21st-century philosophers - Subhash Kak,Friedrich Kambartel,Milan Kangrga,David Kaplan (philosopher),Kojin Karatani,Kedar Joshi,Sam Keen,Anthony Kenny,Jaegwon Kim,Yasuhiko Genku Kimura,Mark Kingwell,Philip Kitcher,,Daniel Kolak,Leszek Kołakowski,David Kolb,Nikolas Kompridis,Mario Kopić,Hilary Kornblith,Christine M. Korsgaard,Décio Krause,Werner Josef Krieglstein,Saul Aaron Kripke ,Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti,Julia Kristeva,Helga Kuhse,Roelof (Roel) Kuiper,Martin Kusch,Will Kymlicka

Subhash Kak (Hindi: सुभाष काक Subhāṣ Kāk) (born March 26, 1947 in Srinagar, Kashmir) is an Indian American computer scientist, most notable for his controversial Indological publications on history, the philosophy of science, ancient astronomy, and the history of mathematics. In computer science he has published material related to cryptography and quantum information.

Friedrich Kambartel (born 1935 in Münster, Germany) is a philosopher.
Kambartel studied mathematics, physics, chemistry and philosophy at the University of Münster, where he received his PhD (in mathematics) and his “habilitation”, the postdoctoral lecture qualification (in philosophy). In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Constance, where he took active part in the reformation of the university (“Little Harvard on Lake Constance”). Kambartel has close ties to the Erlangen School of constructivist philosophy of science. He taught at Frankfurt am Main from 1993 until his retirement in 2000.
Kambartel’s main research areas are the philosophy of language, the philosophy of the natural sciences, and the philosophy of mind. However, he also did work in logic, action theory, ethics and the philosophy of economics.
His most important works are the habilitation thesis “Erfahrung und Struktur” (“Experience and Structure”), published by Suhrkamp in 1968, as well as the two anthologies “Theorie und Begründung” (1978, “Theory and Justification”) and “Philosophie der humanen Welt” (1989, “Philosophy of the Human World”), also published by Suhrkamp.
Two major topics are present throughout Kambartel’s work — on the one hand the primacy of practical reason, and on the other the conception of reason as culture.
The first topic shapes his work in the philosophies of science, mind, and action. If practical reason were granted primacy over theoretical reason, if the latter were only possible on the basis of the former, then results obtained by neuroscience, for example, could never show that man is determined after all and cannot really act freely.
The second topic does not emerge clearly until his later work, and then it also marks a distance to the constructive attempts of the Erlangen School. Reason was not to be understood exactly, e.g. to be defined as a principle or criterion. Reason was rather a culture you grow into, a social practice within which you cultivate your judgment. Conceptual judgments like Kant’s formula of man as an end in itself served as comments to parts of the “grammar” of this culture. Contrary to what Kant believed, morality was not supreme; it was only one standard of rationality among others; reason integrated this standard and weighed it up against other standards of rationality.


Milan Kangrga (1 May 1923 - 25 April 2008) was a Croatian and Yugoslav philosopher who was one of the leading thinkers in the Praxis school of thought which originated in the 1960s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Kangrga was born in Zagreb, where he attended elementary and grammar school. In 1950, he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, where he commenced his work as a teaching assistant working in the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Between 1962 and 1964, he studied in Heidelberg, Germany. He became a tenured professor in 1972 and he held this position until his retirement in 1993.
Kangrga started his confrontation with the Yugoslav communist leadership during his undergraduate studies in February 1948, before the clash of Joseph Broz Tito with Joseph Stalin. Then, he published his first philosophical article entitled On Ethics in Studentski list (Zagreb), which the League of Communists of Yugoslavia bureaucrats found provoking. In 1953, Kangrga became a member of the LCY but in 1954 he was expelled from the party because he announced that he was inspired to become a communist by the works of Miroslav Krleža, who still wasn't wholly rehabilitated by the regime.
In 1964, Kangrga was one of the founders of the journal Praxis. Together with Rudi Supek, he has established the Korčula Summer School, which was a unique meeting place for philosophers from the East and the West between 1964 and 1974. It is around these two institutions that the Praxis school took shape. The defining features of the school were: 1) emphasis on the writings of young Marx; and 2) call for freedom of speech in both East and West based upon Marx's insistence on ruthless critique of everything existent. Milan Kangrga emphasized creativity as well, but also the understanding of human beings as producers humanizing nature.
While he was critical of the Communist party in Yugoslavia, mainly for not implementing self-management socialism, he rejected non-Socialist reactions against SFR Yugoslavia, the most notable one being the Croatian Spring.
Milan Kangrga has lectured in Bonn, Münich, Prague, Budapest, Moscow, and Kiev among other cities. His articles have been published in Germany, Italy, the United States, France, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Mexico.

