21st-century philosophers - Jesús Padilla Gálvez,Jussi Parikka,Christopher Peacocke,David Pearce,Carlo Penco,Mario Perniola,Herman Philipse,Adrian Piper,Thomas Pogge,Mark Poster,Andrew Pyle,Zenon Pylyshyn

Jesús Padilla Gálvez (October 28, 1959, Almería) is a philosopher who worked primarily in philosophy of language, logic, and the history of sciences. Studied Philosophy, History and Mathematics at the University of Cologne (Germany) and was awarded the M.A. in 1983 and a Dr. phil. in Philosophy in 1988. He was Research Assistant (1988–1991) at the University of Murcia (Spain) and later held the post of Associate Professor (1992–1994) for Logic and Philosophy of Language at the University of León (Spain). From 1994 to 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz (Austria). Since 1999 he has been Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo (Spain). He has held visiting posts at the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), Graz (Austria), Potsdam (Germany), Cambridge (United Kingdom) and Munich (Germany).

Jussi Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist and Reader in media studies at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He is also adjunct professor of digital culture theory at the University of Turku in Finland.
With Joss Hands, Parikka is the Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre for Digital Culture. Since January 2010 Parikka has been the Director of the new CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy-research institute at Anglia Ruskin University.
Dr. Parikka's research activities include continental philosophy, media theory, the politics and history of new media, media archaeology, new materialist cultural analysis and various other topics relating to anomalies, media and the body. He is currently working on a new book on media archaeological theories and methods.

Christopher Arthur Bruce Peacocke (born 22 May 1950, son of Arthur Peacocke) is a philosopher especially known for his work in philosophy of mind and epistemology. His recent publications, in the field of epistemology, have defended a version of rationalism.
Of his earlier work, he is perhaps best known for the first chapter of his 1983 book, Sense and Content, entitled "Sensation and the Content of Experience." In this chapter, Peacocke defends the claim that perceptual experience, over and above its intentional content, has certain "sensational properties". He gives three different examples of visual scenarios where intentional content alone cannot capture every aspect of the experience. Those aspects which elude intentional content are thought to be the sensational properties of the experience. Some of those who defend qualia have used these examples as evidence of their existence. Several philosophers have criticized these examples (Michael Tye, Fred Dretske), claiming that the supposed extra quality can indeed be captured in terms of intentional content.
In the 1983 book, Peacocke assumed that the intentional content of mental states is exclusively conceptual content, i.e. the content is such that the subject of the state needs to possess all the concepts that specify the intentional content in question. From about 1986 and onwards, Peacocke abandoned this assumption, arguing that some mental states, in particular perceptual experiences and representational states implicated in subpersonal information processing (for example, in the subconscious parsing of heard speech), have non-conceptual intentional content. Peacocke is now often seen as a leading proponent of this notion of non-conceptual intentional content.
In his 1992, A Study of Concepts, Peacocke gives a detailed exposition of a philosophical theory of concept possession, according to which the nature and identity conditions for concepts may be given, in a non-circular way, by the conditions a thinker has to satisfy in order to possess the relevant concepts. The theory is a version of a so-called "conceptual" or "inferential role" theory of concepts.
Peacocke has been criticised for his unnecessarily abstruse and convoluted style.

David Pearce is a British philosopher of the negative utilitarian school of ethics. He is most famous for his advocation of the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient beings.
Many of Pearce's essays can be found online, but he seems not to have published any book in paper, although some of his work like The Hedonistic Imperative could easily make a book. In most of his essays, Pearce details how he believes the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through modern technologies and mainly through genetic engineering. Other technologies that Pearce finds important for abolishing suffering are nanotechnology, pharmacology, and neurosurgery; Pearce believes that these could potentially converge to help humans transform into more enhanced states, first as transhumans and later as posthumans.

Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström on 10 March 1973) is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk and the anthropic principle. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is currently the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
In addition to his writing for academic and popular press, Bostrom makes frequent media appearances in which he talks about transhumanism-related topics such as cloning, artificial intelligence, superintelligence, mind uploading, cryonics, nanotechnology, and the simulation argument.

Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Carlo Penco (born August 1948) is an Italian analytic philosopher and full professor in philosophy of language at the University of Genoa in Italy.
He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy Summa cum Laude at the University of Genoa in 1972 with a specialization in the philosophy of science (at the time in Italy there were no PhD; he became a member of the PhD program later as a theacher). He studied with Evandro Agazzi in Genoa, with Michael Dummett in Oxford, and later with Robert Brandom at the University of Pittsburgh. He has received various academic awards and fellowships including: CNR Fellow (1976), NATO Fellow at Oxford University (1979) and Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1998). He has been President of the Italian Society for the Analytic Philosophy (2002-2004), and member of Steering Committee of the Italian Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Sciences and the European Society for Analytic Philosophy. Together with Joao Branquino and Josep Corbi, he begun a series of "Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy", in order to foster the exchange of ideas among Analytic Philosophers in the southern countries in Europe, with connection with Latin America. He has been teaching in South of Italy (University of Lecce) between 1988 and 1991; then he went to the University of Genoa, where he is still teaching as full professor in Philosophy of Language. Since 1997 he has been responsible for the web pages of the Department of Philosophy, and later for the web pages of the Faculty of Arts in the same University. President of the Master in Philosophy during the period 2004-2010, he became Head of the Doctoral School in Human Science. He has been working in the Editorial or Scientific for different Journals like: Epistemologia, An International Journal for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Networks, A journal for the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and the Cognitive Sciences, European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, Theoria (A Swedish Journal for Philosophy). He has worked as referee also in Abstracta, Dialectica, Erkenntnis, Ragion Pratica, Synthese, and other Journals. His early research interests has been mainly on the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the philosophy of Frege. He begun to work on the problem of context for the Meetings "Modeling and Using Contexts" since 1999. His recent interests are more strictly linked to different topics in the Philosophy of Language and Pragmatics, mainly on the problem of the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics.

