21st-century philosophers - Janet Radcliffe Richards,John Rajchman,Vojin Rakić,Victor Reppert,Nicholas Rescher,Daniel N. Robinson,Arturo Andrés Roig,Arno Ros,Steven M. Rosen,Jay Rosenberg,David M. Rosenthal (philosopher),Daniel Ross (Australian philosopher and filmmaker),Tamar Ross,John Russon,Alan Ryan

Janet Radcliffe Richards (1944- ) is a British feminist philosopher and bioethicist. She studies bioethics and is Director of the Centre for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine at University College London, is the author of several books, papers and articles, and has sat on a variety of advisory and working committees in areas of philosophy and bioethics.She is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and posts regularly at the University of Oxford’s Practical Ethics: Ethical Perspectives on the News website. At present, her name often arises in articles and discussions on organ transplantation, in particular the idea of a legitimate organ trade (e.g.). Her identification with feminism and her focus on bioethics both occurred “by accident”(p. 27) during the writing of her first book, The Sceptical Feminist: A philosophical enquiry (Routledge, 1980; Penguin, 1982) - bioethics being central to the abortion debate.Her second book, Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2001) explores the so-call Darwin Wars, including what implications Darwinism raises for philosophy and the application of critical thinking to various arguments put forward in the debate.

Peter Albert Railton (born 23 May 1950) is John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980. His research interests center on contemporary metaethics and normative ethics, as well as consequentialism. He is the author of the book Facts, Norms, and Values and a co-editor (with Stephen Darwall and Allan Gibbard) of Moral Discourse and Practice. He has also written several seminal papers on scientific explanation.He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University, and is a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan.

John Rajchman (born June 25, 1946) is a philosopher working in the areas of art history, architecture, and continental philosophy.John Rajchman is an Adjunct Professor and Director of Modern Art M.A. Programs in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and The Cooper Union, among others.
He is a Contributing Editor for Artforum and is on the board of Critical Space. John Rajchman received a B.A., from Yale University and Ph.D., from Columbia University.

Vojin B. Rakic (1967, Belgrade, Serbia) is a political scientist and philosopher. He publishes in English, but also in Serbian. He has a PhD in political science from Rutgers University in the United States.
In 2002 he became a Special Adviser of the United Nations to the Government of Serbia, primarily in charge of public administration reform. During his work as a Government's adviser Rakic worked closely with Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was assassinated in 2003 by rogue elements of the Serbian secret police that were still loyal to ousted President Slobodan Milosevic.Rakic was also a senior research fellow and adviser at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) of Twente University in the Netherlands.He is the author of a variety of books and articles from the domain of philosophy and political science. They include A Theory of the Normative Will, History and Future of Justice and Hegemony, Culture and Human Resources in Politics. In History and Future of Justice Rakic advances the teleological thesis that the purpose of history is the gradual development of justice, and that the 'end of history' will be marked by a condition of perfect justice. A topical book influenced by History and Future of Justice is The Evolution of God, published in 2009 by Robert Wright.Vojin Rakic spent much of his life in the Netherlands, the United States, the Czech Republic and Italy. He is fluent in Serbian, English, Dutch, German, and has a functional knowledge of French and Italian. Currently he is a university professor in Belgrade.