Kangrga has published 15 books in Croatian. The most important are:
The Ethical Problem in Karl Marx's Works (1963)
Ethics and Liberty (1966)
The Meaning of the Historical (1970)
The Man and the World (1975)
Ethics or Revolution (1983)
Praxis-Time-World (1984)
Hegel-Marx: some basic problems of Marxism (1988)
The Meaning and the Reality (1989)
Smugglers of Own Life (2001)
Nationalism or Democracy (2002)
Ethics: the basic problems and tendencies (2004)
Classical German Idealism (2008)

David Benjamin Kaplan (born 1933) is an American philosopher and logician teaching at UCLA. His philosophical work focuses on logic, philosophical logic, modality, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, on propositions, and on reference in intensional contexts.
Semantics for Indexicals and Demonstratives
Kaplan's most influential contribution to the philosophy of language is his semantic analysis of indexicals and demonstratives, which is outlined (in progressively greater detail) in a series of articles: "Dthat," "On The Logic of Demonstratives," "Demonstratives," and "Afterthoughts".
Kaplan's insights center on two key distinctions, which may be seen as responses to the inability of Frege's semantics to deal with context-sensitivity in language. First, in place of Frege's category of Sinn (Sense: roughly meaning or content), Kaplan introduces the notions of character and content. The former is the linguistic meaning of an expression, and the latter is the proposition (or propositional component) expressed by an expression in a context. Second, Kaplan makes an explicit distinction between the context of an utterance and the circumstances of evaluation of the proposition expressed by an utterance. Context can be formalized as a set composed of a speaker, a place, a time, and a possible world (and, depending on the analysis of demonstratives, perhaps a set of either demonstrations or directing intentions). Circumstances of evaluation play a role very similar to possible worlds in modal semantics.
From these rough distinctions, Kaplan then defines character and content more precisely. Character defines a function associated by convention with an expression, which takes contextual elements as arguments and yields content as values. Content, on the other hand, defines a function taking as arguments those elements of the circumstances of evaluation relevant to determining extension, and yielding the extension (referent or truth-value) as a value.
Two more important notions can thus be defined. We can say that an expression is context-sensitive if and only if its character defines a non-constant function (i.e., just in case it yields different content-values given different context-element-arguments). An expression is context-insensitive if and only if its character defines a constant function. Also, the distinction between character and content breaks down in the case of context-insensitive expressions, and convention associates each such expression directly with a content.
On the other hand, an expression is directly referential just in case its content defines a constant function from circumstances of evaluation to extension. Kaplan also characterizes directly referential expressions as those that refer without the mediation of a Fregean Sinn, or as those whose only contribution to content are their referents. Thus, in the case of directly referential expressions, we can say that the distinction between content and referent breaks down.
Any singular term is directly referential according to Kaplan. So the following intuitive picture emerges: the meaning of an indexical is a rule taking us from some part of the context to an expression, and the meaning of an expression is a bit of propositional content that determines the extension in each possible world.
Kaplan goes on to use this semantic scheme to explain phenomena concerning the relationship between necessary and a priori truth. An utterance is said to be necessarily true just in case the content it expresses is true in every possible circumstance; while an utterance is said to be true a priori just in case it expresses, in each context, a content that is true in the circumstances that context is part of. So, "I am here now" is true a priori because each of the indexical expressions used ('I', 'here', 'now') directly refer to the speaker, location, and time of utterance. But the utterance is not necessarily true, because any given speaker might have been in at a different place at that time, given different circumstances of evaluation. On the other hand, "I am David Kaplan," as spoken by David Kaplan, is necessarily true, since "I" and "David Kaplan" (both directly referential expressions) refer to the same object in every circumstance of evaluation. The same statement is not true a priori, however, because if it were spoken in a different context (e.g., one with a speaker other than Kaplan), it might be false.
Another result of Kaplan's theory is that it solves Frege's Puzzle for indexicals. Roughly, the puzzle here arises as indexicals are thought to be directly referential, i.e., they do not refer by means of a Fregean Sinn. However, Frege explains cognitive value in terms of Sinn. Thus the following problem emerges: The sentences "I am David Kaplan", spoken by David Kaplan, "he is David Kaplan", spoken by someone pointing at David Kaplan, and "David Kaplan is David Kaplan", spoken by anyone, all express the same content and refer to the same individuals. Yet each of the three has a different cognitive value (it is possible to rationally believe one while denying another). Kaplan explains this by associating cognitive value with character rather than content, thus remedying the problem. (There are problems with this approach, which Kaplan explores in "Afterthoughts".)
Kaplan's semantic theory faces a problem, however, with proper names, which seem both directly referential and context-insensitive. On Kaplan's account, this means that constant functions are defined by both a proper name's character and its content, which would imply that proper names have no meaning other than their reference. While this approach to proper names is not novel (John Stuart Mill being an early advocate), Frege's Puzzle is thought to cast doubt on any such account. Many philosophers have attempted to deal with this issue (notably Joseph Almog, David Braun, Michael Devitt, John Perry, Nathan Salmon, Scott Soames, and Howard Wettstein), but no solution has been widely accepted.

