to the very possibility of a life, has been specifically taken up in various discussions, including that in an essay by Nick Trakakis.A broader engagement and critique of Malpas’s work has appeared in papers presented in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and, by Paloma Puerte-Lozano, in Place, Space, and Hermeneutics.Such engagement has not been limited to philosophy, but has extended to other fields as well. In theology, for example, British theologian Mark Wynn has drawn on Malpas’s work in order to examine connections between the philosophy of place and philosophical theology. And in sociology, Malpas has published with sociologists such as [2] Gary Wickham and [3] Keith Jacobs (see “Selected Publications” for examples).
== Recognition ==
=== Scholarly organizations ===
Australian Association of Humboldt Fellows Vice-President and Distinguished Fellow
Australian Academy of the Humanities Fellow
=== Grants, prizes, and awards ===
=== Visiting positions ===
=== Significant appointments ===
== Selected publications ==
=== Monographs ===
Malpas has authored (or co-authored) eight monographs, including:
———. In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking In and After Heidegger. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming 2022.
———. Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
——— and Kenneth White. The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
———. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. 2nd, rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2018. First published 1999, by Cambridge University Press.
———. Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
———. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Rev. paperback edition, 2008. Translated in Italian, by Giulia Ballocca, as
=== Edited volumes ===
Malpas has edited (or co-edited) twenty-four volumes, including:
——— and Ingo Farin, eds. Heidegger and the Human. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming 2022).
——— and Keith Jacobs, eds. Towards a Philosophy of the City. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
——— and Ingo Farin, eds. Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
———, ed. The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
———, ed. Dialogues with Davidson: New Perspectives on His Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
=== Chapters in edited volumes ===
Malpas has authored (or co-authored) seventy-six chapters in edited volumes, including:
———. “Uprostorjenje oblikovanja: arhitektura v dobi tehnološkega kapitalizma—oblast, vertikalnost in ulica” [“The Spatialization of Design: Architecture in the Age of Technological Capitalism—Power, Verticality, and the Street”]. In O oblasti v arhitekturi [On Power in Architecture], Zbirka Transformacije, vol. 47, edited by Mateja Kurir, 99-112. Ljubljana: Maska, Društvo Igor Zabel za kulturo in teorijo, 2021.
———. “In the Presence of Things.” In After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics, edited by Bjørnar Olsen, Mats Burström, Caitlin DeSilvey, Þóra Pétursdóttir, 59-71. London: Routledge, 2020.
——— and Randall Lindstrom. “The Modesty of Architecture.” In Political Theory and Architecture, edited by Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka, 255-276. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
———. “The House of Being: Poetry, Language, Place.” In Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, edited by Günter Figal, Diego D’Angelo, Tobias Keiling, and Guang Yang, 15-44. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020.
———. “Dying in a Liberal Society.” In Considering Religions, Rights, and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth, edited by P. Wong, S. Bloor, P. Hutchings, and P. P. Bilimoria, 51-62. Dordrecht: Springer, 2019.
——— and Edward Casey. “A Phenomenology of Thinking in Place.” In Thinking in the World, edited by Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi, 39-63. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
———. “Taking Everything in Hand: Managerialism and Technology.” In The Rise of Managerialism, edited by Anna Yeatman, 21-42. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.
———. “Governing Theory: Ontology, Methodology, and the Critique of Metaphysics.” In Rethinking Law, Society, and Governance: Foucault’s Bequest, edited by Gary Wickham, 125-140. Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2001.
=== Journal articles ===
Malpas has authored (or co-authored) seventy-eight journal articles, including:
———. “From Place to Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space: forthcoming 2022.
———. “Place and Philosophical Topography: Responding to Bubbio, Farin, and Satne.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (2020): 299–312.
———. “Spirit of Time/ Spirit of Place.” Journal of Continental Philosophy 1 (2020): 277-283. Originally published in Turkish as “Zamanın Ruhu/Yerin Ruhu,” Sabah Ülkesi [Quarterly Journal of Arts, Culture, and Philosophy] 58 (2019):36–39.
———. “Topologies of History.” History and Theory 58 (2019): 3–23.
———. “The Spatialization of the World: Technology, Modernity, and the Effacement of the Human.” Phainomena 27 (2018): 91–108.
———. “Five Theses on Place (and some associated remarks): A Reply to Peter Gratton.” Il Cannocchiale: rivista di studi filosofici 42 (2017): 69–81.
———. “Putting Space in Place: Relational Geography and Philosophical Topography.” Planning and Environment D: Space and Society 30 (2012): 226-242. Translated in Korean and reprinted in Space Theory and its Social Appropriation (2013): 15–53.
——— and Gary Wickham. “Democracy and Instrumentalism.” Australian Journal of Political Science 33 (1998): 345–362.
=== Other publications ===
In addition, Malpas has published review articles, encyclopaedia entries, electronic publications, magazine articles, conference proceedings, interviews, book forewords, reports, and book reviews, and has made other contributions via newspapers, radio, television, and online platforms.
== References ==
== External links ==
University of Tasmania
MIT Press
Interview with 3:AM Magazine
Jeff Mapas with Hannah Billenstein and Pietro Nickl: Is Philosophy a science? /Festival der Philosophie 2021 |
Alexander Wendt | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Wendt | Alexander Wendt (born 12 June 1958) is an American political scientist who is one of the core social constructivist researchers in the field of international relations, and a key contributor to quantum social science. Wendt and academics such as Nicholas Onuf, Peter J. Katzenstein, Emanuel Adler, Michael Barnett, Kathryn Sikkink, John Ruggie, Martha Finnemore, and others have, within a relatively short period, established constructivism as one of the major schools of thought in the field.
A 2006 survey of US and Canadian international relations scholars ranks Wendt as first among scholars who have "been doing the most interesting work in international relations in recent years. A 2011 survey of international relations scholars worldwide ranked Wendt first in terms of having "produced the best work in the field of IR in the past 20 years".
== Biography ==
Alexander Wendt was born in 1958 in Mainz in West Germany, attended high school in St. Paul, Minnesota and studied political science and philosophy at Macalester College before receiving his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1989, studying under Raymond "Bud" Duvall. Wendt taught at Yale University from 1989 to 1997, at Dartmouth College from 1997 to 1999, at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2004, and is currently the Ralph D. Mershon Professor of International Security at the Ohio State University.
== Social Theory of International Politics ==
Wendt's most widely cited work to date is Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which builds on and goes beyond his 1992 article "Anarchy is What States Make of It". Social Theory of International Politics places itself as a response to Kenneth Waltz's 1979 work, Theory of International Politics, the canonical text of the neorealist school with Wendt centering states as the object of study and replicating Waltz's division between international relations and foreign policy. Like Waltz, Wendt believed that the actual production that individuates states happens through domestic processes that require a separate theory from international relations; thus: "Much of the construction is at the domestic level, as Liberals have emphasized, and a complete theory of state identity needs to have a domestic component."Wendt's book advances an argument of critical realism, and the ontological and methodological claims of constructivism. Critical realism, drawing upon the work of Roy Bhaskar (amongst others), seeks to explain un-observables within the world and constitutive questions of the world.Constructivism, as imagined by Wendt, builds upon the work of Nicholas Onuf and Anthony Giddens, and argues for the mutual constitution of agents and structures, the historical contingency of cultures of anarchy, the role of constitutive and regulative norms in state behavior, the role of intersubjective social structures in identity, and the power of ideas. Anarchy, for Wendt, "has no logic apart from process and that interaction is structured, albeit not at a macro-level." There are three empirical cultures of anarchy in international relations: Hobbesian (where enmity dominates), Lockean (where rivalry dominates), and Kantian (where friendship dominates).