Dr. Victor Reppert (born 1953) is an American philosopher best known for his development of the Argument from Reason. He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2003) and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo and Philosophia Christi. He is also a philosophy blogger, with two blogs.Dr. Reppert is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Glendale Community College in Arizona.He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy (1989) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Argument from Reason
Reppert first became interested in the Argument from Reason after a conversion experience at the age of 18. He became aware that while unbelievers like Bertrand Russell claimed to be more rational than believers, Christians like C. S. Lewis claimed not only that their belief is more rational than unbelief, but that the Argument from Reason shows that the very capacity to reason is itself a reason to think that the naturalism espoused by unbelievers is false. When he read G. E. M. Anscombe's critique of Lewis's argument, Reppert became persuaded that the argument could be formulated in such a way as to overcome Anscombe's objections. His paper "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues"was the result.
In 1998 Dr. Reppert posted his paper "The Argument from Reason"to the Secular Web. In 1999 a slightly revised version of the same paper appeared, with a response by Jim Lippard,in the humanist journal Philo. In the same issue, Keith M. Parsons, the then editor of Philo, presented some arguments against Reppert's conclusions in the course of a review of Thomas Nagel's The Last Word, so in 2000 Reppert wrote a "Reply to Parsons and Lippard",to which Parsons responded by writing the first full-dress attempt to refute Reppert's argument.Reppert's reply to Parsons was the paper "Causal Closure, Mechanism, and Rational Inference",which, since he felt it was time that more Christian philosophers were familiarized with the argument and related issues,appeared in 2001 in Philosophia Christi. In 2003 Philosophia Christi featured a "Symposium on the Argument from Reason", consisting of a paper by Reppert,responses by Theodore M. Drange, William Hasker and Keith Parsons, and a second paper by Reppert replying to these three critics.
Also in 2003 Dr. Reppert published his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. The title alludes to Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, in which Dennett contrasted two types of explanation: one type is "mind-first," that is to say, "in the last analysis ... purposeful and intentional," whereas the other type "makes the explanation a feature of the system that in the last analysis is a product of the mindless system of physics and chemistry." For Dennett, Reppert observes, Darwin's dangerous idea is that the latter "are the only acceptable types of explanation," a position that "has become orthodoxy in such varied disciplines as evolutionary biology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence," as well as "in Anglo-American philosophy in general." C. S. Lewis's dangerous idea, by contrast, is that the attempt entirely to account for the world in such terms "overlooks something very important: the world thus analyzed has to have scientists in it. And scientists draw their conclusions from evidence, and in so doing they engage in rational inference.... Lewis's contention was that ... if you tried to account for the activity of reasoning as a byproduct of a fundamentally nonpurposive system, you end up describing something that cannot genuinely be called reasoning."In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett calls Darwin's idea "wonderful," "magnificent," "the single best idea anyone has ever had," and says his admiration for it is "unbounded."[14] Reppert observes that "If Darwin's dangerous idea is a true explanation of how Darwin got his dangerous idea, then the idea cannot possibly be the intellectual monument that Dennett supposes it to be."
C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea attracted a lot of response, including some comments by critics, most notably Richard C. Carrier, who on Internet Infidels called the book "surely the most extensive defense of the so-called 'Argument from Reason' yet to appear in print."[Carrier's review "is about as long as the book itself," Reppert noted only half-jokingly, before going on to respond to some of Carrier's criticisms.Another response to Carrier's review came from Darek Barefoot, who, while he did not "find all of Reppert's arguments to be persuasive and all of Carrier's criticisms to be off-target," believed that the core of the Argument from Reason "is sound and that Reppert's book is a landmark contribution to the subject."Barefoot argued that Reppert had made a strong case for Lewis's claim "that the process of inference by which consideration of premises causes us to adopt a conclusion cannot be coherently conceived of in terms of physical cause-and-effect alone." Furthermore, if Reppert's version of the Argument from Reason "is successful, it reveals that rationality is fundamental to the universe, not simply a by-product of physical cause-and-effect; and this, in turn, is readily explicable on theism, but problematic for naturalism."
Jim Lippard, reporting a lecture by Daniel Dennett at Arizona State University in 2009, recounted that Dennett had coined the disparaging term "mind-creationists" for those who argue that original intentionality is an irreducible feature of the world. Lippard noted that the "mind-creationists" whom Dennett had in his sights included atheists like Thomas Nagel, John Searle and Jerry Fodor as well as believers like Victor Reppert.