Kojin Karatani (柄谷 行人 Karatani Kōjin?, born August 6, 1941, Amagasaki) is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.Karatani has produced a number of philosophical concepts such as "the will to architecture", but the best-known of them is probably that of "Transcritique", which he proposed in his book Transcritique, where he reads Kant through Marx and vice-versa.Writing about Transcritique in the New Left Review of Jan-Feb. 2004, Slavoj Žižek brought Karatani's work to greater critical attention. Žižek borrowed the concept of "parallax view" (which is also the title of his review) for the title of his own book.
Karatani has interrogated the possibility of a (de Manian) deconstruction and engaged in a dialogue with Jacques Derrida at the Second International Conference on Humanistic Discourse, organized by the Université de Montréal. Derrida commented on Karatani's paper, 'Nationalism and Ecriture' with an emphasis on the interpretation of his own concept of écriture.

Kedar Joshi (born 31 December 1979, in Mumbai) is a philosopher and writer. His works are collectively titled Superultramodern Science and Philosophy. The works contain The NSTP (Non – Spatial Thinking Process) Theory and The UQV (Ultimate Questioner’s Vanity) Theory.

Sam Keen is a noted American author, professor and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, religion, and being a man in contemporary society. He also co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine.
Keen completed his undergraduate studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania and later completed graduate degrees at Harvard University and Princeton University.
Keen is married to Rev. Patricia de Jong, who is Senior Minister at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, United Church of Christ, in Berkeley, California.

Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny FBA (born 16 March 1931 in Liverpool) is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to Analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St Thomas Aquinas in the style of modern philosophy by clearing away the trappings and obscurities of traditional Thomism. He is one of the executors of Wittgenstein's literary estate. He is a former President of the British Academy and current President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Although deeply interested in traditional Catholic teaching and continuing to attend the Catholic mass, Kenny now explicitly defines his position as an Agnostic, explaining in his What I believe both why he is not a theist and why he is not an atheist. His 2006 book What I believe has (as Ch 3) "Why I am Not an Atheist" which begins: "Many different definitions may be offered of the word 'God'. Given this fact, atheism makes a much stronger claim than theism does. The atheist says that no matter what definition you choose, 'God exists' is always false. The theist only claims that there is some definition which will make 'God exists' true. In my view, neither the stronger nor the weaker claim has been convincingly established". He goes on "the true default position is neither theism nor atheism, but agnosticism ... a claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated; ignorance need only be confessed."He defends the rationality of an agnostic praying to a God whose existence he doubts, stating "It surely is no more unreasonable than the act of a man adrift in the ocean, trapped in a cave, or stranded on a mountainside, who cries for help though he may never be heard or fires a signal which may never be seen."
Kenny has written extensively on Thomas Aquinas and modern Thomism. In The Five Ways, Kenny deals with St. Thomas' five proofs of God. In it, Kenny argues that none of the proofs Thomas sets out are wholly valid, and instead, sets out to show the flaws in the five ways. His arguments range from the problem of Aristotelian motion in a modern scientific context, to the ability of contingent beings to cause eternality in other contingent beings. His objections all focus on a modern interpretation of St. Thomas. Some[who?] have objected to Kenny's reading of Thomas, largely on the accusation that Kenny fails to interact with Thomas' account of Essence and being, and therefore, the conclusions he draws are not wholly accurate in the way Thomas meant them.
In What is Faith?, Kenny addresses "the question of whether belief in God, and faith in a divine world, is a reasonable or rational state of mind.". He criticises the idea, "common to theists like Aquinas and Descartes and to an atheist like Russell," that "Rational belief [is] either self-evident or based directly or indirectly on what is evident" which he terms "foundationalism" following Plantinga arguing out that foundationalism is a self-refuting idea.

Jaegwon Kim (born September 12, 1934 in Korea (now in South Korea)) is an American philosopher currently working at Brown University. He is best known for his work on mental causation and the mind-body problem. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of events. Kim's work on these and other contemporary metaphysical and epistemological issues is well-represented by the papers collected in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (1993).

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura (born 1954) is a mystic, author, and lecturer. He is an integral philosopher, focusing on integrating spiritual philosophy and science. The books he has authored include The Book of Balance (a translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching), Think Kosmically Act Globally, The Twilight Manifesto, Virtues of Love, and The Twilight Club and the Creation of a Moral Community. Kimura was born in Japan and moved to the United States in 1983. He is the founder of Vision-In-Action, a public benefit corporation whose mission is "to provoke thinking which inspires action that engenders integrity and wholeness." Kimura is a former Executive Director of the Twilight Club.
He says that his primary focus is trying to bring about an evolution in human consciousness such that everyone becomes an idea producer who integrates their ideas with each other to generate new ideas, rather than merely being idea consumers that merely perceive and conceive information being produced by a few "external authorities." He calls this a move from an "concentric ideosphere" to an "omnicentric ideosphere." In this way the ideosphere transforms from an "authority-follow structure" to "everyone being self-authority."