== Quantum Mind and Social Science ==
Wendt's 2015 book Quantum Mind and Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the crossroads between quantum physics and social science. He advocates for panpsychism and quantum consciousness from a non-specialist perspective. The book is provocative in nature and has received varied reviews.Mathias Albert in International Affairs explains the book as weakest in its attempts to link quantum physics to social science and behind the times in addressing the agent-structure problem, in addition to only marginally relating to international relations. The reviews within the book include Colin Wight's "Do I agree with it? No." and Jerome Busemeyer's "Some of these ideas may ultimately not be supported".
== Works by Wendt ==
=== Books ===
Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-46960-0
Quantum Mind and Social Science Unifying Physical and Social Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2015, ISBN 9781107442924
=== Chapters in edited volumes ===
"Institutions and International Order." 1989 (with Raymond Duvall) In Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, edited by E. Czempiel, and J. Rosenau. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books.
"The International System and Dependent Militarization" 1992 (with Michael Barnett), in Brian Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 97–119.
"Norms, Identity and Culture in National Security" 1996 (with Ronald Jepperson and Peter Katzenstein), in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 33–75.
"What is IR For?: Notes Toward a Post-Critical View," 2000 in Richard Wyn Jones, ed., Critical Theory and World Politics, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 205–224.
"Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Skeptical View." 2002 (with James Fearon) In Handbook of International Relations, edited by W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse, and B. Simmons. London: Sage.
"'Social Theory' as Cartesian Science: An Auto-Critique from a Quantum Perspective." 2006 In Constructivism and International Relations, edited by Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander. London: Routledge.
"Flatland: Quantum Mind and the International Hologram" 2010 In New Systems Theories of World Politics, edited by Mathias Albert, Lars-Erik Cederman and Alexander Wendt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
=== As editor ===
Wendt was coeditor of the journal International Theory.
== References ==
=== Sources ===
Copeland, Dale C., "The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism: A Review Essay" International Security Vol. 25, No. 2 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 187–212.
Wendt, Alexander (1999). Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46960-9.
Wylie, Gillian "International Relations' via Media: Still under Construction" International Studies Review Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 123–126.
== External links ==
Official website |
Michel Onfray | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Onfray | Michel Onfray (French: [miʃɛl ɔ̃fʁɛ]; born 1 January 1959) is a French writer and philosopher with a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist worldview. A highly-prolific author on philosophy, he has written over 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism. He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traité d'athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique (translated into English as Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), Politique du rebelle: traité de résistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzchéen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which he won the annual Prix Médicis in 1993.
Onfray is often regarded as being left-wing; however, some observers have stated that he harbours right-wing tendencies. He has become appreciated by some far-right circles, notably with his sovereignist magazine Front populaire.
== Life ==
Born in Argentan to a family of Norman farmers, Onfray was sent to a weekly Catholic boarding school in Giel from ages 10 to 14. This was a solution many parents in France adopted at the time when they lived far from the village school or had working hours that made it too hard or too expensive to transport their children to and from school daily. The young Onfray, however, did not appreciate his new environment, which he describes as a place of suffering. Onfray went on to graduate with a teaching degree in philosophy. He taught this subject to senior students at a high school that concentrates on technical degrees in Caen between 1983 and 2002. At that time, he and his supporters established the Université populaire de Caen, proclaiming its foundation on a free-of-charge basis and on the manifesto written by Onfray in 2004 (La communauté philosophique).
Onfray is an atheist and author of Traité d'Athéologie (Atheist Manifesto), which "became the number one best-selling nonfiction book in France for months when it was published in the Spring of 2005 (the word 'athéologie' Onfray borrowed from Georges Bataille and dedicated to Raoul Vaneigem who had defended freedom of speech, including Holocaust denial, in Nothing is sacred, everything can be said. The book repeated its popular French success in Italy, where it was published in September 2005 and quickly soared to number one on Italy's bestseller lists."In the 2002 election, Onfray endorsed the French Revolutionary Communist League and its candidate for the French presidency, Olivier Besancenot. In 2007, he endorsed José Bové but eventually voted for Besancenot and conducted an interview with the future French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who, Onfray declared in Philosophie Magazine, was an "ideological enemy".His book Le crépuscule d'une idole : L'affabulation freudienne (The Twilight of an Idol: The Freudian Confabulation), published in 2010, has been the subject of considerable controversy in France because of its criticism of Sigmund Freud. He recognises Freud as a philosopher but brings attention to the considerable cost of Freud's treatments and casts doubts on the effectiveness of his methods.In 2015, Onfray published Cosmos, the first book of a trilogy. Onfray considers ironically that it constitutes his "very first book".
== Philosophy ==
Onfray writes that there is no philosophy without self-psychoanalysis. He describes himself as an atheist and considers theistic religion to be indefensible.
=== View on history of Western philosophy and philosophical project ===
Onfray has published nine books under a project of history of philosophy called Counter-history of Philosophy. In each of these books Onfray deals with a particular historical period in western philosophy. The series of books are composed by the titles I. Les Sagesses Antiques (2006) (on western antiquity), II. Le Christianisme hédoniste (2006) (on Christian hedonism from the Renaissance period), III. Les libertins baroques (2007) (on libertine thought from the Baroque era), IV. Les Ultras des Lumières (2007) (on radical enlightenment thought), V. L'Eudémonisme social (2008) (on radical utilitarian and eudaimonistic thought), VI. Les Radicalités existentielles (2009) (on 19th and 20th century radical existentialist thinkers) and VII. La construction du surhomme: Jean-Marie Guyau, Friedrich Nietzsche (on Guyau's and Nietzsche's philosophy in relation to the concept of the Übermensch). VIII. Les Freudiens hérétiques (2013). IX. Les Consciences réfractaires (2013).
In an interview, Onfray established his view on the history of philosophy:
There is in fact a multitude of ways to practice philosophy, but out of this multitude, the dominant historiography picks one tradition among others and makes it the truth of philosophy: that is to say the idealist, spiritualist lineage compatible with the Judeo-Christian world view. From that point on, anything that crosses this partial – in both senses of the word – view of things finds itself dismissed. This applies to nearly all non-Western philosophies, Oriental wisdom in particular, but also sensualist, empirical, materialist, nominalist, hedonistic currents and everything that can be put under the heading of "anti-Platonic philosophy". Philosophy that comes down from the heavens is the kind that – from Plato to Levinas by way of Kant and Christianity – needs a world behind the scenes to understand, explain and justify this world. The other line of force rises from the earth because it is satisfied with the given world, which is already so much.