Nicholas Rescher (born July 15, 1928 in Hagen, Germany) is an American philosopher, affiliated for many years with the University of Pittsburgh, where he is currently Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He came to the United States at the age of nine. Rescher served in the U.S. Marine Corps during 1952-54. Having begun his teaching career with a preceptorship at Princeton in 1960, he continues to be active in this role. In 2011 the German Federal Republic awarded Rescher its premier Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) for his services to philosophy and to German-American collaboration in the field. In response to his substantial gift to its philosophy archive, the University of Pittsburgh established in 2010 a biennial Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy, to honor an internationally acknowledged contribution with a gold medal and an award of $25,000.
Rescher has written on a wide range of topics, including logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and the philosophy of value. He is best known as an advocate of pragmatism and, more recently, of process philosophy.
Over the course of his six decade research career, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style, and the author of a system of pragmatic idealism that combines elements of continental idealism with American pragmatism. To this end, he:
Has developed a system of pragmatic idealism, in which the activity of the human mind makes a positive and constitutive contribution to knowledge, and "valid" knowledge contributes to practical success;
Defends a coherence theory of truth in a manner differing somewhat from that of classical idealism; see e.g. his exchange in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (in the Library of Living Philosophers series);
Advocates an "erotetic propagation" of science, asserting that scientific inquiry will continue without end because each newly answered question adds a presupposition for at least one more open question to the current body of scientific knowledge.
Propounds an epistemic law of diminishing returns which holds that actual knowledge merely stands as the logarithm of the available information. This has the corollary that the comparative growth of knowledge is inversely propositional to the volume of information already at hand, so that when information grows exponentially, knowledge will grow at a merely linear rate.
Articulates a theory of axiogenesis which addresses some of the fundamental questions of philosophical metaphysics on the basis of value-eared considerations.
Apart from this larger program, Rescher has made significant contributions to:
Historical studies on Leibniz, Kant, Charles Peirce, and on the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic and logic.
The study of rational dialectic as a rhetorical and linguistic process.
The theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology).
The philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic returns in scientific effort).
One central theme of his thought is the role of unknowing, uncertainty, risk, and luck in human affairs. The resultant need for orientation and support amidst the challenges of life in conditions so largely beyond our control as a prime pillar of religion.
During the 1960s and 70s Rescher worked extensively in symbolic and philosophical logic, contributing various innovations in many-sided logic and temporal logic, including the conception of autodescriptive systems of many-valued logic. He has also contributed to futuristics, and with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey, invented the Delphi method of forecasting.
A lifelong aficionado of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, Rescher has been instrumental in the reconstruction of Leibniz’s machina de-ciphratoria, an ancestor of the famous Enigma cipher machine.

Daniel N. Robinson (born March 9, 1937) is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a member of the philosophy faculty of Oxford University.
Robinson has authored more than seventeen books and edited over thirty volumes in a wide variety of subjects, including moral philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, legal philosophy, the philosophy of the mind, intellectual history, legal history, and the history of psychology. Among his works are An Intellectual History of Psychology (Wisconsin, 1995), Wild Beasts & Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present (Harvard, 1996), and Praise And Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications (Princeton, 2002).
His early research was in the field of psychophysics. He previously served as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychology. He was a visiting professor at Brigham Young University in 1999. In addition to his university positions, Robinson also served as the principal consultant to PBS and the BBC for their award-winning series The Brain and The Mind. He is on the Board of Consulting Scholars of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, Princeton, New Jersey.

Arturo Andrés Roig (born on September 16, 1922) is an Argentine philosopher.
Born in Mendoza, he entered the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, and graduated in 1949 with a degree in Education Sciences (Profesor de Enseñanza Secundaria, Normal y Especial en Filosofía). Roig continued his studies at the Sorbonne.
He returned to Argentina, and in 1955 he began teaching philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, with a special interest in local philosophers. This interest subsequently expanded to national and Latin American philosophers. Roig also studied German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, and authored his first book on the pantheist thinker's influence in Argentina.
He is famous for being one of the best developed examples of Latin American Philosophy, and for his vast amount of scientific works, for which he has received widespread recognition and awards.