Mark Gerald Kingwell B.A, M.Litt, M.Phil, PhD, D.F.A. (born March 1, 1963) is a Canadian professor of philosophy and associate chair at the University of Toronto's Department of Philosophy. Kingwell is a fellow of Trinity College. He specialises in theories of politics and culture.
Kingwell has published twelve books, most notably, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism, which was awarded the Spitz Prize for political theory in 1997. In 2000 Kingwell received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, for contributions to theory and criticism. He has held visiting posts at institutions including: University of Cambridge, University of California at Berkeley, and City University of New York where he held the title of Weissman Distinguished Professor of Humanities.
He studied at the University of Toronto, editing The Varsity through 1983 to 1984 and the University of Toronto Review from 84-85. He received his BA degree from St. Michael's College with High Distinction in 1985, his MLitt degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1987, and both his M.Phil and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1989 and 1991 respectively. He was married to Gail Donaldson in 1988. The marriage ended in divorce in 2004.
Kingwell is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine, the literary quarterly Descant, the political monthly This Magazine and the Globe and Mail books section. He was also a drinks columnist for the men's magazine Toro. He was formerly a columnist for the National Post, and a contributing editor of Saturday Night. He frequently appears on television and radio, often on the CBC, and is well known for his appearance in the documentary film The Corporation. He has delivered the George Grant, Harold Innis, Marx Wartofsky and Larkin-Stuart memorial lectures.
Kingwell’s work has been translated into ten languages, and he lectures to academic and popular audiences around the world. From 2001 to 2004, he was chair of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. His work on philosophy, art, and architecture has appeared in many leading academic journals and magazines, including The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Forum, Ethics, Political Theory, and the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, the New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Utne Reader, Adbusters, the Walrus, Harvard Design Magazine, Canadian Art, Azure, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post.
He describes himself as a social democrat and a "recovering Catholic". According to the Canadian Who's Who 2006, he also enjoys running, baseball, basketball, jazz, films and pop music. He has two brothers: a younger brother named Sean Kingwell and an older brother named Steven Kingwell.

Philip Stuart Kitcher (born 1947) is a British philosophy professor who specializes in the philosophy of science.
Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the South Coast of the United Kingdom. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics/History and Philosophy of Science from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1969, and his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University in 1974, where he worked closely with Thomas Kuhn.
Kitcher is best known outside the academy for his work examining bioethics, creationism and sociobiology. His works attempt to connect the questions raised in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics with the central philosophical issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. He has also published papers on John Stuart Mill, Kant and other figures in the history of philosophy. Lately he has become interested in John Dewey, and he is currently working on a book about naturalistic ethics.
Kitcher currently teaches at Columbia University in the Department of Philosophy where he holds an appointment as the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy. As chair of Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program (part of its undergraduate Core Curriculum), he also holds the James R. Barker Professorship of Contemporary Civilization. Before moving to Columbia, Kitcher taught at the University of Vermont, Vassar College, The University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, and for several years at University of California, San Diego where he held the position of Presidential Professor of Philosophy.
Kitcher is past president of the American Philosophical Association. In 2002, Kitcher was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was awarded the inaugural Prometheus Prize from the American Philosophical Association in 2006 in honor of extended achievement in the philosophy of science.
His wife, Patricia Kitcher, is a well known Kant scholar and philosopher of mind who is the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia.
He has trained a number of prominent philosophers of science, including Peter Godfrey-Smith at Harvard University and Kyle Stanford at the University of California at Irvine.
His appointments and service have included:
Editorial Board, Philosophy of Science, 1985–1994.
Editor-in-Chief, Philosophy of Science, 1994–1999.
Governing Board, Philosophy of Science Association, 1987–1991.
Member NIH/DOE Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project, 1995–1997.
Representative of the American Philosophical Association to Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995–1998.
Member, Board of Officers, American Philosophical Association, 1996–99.
Philosophy Referee for John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1994—

Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher currently employed as an assistant professor in the Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Knobe received his B.A. at Stanford University in 1996 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2006, where he studied under Gilbert Harman, among others. His work has been discussed in various media, including The New York Times and Slate,and he is a fairly frequent guest on the online news, science, and current events channel bloggingheads.tv.

Daniel Kolak (b. 1955 in Zagreb, Croatia) is a Croatian-American philosopher who works primarily in philosophy of mind, personal identity, cognitive science, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. He is professor of philosophy at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and an Affiliate of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Kolak is the founder of the philosophical therapy known as cognitive dynamics.

Leszek Kołakowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He was best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century."
The three volumes progress chronologically from Karl Marx's lifetime to the years after Stalin's death. The third volume looks at what happened to Marxism in the twentieth century and makes a particular example of the career of Georg Lukacs - "Kolakowski does an even better job than Isaiah Berlin of showing how Marxism affected everything at the mental level."