"His mission is to rehabilitate materialist and sensualist thinking and use it to re-examine our relationship to the world. Approaching philosophy as a reflection of each individual's personal experience, Onfray inquires into the capabilities of the body and its senses and calls on us to celebrate them through music, painting, and fine cuisine."
=== Hedonism ===
Onfray defines hedonism "as an introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else." "Onfray's philosophical project is to define an ethical hedonism, a joyous utilitarianism, and a generalized aesthetic of sensual materialism that explores how to use the brain's and the body's capacities to their fullest extent – while restoring philosophy to a useful role in art, politics, and everyday life and decisions".Onfray's works "have explored the philosophical resonances and components of (and challenges to) science, painting, gastronomy, sex and sensuality, bioethics, wine, and writing. His most ambitious project is his projected six-volume Counter-history of Philosophy", three of which have been published. Onfray writes:
In opposition to the ascetic ideal advocated by the dominant school of thought, hedonism suggests identifying the highest good with your own pleasure and that of others; the one must never be indulged at the expense of sacrificing the other. Obtaining this balance – my pleasure at the same time as the pleasure of others – presumes that we approach the subject from different angles – political, ethical, aesthetic, erotic, bioethical, pedagogical, historiographical....
His philosophy aims for "micro-revolutions", or "revolutions of the individual and small groups of like-minded people who live by his hedonistic, libertarian values".
==== Relation to hedonism ====
In La puissance d'exister: Manifeste hédoniste, Onfray claims that the political dimension of hedonism runs from Epicurus to John Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham and Claude Adrien Helvétius. Political hedonism aims to create the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
==== Alcohol ====
In La Raison gourmande, he analyses the relation between philosophers and wine: Gaston Bachelard and Burgundy, Michel Serres and Château d'Yquem. He names also the "alcoholic philosophers": Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, in particular, to whom he dedicated his Traité d'athéologie (2005).
=== Religion ===
The blogger J. M. Cornwell praised Onfray's Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by claiming that it "is a religious and historical time capsule" containing what he sees as "the true deceptions of theological philosophy".Onfray has been involved in promoting the work of Jean Meslier, an 18th-century French Catholic priest who was discovered, upon his death, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism.In Atheist Manifesto, Onfray states that among the "incalculable number of contradictions and improbabilities in the body of the text of the synoptic Gospels" two claims are made: crucifixion victims were not laid to rest in tombs, and in any case, Jews were not crucified in this period. The historian John Dickson, of Macquarie University, has said that Philo of Alexandria, who wrote about the time of Jesus, noted that the Romans sometimes handed the bodies of crucifixion victims over to family members for proper burial. The Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus even remarks: "the Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset". Regarding the second claim, Dickson calls this a "clear historical blunder".In Onfray's latest book, Décadence he argued for Christ myth theory, which is a hypotheses that Jesus was not a historical person. Onfray based this on the fact that, other than in the New Testament, Jesus is barely mentioned in accounts of the period.In July 2021, Onfray criticised Pope Francis's apostolic letter Traditionis custodes by arguing that the Tridentine Mass embodies “the heritage of the genealogical time of our civilization".
== Université populaire de Caen ==
Onfray was a secondary school philosophy teacher for two decades until he resigned in 2002 to establish a tuition-free Université populaire (People's University) at Caen, at which he and several colleagues teach philosophy and other subjects.
"The Université populaire, which is open to all who cannot access the state university system, and on principle does not accept any money from the State -- Onfray uses the profits from his books to help finance it -- has had enormous success. Based on Onfray's book La Communauté philosophique: Manifeste pour l'Université populaire (2004), the original UP now has imitators in Picardy, Arras, Lyon, Narbonne, and Le Mans, with five more in preparation." "The national public radio network France Culture annually broadcasts his course of lectures to the Université Populaire on philosophical themes."
== Reception ==
Several authors criticise Onfray for approximations and historical errors contained in several of his works. That is particularly the case of the historians Guillaume Mazeau, Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jean-Marie Salamito with his essay Monsieur Onfray au pays des mythes or even Ian Birchall.
== Awards and honors ==
Asteroid 289992 Onfray, discovered by astronomers at the Saint-Sulpice Observatory in 2005, was named in Onfray's honour. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 16 March 2014 (M.P.C. 87546).
== Criticism of the Algerian regime ==
During a Television interview and as a response to a visit by French president Emmanuel Macron to Algeria in August 2022, Onfray described the ruling regime in Algeria as a "mafia" and asserted that France has no responsibility for the impoverished life of the Algerian people in a country rich in gas and oil because the French had left in 1962. During the interview Onfray said "We know very well that this country has hated us since 1962."
== Works ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
In Bosnian
Onfre u Podgorici: Ciklus predavanja, Centar za građansko obrazovanje, 2013 (Filip Kovacevic)
In French
Dieu avec esprit : réponse à Michel Onfray, P. Rey, 2005 (Irène Fernandez)
L'anti traité d'athéologie : le système Onfray mis à nu, Presses de la Renaissance, 2005 (Matthieu Baumier)
Michel Onfray, la force majeure de l'athéisme, Pleins Feux, 2006 (Alain Jugnon)
Le dieu caché : Michel Onfray éclairé par Blaise Pascal, le Cep, 2006 (Philippe Lauria)
Des-montages : le poujadisme hédoniste de Michel Onfray, I & D Vingt-scènes, 2006 (Harold Bernat)
Anti-Onfray 1 : sur Freud et la psychanalyse, L'Harmattan, 2010 (Emile Jalley)
Anti-Onfray 2 : les réactions au livre de Michel Onfray : débat central, presse, psychanalyse théorique, L'Harmattan, 2010 (Emile Jalley)
Anti-Onfray 3 : Les réactions au livre de Michel Onfray Clinique, psychopathologie, philosophie, lettres, histoire, sciences sociales, politique, réactions de l'étranger, le décret scélérat sur la psychothérapie, L'Harmattan, 2010 (Emile Jalley)
Mais pourquoi tant de haine ?, Seuil, 2010 (Élisabeth Roudinesco)
Un crépuscule pour Onfray : minutes de l'interrogatoire du contempteur de Freud, L'Harmattan, 2011 (Guy Laval)
L'évangile de Michel Onfray ! : ou Comment Onfray peur inspirer les plus ou moins chrétiens ainsi que tous les autres, Golias, 2011 (Thierry Jaillet)
La Gageure, autopsie du traité d'athéologie de monsieur Onfray, Les Éditions du Net, 2012 (Abdellah Erramdani)
Antichrists et philosophes : en défense de Michel Onfray, Obsidiane, 2012 (Alain Jugnon)
Michel Onfray, le principe d'incandescence, Grasset, 2013 (Martine Torrens Frandji)
Michel Onfray : une imposture intellectuelle, les Ed. de l'Epervier, 2013 (Michael Paraire)
Onfray coi maintenant ? : quelques réflexions (tardives) sur et autour du livre Crépuscule d'une idole : affabulations freudiennes, L'Harmattan, 2014 (Michel Santacroce)
La contre-histoire de Michel Onfray, Tatamis, 2014 (Jonathan Sturel)
L'anti traité d'athéologie: le système onfray mis à nu, Presses de la Renaissance, 2014 (Matthieu Baumier)
Réponse à Michel Onfray : et autres textes sur la Résistance, Delga, 2015 (Léon Landini)
Michel Onfray ou L'intuition du monde, Le Passeur éditeur, 2016 (Adeline Baldacchino)
Contre Onfray, Nouvelles éditions Lignes, 2016 (Alain Jugnon)
Monsieur Onfray au pays des mythes : réponses sur Jésus et le christianisme, Salvator, 2017 (Jean-Marie Salamito)
Michel Onfray, la raison du vide, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2017 (Rémi Lélian)
Michel Onfray... le vin mauvais ?, Tonnerre de l'Est éditions, 2017 (Thierry Weber, Olivier Humbrecht)
En finir avec Onfray : du déni de Bataille à la boboïsation ambiante, Champ Vallon, 2018 (Gilles Mayné)
== External links ==
Quotations related to Michel Onfray at Wikiquote
Media related to Michel Onfray at Wikimedia Commons
Official website (in French)
Blog about Onfray (in French)
Profile of Michel Onfray in New Humanist magazine, July/August 2007 |
Orlando E. Toledo | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Western_philosophers | This is a list of philosophers from the Western tradition of philosophy.