Mario Perniola (born May 20, 1941, in Asti, Italy) is an internationally acclaimed Italian philosopher, professor of Aesthetics and author. Many of his works have been published in English.
The initial period of Perniola’s career focuses on the philosophy of the novel and the theory of literature.In his first main work, Il metaromanzo (The Metanovel 1966), which is his doctoral dissertation, Perniola argues that the modern novel from Henry James to Beckett has a self-referential character. Furthermore he claims that the novel is only about itself. Perniola’s aim was to demonstrate the philosophical dignity of these literary works and try to recover a serious cultural expression. The Italian Nobel Prize for Literature Eugenio Montale praised Perniola for this original critique of novels.

Aesthetics
Perniola’s work also covers the history of aesthetics and aesthetic theory. In 1990 he published Enigmi. Il momento egizio nella società e nell'arte, (Enigmas. The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, London-New York, Verso, 1995), in which he analyzes other forms of sensibility that take place between man and things.[24] Perniola argues that our society is living through an “Egyptian moment”, marked by a process of reification. As products of high technology increasingly assume organic properties, humanity turns into a thing, in the sense that it deliberately sees itself as an object.The volume L’estetica del Novecento (Twentieth-Century Aesthetics 1997) provides an original account and critique to the main aesthetic theories that characterized the previous century. He traces six main trends which are the aesthetics of life, form, knowledge, action, feeling and culture. In Del sentire cattolico. La forma culturale di una religione universale (On Catholic Feeling. The Cultural Form of a Universal Religion 2001), Perniola emphasizes the cultural identity of Catholicism rather than its moralitstic and dogmatic one. He proposes “Catholicism without orthodoxy” and “a faith without dogma”, which enables Catholicism to be perceived as a universal sense of cultural feeling.The work Strategie del bello. Quarant’anni di estetica italiana (1968-2008) (Strategies of Beauty. Forty Years of Italian Aesthetics (1968-2008) 2009) analyzes the main aesthetic theories which portray the transformations taken place in Italy since the 1960s onwards. Perniola’s volume highlights the relationship between the historical, political, and anthropological traits rooted in Italian society and the critical discourse arisen around them. Furthermore he argues that knowledge and culture should continue to be granted a privileged position in our societies, and they should challenge the arrogance of the establishments, the insolence of the publishers, the vulgarity of mass media, and the plutocratic roguery.

Herman Philipse (born May 13, 1951) is a professor of philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. From 1986 until 2003, he taught at Leiden University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1983.
Philipse has written many philosophical works in Dutch, including books on Husserl's early philosophy of logic, the role of certainty in Descartes' moral theory, and a widely-read Atheist Manifesto (Atheistisch manifest & De onredelijkheid van religie (2004), untranslated; Eng: Atheist Manifesto and the unreasonableness of religion). In English, he has written over a dozen articles in philosophical journals, as well as a detailed assessment of Heidegger, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. He has also written many commentaries for Dutch newspapers (most frequently as a regular contributor to the NRC Handelsblad) and current events television programs, defending atheism and advocating cultural assimilation for non-European immigrants in the Netherlands.
In his philosophical work, Philipse defends a non-reductionist naturalism, akin to that of Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, and P.M.S. Hacker. While highly critical of the transcendental idealist tradition of Kant and Husserl for its allegedly incoherent notion of conceptual schemes, Philipse argues that scientistic philosophies that attempt to reduce consciousness to purely physical descriptions (such as those of Quine and Churchland) fall victim to a similar inconsistency: their theories logically depend on the concepts of ordinary human life they would abolish. More generally, Philipse firmly defends the values of the Enlightenment: support for the natural sciences and political liberalism, coupled with hostility toward religion.
Philipse's vigorous public atheism has, unsurprisingly, brought him into conflict with Islamists in the Netherlands. His 1995 Atheist Manifesto was republished in an expanded edition in 2004 with a foreword by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who partly credits the book for her shift from Islam to atheism.

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is a first-generation conceptual artist and analytic philosopher who was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States. Since 2005 she has lived and worked in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin.
Adrian Piper taught philosophy at Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and UCSD. Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, in 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley College forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. Her principal philosophical publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics.

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge (born 1953) is a German philosopher and is currently the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. In addition to his Yale appointment, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire's Centre for Professional Ethics. Pogge is also an editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Pogge received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation supervised by John Rawls. Since then he has published widely on Kant and in moral and political philosophy, including various books on John Rawls and global justice.

Mark Poster (born 6 July 1941) is a Professor Emeritus of History, Film and Media Studies, and the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1968, and his research interests include European Intellectual and Cultural History, Critical Theory, and Media Studies.
He is known for applying the ideas of French theorists (including Althusser, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault) to the new media (including databases, hypertext and the internet).
He seeks to politicize the issue of the use and development of the Internet by emphasizing the possibilities of the Internet for liberatory political change, while acknowledging the existence of a deep digital divide, as well as the interests of transnational corporations and national governments.


Andrew 'Pylely' Pyle (born 17 March 1955).
Pyle is currently a reader in Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Bristol. Pyle also writes on the history of science and has given talks within the university on the nature of science historically. Pyle's research interests includes the history of epistemology and metaphysics as well as the history of science.


Zenon Pylyshyn (born 1937) is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher.
He holds degrees in Engineering-Physics (B.Eng. 1959) from McGill University and in Control Systems (M.Sc. 1960) and Experimental Psychology (Ph.D. 1963), both from the University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. He was a Canada Council Senior fellow from 1963–1964.