Arno Ros (born 1942 in Hamburg) is a German philosopher and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in Magdeburg, Germany.
Ros studied Ibero-Romance languages, sociology, literature and philosophy in Hamburg, Madrid (Spain) and Coimbra (Portugal). He received his doctorate in 1971 for the dissertation On the theory of literary narrative. He earned his habilitation in Saarbrücken as an assistant of Kuno Lorenz. The title of his habilitation thesis was Philosophy as a methodological critique of meaning. In subsequent years, Ros was a visiting professor in Hamburg, Saarbrücken and Campinas (Brazil).

Steven M. Rosen (born September 6, 1942) is a philosopher and psychologist, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. His writings focus on issues concerning phenomenological ontology, the philosophy and poetics of science, Jungian thought, the gender question, ecological change, and cultural transformation.
Rosen's books include The Self-Evolving Cosmos (Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific Publishing, 2008), Topologies of the Flesh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), Dimensions of Apeiron (Amsterdam-New York: Editions Rodopi, 2004), Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994) and The Moebius Seed (Walpole, N.H.: Stillpoint Publications, 1985).
Steven M. Rosen taught psychology and philosophy at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York from 1970 to 2000, and is a member of the board of directors of the Lifwynn Foundation for Social Research.

Jay Frank Rosenberg (April 18, 1942 in Chicago IL – February 21, 2008 in Chapel Hill NC) was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a student of Wilfrid Sellars and established his reputation with ten books and over 80 articles in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy (especially Kant). His most commercially successful work, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners, is a standard text in introductory philosophy courses, and has been translated into German.
Rosenberg's first publication, which he wrote as an undergraduate at Reed College, was The Impoverished Students' Book of Cookery, Drinkery, and Housekeepery!. Also while at Reed, he is believed to have contributed to the design of the game Empire, which he was a keen observer of, though he never played.
Rosenberg won about $50,000 on the television game show Jeopardy! in 1985 and returned for the program's Ultimate Tournament of Champions.

David M. Rosenthal is a philosopher at the City University of New York who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly in the area of consciousness. He was educated at the University of Chicago and then Princeton University. Besides philosophy of mind, Rosenthal has interests in the related field of cognitive science and also has done some work in the areas of philosophy of language, metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and 17th-Century rationalism.

Higher-order thoughts
Rosenthal is best known for his higher-order-thought (or "HOT") theory of consciousness. He argues that a mental state is conscious if one is conscious of oneself as being in that state, and that one is conscious of being in such a state by having a thought that one is in it. These "higher-order thoughts" are rarely themselves conscious, and they are distinct from the states they are about.

Homomorphism theory
Rosenthal has also developed a "homomorphism theory" of the mental qualities, which enables the individuation of mental qualities even when they occur without being conscious, as in subliminal perceiving and in blindsight. Mental qualities on that theory are individuated by their positions in a quality space that pertains to a particular sensory modality. More specifically, each quality occupies a position in its quality space homomorphic to the position in a corresponding quality space of the physical perceptible property to which that mental quality enables perceptual access.
Because the quality spaces of perceptible properties are each determined by an individual's ability to identify sample qualities as distinct or identical, independently of whether the relevant qualitative states are conscious, mental qualities can occur without being conscious. They occur consciously when one is conscious of oneself as being in the relevant qualitative state, and hence when one has a HOT that one is in that state.

Daniel Ross (born 1970) is an Australian philosopher and filmmaker. Ross is best known as the author of Violent Democracy (2004) and the co-director of the film The Ister (2004).
Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University under the supervision of Michael Janover. It was entitled Heidegger and the Question of the Political (2002) and focused in particular on two of Heidegger's lecture courses, Plato's Sophist and Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister".
Ross's recent work is influenced by Bernard Stiegler, and he is a translator or co-translator of several texts by Stiegler, including Acting Out (2009) and For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010).In addition to Stiegler and Heidegger, Ross has written on Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Stanley Cavell, Irving Singer, Leo Strauss, Roger Scruton, Isabelle Stengers, Noel Pearson, Gerald Murnane, Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Yvonne Rainer, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ingmar Bergman, among others.Ross's father's uncle was Charles Goren.