== Western philosophers ==
=== Greek philosophers ===
==== 600–500 BCE ====
Thales of Miletus (c. 624 – 546 BCE). Of the Milesian school. Believed that all was made of water.
Pherecydes of Syros (c. 620 – c. 550 BCE). Cosmologist.
Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610 – 546 BCE). Of the Milesian school. Famous for the concept of Apeiron, or "the boundless".
Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 585 – 525 BCE). Of the Milesian school. Believed that all was made of air.
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580 – c. 500 BCE). Of the Ionian School. Believed the deepest reality to be composed of numbers, and that souls are immortal.
Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570 – 480 BCE). Advocated monotheism. Sometimes associated with the Eleatic school.
Epicharmus of Kos (c. 530 – 450 BCE). Comic playwright and moralist.
==== 500–400 BCE ====
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE). Of the Ionians. Emphasized the mutability of the universe.
Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 – 450 BCE). Of the Eleatics. Reflected on the concept of Being.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500 – 428 BCE). Of the Ionians. Pluralist.
Empedocles (492 – 432 BCE). Eclectic cosmogonist. Pluralist.
Zeno of Elea (c. 490 – 430 BCE). Of the Eleatics. Known for his paradoxes.
Protagoras of Abdera (c. 481 – 420 BCE). Sophist. Early advocate of relativism.
Antiphon (480 – 411 BCE). Sophist.
Hippias (Middle of the 5th century BCE). Sophist.
Gorgias. (c. 483 – 375 BCE). Sophist. Early advocate of solipsism.
Socrates of Athens (c. 470 – 399 BCE). Emphasized virtue ethics. In epistemology, understood dialectic to be central to the pursuit of truth.
Critias of Athens (c. 460 – 413 BCE). Atheist writer and politician.
Prodicus of Ceos (c. 465 – c. 395 BCE). Sophist.
Leucippus of Miletus (First half of the 5th century BCE). Founding Atomist, Determinist.
Thrasymachus of Miletus (c. 459 – c. 400 BCE). Sophist.
Democritus of Abdera (c. 450 – 370 BCE). Founding Atomist.
Diagoras of Melos (c. 450 – 415 BCE). Atheist.
Archelaus. A pupil of Anaxagoras.
Melissus of Samos. Eleatic.
Cratylus. Follower of Heraclitus.
Ion of Chios. Pythagorean cosmologist.
Echecrates. Pythagorean.
Timaeus of Locri. Pythagorean.
==== 400–300 BCE ====
Antisthenes (c. 444 – 365 BCE). Founder of Cynicism. Pupil of Socrates.
Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 440 – 366 BCE). A Cyrenaic. Advocate of ethical hedonism.
Alcidamas c. 435 – c. 350 BCE). Sophist.
Lycophron (Sophist) c. 430 – c. 350 BCE). Sophist.
Diogenes of Apollonia (c. 425 – c 350 BCE). Cosmologist.
Hippo (c. 425 – c 350 BCE). Atheist cosmologist.
Xenophon (c. 427 – 355 BCE). Historian.
Plato (c. 427 – 347 BCE). Famed for view of the transcendental forms. Advocated polity governed by philosophers.
Speusippus (c. 408 – 339 BCE). Nephew of Plato.
Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 408 – 355 BCE). Pupil of Plato.
Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404 – 323 BCE). Cynic.
Xenocrates (c. 396 – 314 BCE). Disciple of Plato.
Aristotle (c. 384 – 322 BCE). A polymath whose works ranged across all philosophical fields.
=== Hellenistic era philosophers ===
==== 300–200 BCE ====
Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE). Peripatetic.
Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 – 270 BCE). Skeptic.
Strato of Lampsacus (c. 340 – c. 268 BCE). Atheist, Materialist.
Theodorus the Atheist (c. 340 – c. 250 BCE). Cyrenaic.
Epicurus (c. 341 – 270 BCE). Materialist Atomist, hedonist. Founder of Epicureanism
Zeno of Citium (c. 333 – 264 BCE). Founder of Stoicism.
Timon (c. 320 – 230 BCE). Pyrrhonist, skeptic.
Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BCE). Astronomer.
Euclid (fl. 300 BCE). Mathematician, founder of geometry.
Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BCE). Mathematician and inventor.
Chrysippus of Soli (c. 280 – 207 BCE). Major figure in Stoicism.
Eratosthenes (c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BCE). Geographer and mathematician.
==== 200–100 BCE ====
Carneades (c. 214 – 129 BCE). Academic skeptic. Understood probability as the purveyor of truth.
Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190 – c. 120 BCE). Astronomer and mathematician, founder of trigonometry.
=== Roman era philosophers ===
==== 100 BCE – 1 CE ====
Cicero (c. 106 BCE – 43 BCE) Skeptic. Political theorist.
Lucretius (c. 99 – 55 BCE). Epicurean.
==== 1–100 CE ====
Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BCE – 30 or 33 CE) the founder of Christianity.
Philo (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE). Believed in the allegorical method of reading texts.
Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE – 65 CE). Stoic.
Quintilian (c. 35 CE – c. 100 CE). Rhetorician and teacher.
Hero of Alexandria (c. 10 CE – c. 70 CE). Engineer.
==== 100–200 CE ====
Epictetus (c. 55 – 135). Stoic. Emphasized ethics of self–determination.
Marcus Aurelius (121–180). Stoic.
==== 200–400 CE ====
Sextus Empiricus (fl. during the 2nd and possibly the 3rd centuries AD). Skeptic, Pyrrhonist.
Plotinus (c. 205 – 270). Neoplatonist. Had a holistic metaphysics.
Porphyry (c. 232 – 304). Student of Plotinus.
Iamblichus of Syria (c. 245 – 325). Late neoplatonist. Espoused theurgy.
