21st-century philosophers - Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Frank Cameron Jackson, Andrew Janiak ,Ward Jones ,Jun-Hyeok Kwak,

Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri (Arabic: محمد عابد الجابري‎; December 27, 1936 – May 3, 2010)was a contemporary Moroccan critic and professor of philosophy and Islamic thought in Mohammed V University in Rabat. He is also an expert in Arabic and Arabic literature. He is considered to have been one of the major intellectual figures in the contemporary Arab world.He is also known for his academic project "The critique of the Arab Mind". He published several influential books on the Arab philosophical tradition. He was born in Figuig, Morocco.

Al-Jabri's approach consists of the exploration of the conflict between modernity and tradition in the Muslim and Arab world. In his writings, Al-Jabri focused on the rationalism of the medieval Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna (980-1037), Averroes (1126–1198), and Ibn Khaldoun (1332–1406). He rejected what he called the current polarization of Arab thought between an imported modernism that disregards Arab tradition and a fundamentalism that would reconstruct the present in the image of an idealized past.
According to al-Jabri, the Maghreb (the western Arab world) has a rationalist intellectual tradition based on the Greek philosophy. An example was the case of Averroes in the Zaherite school of thought. This is put in contrast with Mashreq (the eastern Arab world) where Muslim philosophers wrote works on Gnosticism, hermetism, and sufism which Al-Jabri consider it irrationalist and aestheticist. Now, affirming that the modern Arab world needs an empowerment of its reason to survive in the contemporary world. Al-Jabri called then for a "new averroism".

Al-Jabri considered Averroism to be the way for the survival of the Arabo-Islamic tradition. Initially Averroism had broken with the thoughts of Avicenna and Sunni-sufi Eastern Arab philosophy. Later, Averroes also broke the way between the theoretical thought and philosophical one. Before, science and the philosophy existed to explain conception of religion. Averroes finishes with separating religion from science and philosophy. Averroes thought that the understanding of philosophy must have exclusivity and the same principles of philosophy as the basis, and it should not be based on other fields like religion.

Frank Cameron Jackson (born 1943) is an Australian philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor and former Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. In 2007-2008, he also became a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University. His research focuses primarily on philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and meta-ethics.
Jackson's philosophical research is broad, but focuses primarily on the areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and meta-ethics.
In philosophy of mind, Jackson is known, among other things, for the knowledge argument against physicalism—the view that the universe is entirely physical (i.e., the kinds of entities postulated in physics). Jackson motivates the knowledge argument by a thought experiment known as Mary's room. Jackson phrases the thought experiment as follows:
“ Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false. ”
(As a side note, this thought-experiment was dramatised in the three-part Channel 4 documentary "Brainspotting." It also forms the central motif of author David Lodge's novel Thinks... (2001). Jackson makes an appearance in Lodge's novel as, of course, himself.)
Jackson used the knowledge argument, as well as other arguments, to establish a sort of dualism, according to which certain mental states, especially qualitative ones, are non-physical. The view that Jackson urged was a modest version of epiphenomenalism—the view that certain mental states are non-physical and, although caused to come into existence by physical events, do not then cause any changes in the physical world.
However, Jackson has since rejected the knowledge argument, as well as other arguments against physicalism:
“ Most contemporary philosophers given a choice between going with science and going with intuitions, go with science. Although I once dissented from the majority, I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism—the arguments that seem so compelling—go wrong. ”
Jackson argues that the intuition-driven arguments against physicalism (such as the knowledge argument and the zombie argument) are ultimately misleading.
Jackson is also known for his defense of the centrality of conceptual analysis to philosophy; his approach, set out in his Locke Lectures and published as his 1997 book, is often referred to as "the Canberra plan" for how to do philosophy.

Andrew Janiak is a professor of philosophy at Duke University, where he directs the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. He received an M.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D from Indiana University. His dissertation was directed by Michael Friedman.
Janiak writes on the philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, and the history of modern philosophy, especially on the philosophical works of Newton.

Ward E. Jones is a scholar at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he is an associate professor of philosophy. He joined the department in 1999.
His DPhil. thesis, entitled The View from Here: A First-person Constraint on Believing was completed in 1998 at Oxford University. While finishing his thesis, Jones spent three years teaching philosophy at various colleges in Oxford.
Jones has published in the areas of epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and metaphilosophy.
With a 1997 paper, 'Why Do We Value Knowledge', published in American Philosophical Quarterly, he won regard as one of the early contributors to the nascent debate on the Meno problem. In collaboration with Samantha Vice, he has edited and contributed to Ethics at the Cinema, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
He is currently chief editor of Philosophical Papers, published by Routledge.

Jun-Hyeok Kwak is Associate Professor of Political Science at Korea University, where he has taught political philosophy and theory since Fall 2007. He also serves as Director of EAI Center for Values & Ethics and Head of Center for Political Theory, Peace and Democracy Institute at Korea University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2002. Before joining the faculty at Korea University, he taught political thought at Kyungpook National University. His research interests lie at the crossroads of political thought from Socrates to Machiavelli and contemporary political/social theory, with concentration on republicanism, nationalism, constitutionalism, democratic leadership, and human rights. He teaches classes on constitutionalism and democracy, multiculturalism, politics and rhetoric, human rights, and classical and medieval political thought.
His research currently focuses on constructing reciprocal nondomination as a regulative principle that guides agonistic deliberation between peoples in conflict as well as cultures in tension, with special but not exclusive attention to classical republicans, such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli. Besides, he inquires a way in which reciprocal nondomination can be applicable to various subjects, including patriotism without nationalism, deliberative democracy, democratic authority, civic responsibility, transnationalism, and multicultural coexistence, etc.. He is now working on books entitled, Liberty as Nondomination: Reconsidering Classical Republicanism, Machiavelli’s Silence, and Patriotism before Nationalism, and running projects “Inherited Responsibility” and “Republican Leadership.”