David Kolb (born 1939) is a well-known philosopher and the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bates College in Maine.
Kolb received a B.A. from Fordham University in 1963 and an M.A. in 1965. He later received a M.Phil. from Yale University in 1970 and a Ph. D. in 1972. Kolb's Dissertation was titled "Conceptual Pluralism and Rationality." Most of Kolb's writing deals with "what it means to live with historical connections and traditions at a time when we can no longer be totally defined by that history." Professor Kolb taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Bates in 1977.

Nikolas Kompridis is a professor at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. His scholarly work addresses a wide range of subjects in contemporary social and political philosophy, as well as in aesthetics and philosophy of culture. Kompridis' published works cover topics that include: critical theory; democratic theory; theories of agency and action; theories of rationality; theories of identity, recognition, and culture; the role of social criticism in social change; the renewal of romanticism; and issues in philosophy of art, literature, music and film.

Mario Kopić (born 13 March 1965) is a philosopher, author and translator. His main areas of interest include: History of Political Ideas, Philosophy of Art, Philosophy of Culture, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion.
Mario Kopić was born in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb; Phenomenology and Political Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana; Political History and History of Ideas at the Institute Friedrich Meinecke at the Free University of Berlin (under the mentorship of Ernst Nolte); and Comparative Religiology at the Sapienza University of Rome (under the mentorship of Ida Magli).
Mario Kopić's philosophical work is under the influence of the Italian philosophical approach known as pensiero debole, or "weak thought", and the ethical-political thought of late Derrida.
Mario Kopić's translation (into Croatian language) of Nietzsche's philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra was published in Zagreb in 2009.

Hilary Kornblith is an American Professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, and one of contemporary epistemology's most prominent proponents of naturalized epistemology. Kornblith received his B.A. from SUNY Buffalo in 1975 and his PhD from Cornell University in 1980, where he studied under Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Boyd. Before coming to University of Massachusetts in 2003, Kornblith taught at the University of Vermont, where he also chaired the department from 1991 to 1997. His research interests include epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Apart from naturalized epistemology, his most recent work includes the role of intuitions in philosophical theorizing, the conflicts between internalism and externalism in epistemology, and the mental states of non-human animals.

Christine M. Korsgaard (born 1952 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American philosopher and academic whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general. She has taught at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago; since 1991 she has been a professor at Harvard University, where she is now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy.
Korsgaard received a B.A. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D from Harvard where she was a student of John Rawls. She also received an LHD Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois in 2004.
In 1996, Korsgaard published a book entitled The Sources of Normativity, which was the revised version of her Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and also a collection of her past papers on Kant's moral philosophy and Kantian approaches to contemporary moral philosophy: Creating the Kingdom of Ends. In 2002, she gave the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, which turned into her most recent book, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity.

Décio Krause, (born in RIo de Janeiro, 01 June 1953) is an Associated Professor of logic and philosophy of science at the Department of Philosophy of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis, SC, Brazil.
He studied at the Federal University of Paraná, in the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, and in the University of São Paulo, receiving his PhD in philosophy by this last university. He also got post-doctoral studies at the universities of Florence (Italy), Leeds (UK), and Oxford (UK).
He held teaching posts at the first two universities and at the Federal Technological University of Paraná, getting retired as a full professor from the Department of Mathematics of the Federal University of Paraná.
He is the director of the research group on Logic and Foundations of Science (CNPq) and member of the editorial boards of several philosophical journals.
His research interests include the philosophy of logic, analytical ontology, and the logical foundations of quantum physics. He is the author of two books, editor of other publications, and author of circa 100 articles.