Augustine of Hippo (c. 354 – 430). Neoplatonist. Original Sin. Church father.
Proclus (c. 412 – 485). Neoplatonist.
=== Medieval philosophers ===
==== 500–800 CE ====
Boethius (c. 480–524).
John Philoponus (c. 490–570).
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500?).
John of Damascus (c. 680-750).
==== 800–900 CE ====
Al-Kindi (c. 801 – 873). Major figure in Islamic philosophy. Influenced by Neoplatonism.
Abbas ibn Firnas (809–887). Polymath.
John the Scot (c. 815 – 877). neoplatonist, pantheist.
==== 900–1000 CE ====
al–Faràbi (c. 870 – 950). Major Islamic philosopher. Neoplatonist.
Saadia Gaon (c. 882 – 942). Jewish Philosopher
al-Razi (c. 865 – 925). Rationalist. Major Islamic philosopher. Held that God creates universe by rearranging pre–existing laws.
==== 1000–1100 CE ====
Al-Biruni (973– after 1050) Islamic polymath.
Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (c. 980–1037). Major Islamic philosopher.
Ibn Hazm (7 November 994 – 15 August 1064)
Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) (c. 1021–1058). Jewish philosopher.
Anselm (c. 1034–1109). Christian philosopher. Produced ontological argument for the existence of God.
Omar Khayyam (c. 1048–1131). Major Islamic philosopher. Agnostic. Mathematician. Philosophical poet, one of the 5 greatest Iranian Poets.
Al-Ghazali (c. 1058–1111). Islamic philosopher. Mystic.
==== 1100–1200 CE ====
Bahya ibn Paquda (c. 1050-1150). Jewish philosopher, author, rabbi, judge.
Ibn Tufail (c. 1105 – 1185)
Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142). Scholastic philosopher. Dealt with the problem of universals.
Abraham ibn Daud (c. 1110–1180). Jewish philosophy.
Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160). Scholastic.
Averroes (Ibn Rushd, "The Commentator") (c. 1126–December 10, 1198). Islamic philosopher.
Maimonides (c. 1135–1204). Jewish philosopher.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149 or 1150 – 1209)
Suhrawardi (c. 1154–1191). Major Islamic philosopher.
Francis of Assisi (c. 1182–1226). Ascetic.
==== 1200–1300 CE ====
Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). Andalusian Muslim philosopher, mystic, poet, and scholar. Founder of Akbarism, one of the major current of later Islamic philosophy.
Fibonacci (c. 1170–c. 1250), mathematician.
Michael Scot (1175–c. 1232), mathematician.
Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253).
Alexander of Hales (c. 1185-1245). Franciscan, Scholasticism.
Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) (c. 1193–1280). Early Empiricist.
Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1294). Empiricist, mathematician.
Ibn Sab'in (1217–1271).
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1221–1274). Aristotelian.
Bonaventure (c. 1225–1274). Franciscan.
Siger (c. 1240–c. 1280). Averroist.
Boetius of Dacia. Averroist, Aristotelian.
==== 1300–1400 CE ====
Ramon Llull (c. 1232–1315) Catalan philosopher
Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328). mystic.
Ibn Taymiyya (c. 1263-1328) Islamic scholar, jurist and philosopher
Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308). Franciscan, Scholastic, Original Sin.
Marsilius of Padua (c. 1270–1342). Understood chief function of state as mediator.
William of Ockham (c. 1288–1348). Franciscan. Scholastic. Nominalist, creator of Ockham's razor.
Gersonides (c. 1288–1344). Jewish philosopher.
Jean Buridan (c. 1300–1358). Nominalist.
John Wycliffe (c. 1320–1384).
Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–5 – 1382). Made contributions to economics, science, mathematics, theology and philosophy.
Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406).
Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340 – c. 1411). Jewish philosopher.
Gemistus Pletho (c. 1355 – 1452/1454). Late Byzantine scholar of neoplatonic philosophy.
==== 1400–1500 CE ====
Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). Christian philosopher.
Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457). Humanist, critic of scholastic logic.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Christian Neoplatonist, head of Florentine Academy and major Renaissance Humanist figure. First translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin.
Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). Renaissance humanist.
=== Early modern philosophers ===
==== 1500–1550 CE ====
Neagoe Basarab (c.1459–1521)
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). Humanist, advocate of free will.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). Political realism.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). Scientist, whose works affected Philosophy of Science.
Sir Thomas More (1478–1535). Humanist, created term "utopia".
Martin Luther (1483–1546). Major Western Christian theologian.
Petrus Ramus (1515–1572).
==== 1550–1600 CE ====
John Calvin (1509–1564). Major Western Christian theologian.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). Humanist, skeptic.
Pierre Charron (1541–1603).
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Advocate of heliocentrism.
Francisco Suarez (1548–1617). Politically proto–liberal.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Scientist, whose works affected Philosophy of Science.
Molla-Sadra (1572–1640). Major Islamic philosopher.
==== 1600–1650 CE ====
Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648). Nativist.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Empiricist.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Heliocentrist.
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Natural law theorist.
François de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672)
Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Cartesian.
Robert Filmer (1588–1653). Absolutist, monarchist, patrimonialist. Divine right of kings.
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Mechanicism. Empiricist.
René Descartes (1596–1650). Heliocentrism, mind-body dualism, rationalism.
Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658). Spanish catholic philosopher
==== 1650–1700 CE ====
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Advocate of extensive government power, social contract theorist, materialist.
Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694).
François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680).
Henry More (1614–1687).
Jacques Rohault (1617–1672), Cartesian.
Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688). Cambridge Platonist.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Physicist, scientist. Noted for Pascal's wager.
Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673). Materialist, feminist.
Arnold Geulincx (1624–1669). Important occasionalist theorist.
Pierre Nicole (1625–1695).
Geraud Cordemoy (1626–1684). Dualist.
Robert Boyle (1627–1691).
Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway (1631–1679).
Richard Cumberland (1631–1718). Early proponent of utilitarianism.
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Rationalism.
Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694). Social contract theorist.
John Locke (1632–1704). Major Empiricist. Political philosopher.
Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680).
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Cartesian.
Isaac Newton (1643–1727).
Simon Foucher (1644–1696). Skeptic.
John Flamsteed (1646 – 1719). Astronomer.
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Pyrrhonist.
Damaris Masham (1659–1708).
John Toland (1670–1722).
Dimitrie Cantemir (1674-1723)
==== 1700–1750 CE ====
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). Co-inventor of calculus.
John Norris (1657–1711).
Jean Meslier (1664–1729). Atheist Priest.
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744).
Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733).
Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1671–1713).
Samuel Clarke (1675–1729).
Catherine Cockburn (1679–1749).
Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Determinist, rationalist.
George Berkeley (1685–1753). Idealist, empiricist.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). Skeptic, humanist.
Joseph Butler (1692–1752).
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Proto–utilitarian.
John Gay (1699–1745).
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). American philosophical theologian.
David Hartley (1705–1757).
Julien La Mettrie (1709–1751). Materialist, genetic determinist.
==== 1750–1800 CE ====
Voltaire (1694–1778). Advocate for freedoms of religion and expression.
