Browse the index
Filter by category and discipline, then by continent, country and century of birth. Countries not yet represented can be drafted at the research desk.
Category
Era
12 figures
Karl Popper
1902 – 1994Falsifiability became science's demarcation criterion.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 – 1980Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.
Elias Canetti
1905 – 1994Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.
Viktor Frankl
1905 – 1997Logotherapy: meaning as the primary human drive, tested in the camps.
Kurt Gödel
1906 – 1978Incompleteness theorems set permanent limits on formal systems.
Hannah Arendt
1906 – 1975The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the reference work on how republics fail.
Simone de Beauvoir
1908 – 1986The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.
Simone Weil
1909 – 1943Wrote on attention, affliction and rootedness while working the factory floor.
Arne Næss
1912 – 2009Founded deep ecology and the case for nature's intrinsic worth.
Albert Camus
1913 – 1960The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.
Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.
Frantz Fanon
1925 – 1961Psychiatrist whose Wretched of the Earth remains the core text of decolonisation.