Tamar Ross is a professor of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University. She has scholarly expertise in the thought of Abraham Isaac Kook, the modern Musar movement and the ideology of Mitnaggedism, and Judaism and gender. She is the author of books and articles on Jewish ethics and theology, contemporary issues in traditional Jewish thought, philosophy of halakha, and Orthodox Jewish feminism.
As a Modern Orthodox Jewish feminist, Ross attempts to reconcile the idea of "Torah from Heaven" with what she perceives to be flaws in the viewpoint of Halakha and narrative, including both rules which she perceived as biased towards men, and narrative written from an exclusively male viewpoint. One approach she develops to address this problem is the idea of evolving revelation, that is, that we learn more as history evolves and societies develop and mature. She argues against the concept of Yeridat ha-dorot, the idea that knowledge of Torah diminishes with time. She also argues against approaches of more liberal movements which address perceived flaws by challenging the divinity and religious validity of sacred texts and traditions, arguing that such an approach only undermined the foundations faith. She develops the metaphor of "Expanding the Palace of Torah", originally an idea of Abraham Isaac Kook, for an approach seeking to address contemporary concerns by expanding rather than undermining religious tradition.

John Russon is a Canadian philosopher, working primarily in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. In 2006, he was named Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Guelph.
Original Philosophy
Russon is known as an original philosopher, primarily through his books Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis and the Elements of Everyday Life and Bearing Witness to Epiphany. Leonard Lawlor describes Russon as "one of the few original voices working in Continental Philosophy today."Human Experience, which won the 2005 Broadview Press/Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, brought together themes from Hegel, Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Ancient Philosophy, and produced an original interpretation of the development of personal identity. In this work Russon argues that the experiences through which we are inaugurated into any distinctive domain of meaning necessarily leave the stamp of their specific (and contingent) character on our subsequent experiences in that domain. He uses this notion to interpret the significance of family experience in the formation of personal identity, and he finds this aspect of our experience to be the key to understanding mental health (and mental illness).Russon's approach to mental health—in particular his interpretation of neurosis—is specially striking for its bringing together of the theme of embodiment that has been prominent in existential phenomenology with the theme of dialectical self-transformation that is prominent in the philosophy of Hegeland with the theme of the "system" of family life that is prominent in the work of such psychologists and family theorists as Salvador Minuchin, R.D. Laing and D.W. Winnicott.This work is also important for its use of these ideas to criticize the "individualist" premises of much political and economic theory,and to develop of a political theory of multiculturalism.His interpretation of the dynamic and transformative role of sexuality (eros) provides an important link between his work and the philosophy of Plato. The importance of sexuality to personal development, and especially its relationship to ethical life and to artistic creativity is further explored in Bearing Witness to Epiphany, his most recent work. Like Human Experience, this work stands out for its emphasis on the way that the important dimensions of our experience are embodied in the most basic material dimensions of our lives—everyday "things" and basic bodily practices—and this work thus offers a new metaphysics of "the thing" and of reality in general, arguing that issues of metaphysics cannot be separated from issues of ethics.

Alan James Ryan, FBA (born 9 May 1940) was Warden of New College, Oxford, and Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and currently a lecturer at Princeton University.
He was educated at Christ's Hospital, Balliol College, Oxford, and University College, London. Elected a fellow of New College in 1969, he returned in 1996 to take up the Wardenship. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986.
Ryan is a recognised authority on the work of John Stuart Mill, having contributed directly to the ‘Reversionary’ school, which led to a re-examination of Mill’s work from the 1970s. His academic work also takes in broader themes in political theory, including the philosophy of social science, the nature of property, and liberalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ryan has held positions at the Universities of Oxford, Essex, Keele, Princeton University, as well as the University of Virginia School of Law.
Ryan is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. Ryan can be heard here giving a brief account of Mill's philosophy, and a defence of him as the greatest British philosopher, on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time.