Thomas Reid (1710–1796). Member of Scottish Enlightenment, founder of Scottish Common Sense philosophy.
David Hume (1711–1776). Empiricist, skeptic.
Jean–Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Social contract political philosopher.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784).
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762).
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771). Utilitarian.
Etienne de Condillac (1715–1780).
Jean d'Alembert (1717–1783).
Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789). Materialist, atheist.
Adam Smith (1723–1790). Economic theorist, member of Scottish Enlightenment.
Richard Price (1723–1791). Political liberal.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Major contributions in nearly every field of philosophy, especially metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). Member of the Jewish Enlightenment.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781).
Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Conservative political philosopher.
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788).
Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794). Italian criminologist, jurist, and philosopher from the Age of Enlightenment.
William Paley (1743–1805).
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Liberal political philosopher.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819).
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803).
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Utilitarian, hedonist.
Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803) Anarcho-Communist, Deist
Dugald Stewart (1753–1828).
Salomon Maimon (1753–1800).
William Godwin (1756–1836). Anarchist, utilitarian.
Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823). Kantian.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Feminist.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).
Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833). Skeptic.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).
=== Modern philosophers ===
==== 1800–1850 CE ====
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Early evolutionary theorist.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827). Determinist.
Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) Conservative
Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Socialist.
Madame de Staël (1766–1817).
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Hermeneutician.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Poet and philosopher.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). German idealist.
James Mill (1773–1836). Utilitarian.
F. W. J. von Schelling (1775–1854). German idealist.
Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848).
Richard Whately (1787–1863).
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Pessimism, Critic, Absurdist.
John Austin (1790–1859). Legal positivist, utilitarian.
William Whewell (1794–1866).
Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Social philosopher, positivist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Transcendentalist, abolitionist, egalitarian, humanist.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872).
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859).
Max Stirner (1806–1856). Anarchist.
Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871). Logician.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Utilitarian.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865). Anarchist.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Scientist, whose works affected Philosophy of Science.
Jaime Balmes (1810–1848)
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850). Egalitarian.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Existentialist.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Transcendentalist, pacifist, abolitionist.
==== 1850–1900 CE ====
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet (1788–1856).
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883). Egalitarian, abolitionist.
Harriet Taylor Mill (1807–1858). Egalitarian, utilitarian.
Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Revolutionary anarchist.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902). Egalitarian.
Hermann Lotze (1817–1881).
Karl Marx (1818–1883). Socialist, formulated historical materialism.
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Egalitarian, dialectical materialist.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Nativism, libertarianism, social Darwinism.
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906). Feminist.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911).
Edward Caird (1835–1908). Idealist.
T.H. Green (1836–1882). British idealist.
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). Rationalism, utilitarianism.
Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Philosopher of science, influence on logical positivism.
Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Phenomenologist.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Pragmatist.
Philipp Mainländer (1841-1876). Pessimist.
William James (1842–1910). Pragmatism, Radical empiricism.
Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). Neo-Kantianism, Jewish philosophy.
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). Anarchist communism.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Naturalistic philosopher, influence on Existentialism.
W. K. Clifford (1845–1879). Evidentialist.
F. H. Bradley (1846–1924). Idealist.
Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923). Social philosopher.
Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923). Idealist.
Gottlob Frege (1848–1925). Influential analytic philosopher.
Cook Wilson (1849–1915).
Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Specialist in counterfactuals.
David George Ritchie (1853–1903). Idealist.
Alexius Meinong (1853–1920). Logical realist.
Henri Poincaré (1854–1912).
Josiah Royce (1855–1916). Idealist.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Neurologist, founded psychoanalysis, posited structural model of mind.
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856–1931).
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Linguist, Semiotics, Structuralism.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). Social philosopher.
Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932).
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Founder of phenomenology.
Samuel Alexander (1859–1938). Perceptual realist.
Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Vitalism.
John Dewey (1859–1952). Pragmatism.
Jane Addams (1860–1935). Pragmatist.
Pierre Duhem (1861–1916).
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).Anthroposophy
Karl Groos (1861–1946). Evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Process Philosophy, Mathematician, Logician, Philosophy of Physics, Panpsychism.
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Pragmatism, symbolic interactionist.
Max Weber (1864–1920). Social philosopher.
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936).
J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925). Idealist.
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952).
Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Anarchist.
Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919). Marxist political philosopher.
G. E. Moore (1873–1958). Common sense theorist, ethical non–naturalist.
Carl Jung (1875–1961). Psychoanalysis, Methaphysics
==== 1900–2000 CE ====
George Santayana (1863–1952). Pragmatism, naturalism; known for many aphorisms.
H.A. Prichard (1871–1947). Moral intuitionist.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Analytic philosopher, nontheist, influential.
A.O. Lovejoy (1873–1962).
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948). Existentialist.
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945).
Max Scheler (1874–1928). German phenomenologist.
Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). Idealist and fascist philosopher.
Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957).
W.D. Ross (1877–1971). Deontologist.
Martin Buber (1878–1965). Jewish philosopher, existentialist.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973).
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Christian evolutionist.
Hans Kelsen (1881–1973). Legal positivist.
Moritz Schlick (1882–1936). Founder of Vienna Circle, logical positivism.
Otto Neurath (1882–1945). Member of Vienna Circle.
Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950).
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). Human rights theorist.
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). Philosopher of History.
C.I. Lewis (1883–1964). Conceptual pragmatist.
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962).
Georg Lukács (1885–1971). Marxist philosopher.
Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929).
Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967)
Karl Barth (1886–1968).
C. D. Broad (1887–1971).
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Analytic philosopher, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, influential.
Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973). Christian existentialist.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Phenomenologist.
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Marxist philosopher.
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). Vienna Circle. Logical positivist.
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Marxist. Philosophy of language.
Brand Blanshard (1892–1987).
F. S. C. Northrop (1893–1992). Epistemologist.
Roman Ingarden (1893–1970). Perceptual realist, phenomenalist.
Susanne Langer (1895–1985).
Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959). Vienna Circle. Logical positivist.
Georges Bataille (1897–1962).
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). Frankfurt School.
Xavier Zubiri (1898–1983). Materialist open realism.
Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Political Philosopher.
H.H. Price (1899–1984).
Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976).
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Hermeneutics.
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Structuralism.
Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). Marxist philosopher
Alfred Tarski (1901–1983). Created T–Convention in semantics.
E. Nagel (1901–1985). Logical positivist.
Karl Popper (1902–1994). Falsificationist.
Mortimer Adler (1902–2001).
Frank P. Ramsey (1903–1930). Proposed redundancy theory of truth.
Theodor Adorno (1903–1969). Frankfurt School.
Ernest Addison Moody (1903–1975).
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Humanism, existentialism.
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). Existentialist.
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) comparative mythology and comparative religion
Eugen Fink (1905–1975). Phenomenologist.
Ayn Rand (1905–1982). Objectivist, Individualist.
Kurt Gödel (1906–1978). Vienna Circle.
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995).
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). Political Philosophy.
H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992). Legal positivism.
C.L. Stevenson (1908–1979).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Influential French phenomenologist.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). Existentialist, feminist.
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000).
Simone Weil (1909–1943).