Werner Josef Krieglstein, Ph.D. (October 31, 1941), a Fulbright Scholar and University of Chicago fellow,is an award winning and internationally recognized scholar, director and actor. Krieglstein is the founder of a neo-Nietzschean philosophical school called Transcendental Perspectivism. Krieglstein's "philosophy of compassion"has been the subject of symposium lectures at many prominent conferences including the recent UNESCO section of the World Congress of Philosophy conference in Seoul Korea (August, 2008),the ISAIL "Fields of Conflict-Fields of Wisdom": 4th International Congress in Wuerzburg, Germany (May, 2008),the meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Washington D.C.(Symposium Chair: Sept. 2006),and the ISUD Fourth World Conference of the International Society for Universal Dialogue (Summer, 2001),among many others.

Saul Aaron Kripke (born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.
Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, since he was a teenager. Unusually for a professional philosopher, his only degree is an undergraduate degree from Harvard. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, with his principal contribution being a metaphysical description of modality, involving possible worlds as described in a system now called Kripke semantics.Another of his most important contributions is his argument that there are necessary a posteriori truths, such as "Water is H2O." He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referred to as "Kripkenstein." His most famous work is Naming and Necessity (1980).

Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti (Telugu: ఉప్పలూరి గోపాల కృష్ణమూర్తి ), (July 9, 1918 – March 22, 2007), known as U.G. Krishnamurti, or just U.G., was an Indian thinker who claimed that there is no "enlightenment".
Although necessary for day to day functioning of the individual, in terms of the Ultimate Reality or Truth he rejected the very basis of thought and in doing so negated all systems of thought and knowledge in reference to It.
"Tell them that there is nothing to understand."
"I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences. What is there is only your interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is not now nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am saying. I have no claims"
"I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second statement is negated by a third and so on. My aim is not some comfy dialectical thesis but the total negation of everything that can be expressed."
U.G. emphasized the impossibility and non-necessity of any human change, radical or mundane. These assertions, he stated, cannot be considered as a "teaching", that is, something intended to be used to bring about a change. He insisted that the body and its actions are already perfect, and he considered attempts to change or mold the body as violations of the peace and the harmony that is already there. The psyche or self or mind, an entity which he denied as having any being, is composed of nothing but the "demand" to bring about change in the world, in itself, or in both. Furthermore, human self-consciousness is not a thing, but a movement, one characterized by "perpetual malcontent" and a "fascist insistence" on its own importance and survival.
He stated that we inhabit a thought realm. When the continuity of thought is broken, even for a split second, its hold on the body is broken and the body falls into its natural rhythm. Thought also falls into its natural place – then it can no longer interfere or influence the working of the human body. In the absence of any continuity the arising thoughts combust. UG stated that the burning away of thought often produced an ash-like substance on the surface of his body.[citation needed]
In its natural state, the senses of the body take on independent existences (uncoordinated by any 'inner self') and the ductless glands (that correspond to the locations of the Hindu Chakras) become reactivated. UG described how it is the Ajna Chakra (pineal gland) that takes over the functioning of the body in the natural state, as opposed to thought.
U.G. also maintained that the reason people came to him (and to gurus), was in order to find solutions for their everyday real problems, and/or for solutions to a fabricated problem, namely, the search for spirituality and enlightenment. He insisted that this search is caused by the cultural environment, which demands conformity of individuals as it simultaneously places within them the desire to be special – the achievement of enlightenment thus viewed as a crowning expression of an individual's "specialness" and uniqueness. Consequently, the desire for enlightenment is exploited by gurus, spiritual teachers, and other "sellers of shoddy goods", who pretend to offer various ways to reach that goal. According to U.G., all these facilitators never deliver, and cannot ever deliver, since the goal itself (i.e. enlightenment), is unreachable.
"Man is just a memory. You understand things around you by the help of the knowledge that was put in you. You perhaps need the artist to explain his modern art, but you don't need anybody's help to understand a flower. You can deal with anything, you can do anything if you do not waste your energy trying to achieve imaginary goals."
The articulation of his insights, at least in public, did not begin until U.G. was well into middle age. According to U.G., despite his life-long efforts to bring about spiritual enlightenment, he underwent a life-altering series of bodily experiences, which he collectively referred to as 'the' "calamity". (See sections below).
According to U.G., "The so called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing because it's going to blast every nerve, every cell, even the cells in the marrow of your bones."
"I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine."

Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева) (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her immense body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Gérard Genette, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists, in that time when structuralism took a major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.
She is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.

Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist. From the 1970s, she was one of the first philosophers to address the ethical implications of the developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. With Peter Singer, she founded the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in 1980, one of the first research centres in the world devoted entirely to bioethics. She served as Director of the Centre until June 1999.Her ideas on the end of life, the right to die, and assisted death, have prompted controversy worldwide.
Kuhse is a prominent supporter of the legalisation of voluntary assisted euthanasia. Many people, including the former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory of Australia, Marshall Perron, credit Kuhse's work as the inspiration for the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act.In 1996, Perron told a public forum that it was after reading one of Kuhse's papers that he was prompted to introduce the Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill into Parliament. The Act was the first piece of legislation anywhere in the world to legalise euthanasia. However, the Act was overturned by the Australian Federal Government in 1997.
Kuhse has served on a number of ethics committees, and has been an expert advisor to Australian parliaments considering euthanasia legislation. In 1987, she founded the international academic journal Bioethics with Peter Singer. The pair also founded the International Association of Bioethics. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at Monash University.

Roelof (Roel) Kuiper (born 5 April 1962, Mariënberg) is a Dutch historian, philosopher, ideologue, politician and university professor. He is a member of the Dutch Senate, and is professor of Reformational philosophy at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam in the name of the Association for Reformational philosophy, teaching Society Issues at the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede and Gereformeerde Hogeschool Zwolle and Political and social philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).
Kuiper received his doctorate in History in 1986 at the VU. In 1992 he got his promotion at the same university on the subject: Zelfbeeld en wereldbeeld: antirevolutionairen en het buitenland 1848-1905. He received his doctorate in Philosophy at the VU in 1998.

Martin Kusch is Professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. Until 2009, Kusch was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. Prior to Cambridge, Kusch was Lecturer in the Science Studies Unit of the University of Edinburgh.
Kusch's wide-ranging contributions to philosophy reflect both systematic and historical interests and cut across traditional disciplinary divides. He has published in the philosophy of the social sciences, epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, philosophy of the natural sciences, philosophy of technology, and the history of German and Austrian philosophy.
Kusch has also made important contributions to science and technology studies, particularly in the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge.
In addition, Kusch has written on the history of science with a special reference to the history of German psychology.
In 2005, he delivered the Leibniz Lectures at Leibniz University Hannover.

Will Kymlicka is a Canadian political philosopher best known for his work on multiculturalism. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University at Kingston, and Recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
Kymlicka received his B.A. (Honours) in philosophy and political studies from Queen's University in 1984, and his D.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1987, under the direction of G.A. Cohen. He has written extensively on multiculturalism and political philosophy, and several of his books have been translated into other languages. Kymlicka has held professorships at a variety of different universities in Canada and abroad, and has also worked as an advisor to the Government of Canada.The standard liberal criticism which states that group rights are problematic because they often treat individuals as mere carriers of group identities rather than autonomous social agents is overstated or oversimplified. The actual problem of minorities and how they should be viewed in liberal democracies is much more complex. There is a distinction between good group rights, bad group rights, and intolerable group rights.
Bad Group Rights (internal restrictions) are rules imposed by the group upon intra-group relations. Most often take the form of the group restricting the liberty of individual members in the name of group solidarity. Indigenous groups try to protect themselves from women's movements on the basis that they threaten the social and traditional role of indigenous populations. He contends this raises the danger of individual oppression. Internal restrictions can be used to uphold violent, dominant, absolutist systems. Legally imposed internal restrictions are thus bad and almost always unjust. Not to mention they go against liberal ideals.
Good Group Rights (external protections) involve inter-group relations. Indigenous groups need protection in terms of their nationals identities by limiting the vulnerability of that group to the decisions of external groups or society. Therefore, they should have the right to their own taxation, health care, education, and governance.