A.J. Ayer (1910–1989). Logical positivist, emotivist.
J.L. Austin (1911–1960).
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980). Media theory.
Alan Turing (1912–1954). Functionalist in philosophy of mind.
Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989). Influential American philosopher
Albert Camus (1913–1960). Absurdist.
Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). French philosopher and theologian.
Roland Barthes (1915–1980). French semiotician and literary theorist.
J. L. Mackie (1917–1981). Moral skeptic.
Donald Davidson (1917–2003). Coherentist philosophy of mind.
Louis Althusser (1918–1990). Structural Marxist.
M. Bunge (1919–2020).
R. M. Hare (1919–2002).
P. F. Strawson (1919–2006). Ordinary language philosophy.
John Rawls (1921–2002). Liberal.
Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009).
Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). Author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017). Polish sociologist and philosopher, who introduced the idea of liquid modernity.
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Postcolonialism
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). Post-structuralism
Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, and the concept of biopolitics.
Hilary Putnam (1926–2016). Neopragmatism.
David Malet Armstrong (1926–2014).
Eugene Gendlin (1926–2017). Philosopher and psychotherapist, linked to Phenomenology and Pragmatism.
John Howard Yoder (1927–1997). Pacifist.
Noam Chomsky (born 1928). Linguist.
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017). Introduced the Methaphysics of Quality. MOQ incorporates facets of East Asian philosophy, pragmatism and the work of F. S. C. Northrop.
Bernard Williams (1929–2003). Moral philosopher.
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). Postmodernism, Post-structuralism.
Jürgen Habermas (born 1929). Discourse ethics.
Jaakko Hintikka (1929–2015).
Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929). Aristotelian.
Allan Bloom (1930–1992). Political Philosopher.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). French psychoanalytic sociologist and philosopher.
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Deconstruction.
Thomas Sowell (born 1930). Political Philosopher, capitalist.
Guy Debord (1931–1994). French Marxist philosopher.
Richard Rorty (1931–2007). Pragmatism, Postanalytic philosophy.
Charles Taylor (born 1931). Political philosophy, Philosophy of Social Science, and Intellectual History
John Searle (born 1932). Direct realism.
Alvin Plantinga (born 1932). Reformed epistemology, Philosophy of Religion.
Jerry Fodor (1935–2017).
Ioanna Kuçuradi (born 1936). Grounded Ethics on unchangeable values of Person, and developed the idea of human rights based on this ethics.
Thomas Nagel (born 1937). Qualia theory.
Alain Badiou (born 1937).
Robert Nozick (1938–2002). Libertarian.
Tom Regan (1938–2017). Animal rights philosopher.
Saul Kripke (1940-2022). Modal semantics.
Jean-Luc Nancy (born 1940) French philosopher.
David K. Lewis (1941–2001). Modal realism.
Joxe Azurmendi (born 1941). Basque Philosopher, Political philosophy, Social philosophy, Philosophy of language.
Antonio Escohotado (1941-2021). Hegelianism, Liberal.
Derek Parfit (1942–2017).
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942). state of exception, form–of–life, and homo sacer.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born 1942). Postcolonialism, Feminism, Literary theory.
Roger Scruton (1944-2020). Traditionalist conservatism.
Peter Singer (born 1946) Moral philosopher on animal liberation, effective altruism.
Camille Paglia (born 1947).
John Ralston Saul (born 1947).
Martha Nussbaum (born 1947). Political philosopher.
Oruç Aruoba (1948–2020). Developed a certain approach of ethics based on how One becomes onseself through one's actions.
Carol Cleland (born 1948). Philosopher of science, proponent of the shadow biosphere.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (born 1949).
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949). Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Ken Wilber (born 1949). Integral Theory.
John Dupré (born 1952), Philosopher of science, especially of biology and the social sciences.
Cornel West (born 1953).
Judith Butler (born 1956). Poststructuralist, feminist, queer theory.
Jeff Malpas (born 1958)
Alexander Wendt (born 1958). Social constructivism.
Michel Onfray (born 1959).
Orlando E. Toledo (born 1964). Philosopher of Science and Political Philosopher.
David Benatar (born 1966). Antinatalist.
Alain de Botton (born 1969).
Nick Bostrom (born 1973).
Sabina Leonelli, philosopher of science.
== See also ==
Contemporary philosophy
Timeline of German Idealism
List of years in philosophy
Category:21st-century philosophers
== References ==
Kemerling, Garth (2002). "Timeline of Western Philosophers". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) http://www.philosophypages.com
LaFave, Sandra (2006). "Chronological List of Western Philosophers". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) http://lafavephilosophy.x10host.com/CRONLIST.htm
Russell, Bertrand (1959). Wisdom of the West. London: Rathbone Books, Ltd.
== External links ==
Jewish Intellectual Timeline, a parallel history of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual ideas |
David Benatar | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benatar | David Benatar (born 8 December 1966) is a South African philosopher, academic, and author. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which he argues that coming into existence is serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings.
== Early life and education ==
Benatar is the son of Solomon Benatar, a global-health expert who founded the Bioethics Centre at the University of Cape Town. Not much is known about Benatar's personal life as he deliberately guards his privacy. He has held antinatalist views since his childhood.
== Academic career ==
Benatar is a professor of philosophy and director of the Bioethics Centre at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
== Philosophical work ==
=== Asymmetry between pain and pleasure ===
Benatar argues there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things, such as pleasure and pain, which means it would be better for humans not to have been born:
The presence of pain is bad.
The presence of pleasure is good.
The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.
The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.
==== Implications for procreation ====
Benatar argues that bringing someone into existence generates both good and bad experiences, pain and pleasure, whereas not doing so generates neither pain nor pleasure. The absence of pain is good, the absence of pleasure is not bad. Therefore, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-procreation.
Benatar raises four other related asymmetries that he considers quite plausible:
We have a moral obligation not to create unhappy people and we have no moral obligation to create happy people. The reason why we think there is a moral obligation not to create unhappy people is that the presence of this suffering would be bad (for the sufferers) and the absence of the suffering is good (even though there is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). By contrast, the reason we think there is no moral obligation to create happy people is that although their pleasure would be good for them, the absence of pleasure when they do not come into existence will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
It is strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide to create them, and it is not strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide not to create them. That the child may be happy is not a morally important reason to create them. By contrast, that the child may be unhappy is an important moral reason not to create them. If it were the case that the absence of pleasure is bad even if someone does not exist to experience its absence, then we would have a significant moral reason to create a child and to create as many children as possible. And if it were not the case that the absence of pain is good even if someone does not exist to experience this good, then we would not have a significant moral reason not to create a child.
Someday we can regret the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we created them – a person can be unhappy and the presence of their pain would be a bad thing. But we will never feel regret for the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we did not create them – a person will not be deprived of happiness, because he or she will never exist, and the absence of happiness will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
We feel sadness by the fact that somewhere people come into existence and suffer, and we feel no sadness by the fact that somewhere people did not come into existence in a place where there are happy people. When we know that somewhere people came into existence and suffer, we feel compassion. The fact that on some deserted island or planet, people did not come into existence and suffer is good. This is because the absence of pain is good even when there is not someone who is experiencing this good. On the other hand, we do not feel sadness by the fact that on some deserted island or planet, people did not come into existence and are not happy. This is because the absence of pleasure is bad only when someone exists to be deprived of this good.
=== Humans' unreliable assessment of life's quality ===
Benatar raises the issue of whether humans inaccurately estimate the true quality of their lives, and has cited three psychological phenomena which he believes are responsible for this:
Tendency towards optimism: we have a positively distorted perspective of our lives in the past, present, and future.
Adaptation: we adapt to our circumstances, and if they worsen, our sense of well-being is lowered in anticipation of those harmful circumstances, according to our expectations, which are usually divorced from the reality of our circumstances.
Comparison: we judge our lives by comparing them to those of others, ignoring the negatives which affect everyone to focus on specific differences. And due to our optimism bias, we mostly compare ourselves to those worse off, to overestimate the value of our own well-being.He concludes:
The above psychological phenomena are unsurprising from an evolutionary perspective. They militate against suicide and in favour of reproduction. If our lives are quite as bad as I shall still suggest they are, and if people were prone to see this true quality of their lives for what it is, they might be much more inclined to kill themselves, or at least not to produce more such lives. Pessimism, then, tends not to be naturally selected.
=== Sexual discrimination against men and boys ===
Benatar's The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys (2012) examines various issues regarding misandry and the negative socially-imposed aspects of male identity. It does not seek to attack or diminish the ideas of feminism, but rather to shine a light on the parallel existence of systemic and cultural discrimination against men and boys, and how it simultaneously contributes to the oppression of women. In a review of the book, philosopher Simon Blackburn writes that "Benatar knows that such examples are likely to meet snorts of disbelief or derision, but he is careful to back up his claims with empirical data," and through this book, he shows that "if it is all too often tough being a woman, it is also sometimes tough being a man, and that any failure to recognise this risks distorting what should be everyone's goal, namely universal sympathy as well as social justice for all, regardless of gender." In another review, the philosopher Iddo Landau praises the work as "a very well-argued book that presents an unorthodox thesis and defends it ably," agreeing with Benatar that "in order to cope with the hitherto ignored second sexism, we should not only acknowledge it, but also dedicate much more empirical and philosophical research to this under-explored topic and, of course, try to change many attitudes, social norms, and laws".
== Publications ==
Benatar is the author of a series of widely cited papers in medical ethics, including "Between Prophylaxis and Child Abuse" (The American Journal of Bioethics) and "A Pain in the Fetus: Toward Ending Confusion about Fetal Pain" (Bioethics). His work has been published in such journals as Ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, American Philosophical Quarterly, QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, Journal of Law and Religion and the British Medical Journal.
== Cultural influence ==
Nic Pizzolatto, creator and writer of True Detective, has cited Benatar's Better Never to Have Been as an influence on the TV series (along with Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound, Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Jim Crawford's Confessions of an Antinatalist, and Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of This Planet).
== Personal life ==
Benatar is vegan, and has taken part in debates on veganism. He has argued that humans are "responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence." He has also argued that the outbreak of zoonotic diseases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is often the result of how humans mistreat animals.Benatar is an atheist and has stated that he has no children of his own.
== Bibliography ==
Benatar, David (2001). Ethics for Everyday. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-240889-8.
Benatar, David (2006). Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929642-2.
Benatar, David (2012). The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-67451-2.
Benatar, David (2015). "The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism". In S. Hannan; S. Brennan; R. Vernon (eds.). Permissible Progeny?: The Morality of Procreation and Parenting. Oxford University Press. pp. 34–64. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199378111.003.0002. ISBN 978-0-19-937814-2.
Benatar, David; Wasserman, David (2015). Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong to Reproduce?. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-027311-8.
Archard, David; Benatar, David (2016). Procreation and Parenthood: The Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-874815-1.
Benatar, David (2017). The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190633813.
=== As editor ===
Benatar, David, ed. (2006). Cutting to the Core: Exploring the Ethics of Contested Surgeries. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-5001-8.
Ethics for Everyday. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Life, Death & Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions (2004)
== Notes ==
== References ==
== External links ==
University of Cape Town – Benatar's faculty pageDavid Benatar at IMDb
Quotations related to David Benatar at Wikiquote |
Sabina Leonelli | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabina_Leonelli | Sabina Leonelli is a philosopher of science and professor at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She is well known for her work on scientific practices, data-centric science, and open science policies. She was awarded the 2018 Lakatos award for her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016).
== Biography ==
Originally from Italy, Leonelli moved to the UK for a BSc degree in history, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science at University College London and a MSc degree in History and Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics. Her doctoral research was carried out in the Netherlands at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with Henk W. de Regt and Hans Radder. Before joining the Exeter faculty, she was a research officer under Mary S. Morgan at the Department of Economic History of the London School of Economics.
Leonelli is the co-director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis) and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the international journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review. She serves as External Faculty for the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
== Involvement in science policy ==
Leonelli is currently an ambassador of Plan S, an open-access science publishing initiative supported by cOAlition S. From 2015 to 2017, Leonelli led the Open Science working group of the Global Young Academy, and from 2016 to 2019 represented the GYA on the Open Science Policy Platform of the European Commission. In 2016, she co-chaired the production of the Open Data Position Statement by the GYA and European Young Academies and in 2018, co-authored the GYA Statement on Plan S.
== Recognition ==
Leonelli was awarded with the 2018 Lakatos award for Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016), a book on the use of data and databases in contemporary biological research practices.She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2021.
== Media appearances ==
=== Podcasts ===
Technoculture Podcast – Episode #9: Sabina Leonelli on the Open Science Movement
Oxford Internet Institute Podcast on "Researching Life in the Digital Age: A Philosophical Analysis of Data-Intensive Biology"
The Dissenter Podcast on Science in the World of Big Data
SCI PHI Podcast
== Grants and projects ==
From 2019 to 2021: Turing Project "From Field Data to Global Indicators: Towards a Framework for Intelligent Plant Data Linkage"
From 2016 to 2020: Australian Research Council Discovery Grant "Organisms and Us: How Living Things Help Us to Understand Our World," led by Rachel Ankeny
From 2018 to 2021: Economic and Social Research Council Research Grant "Understanding the Use of Digital Forensics in Policing in England and Wales," led by Dana Wilson-Kovacs
From 2019 to 2023: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Doctoral Training Centre on Environmental Intelligence, led by Gavin Shaddik
From 2014 to 2019: European Research Council Starting Grant on The Epistemology of Data-Intensive Science (DATA_SCIENCE).
== Selected publications ==
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article 'Scientific Research and Big Data'
Model Organisms (2020) with Rachel Ankeny. ISBN 978-1-108-74232-0
Data Journeys in the Sciences (2020), Editors: Leonelli, Sabina, Tempini, Niccolò (Eds.). ISBN 978-3-030-37177-7
Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016). ISBN 978-0-226-41633-5
== References ==
== External links ==
Sabina Leonelli publications indexed by Google Scholar
Sabina Leonelli on Twitter |