Mark D. Sacks (December 29, 1953 – June 17, 2008) was a British philosopher in the fields of Kant, Post-Kantian idealism, and the epistemological tradition in European Philosophy. He was one of the few philosophers who sought the way to unite Analytic philosophy with Continental philosophy.
He founded the European Journal of Philosophy in 1993. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Essex until his death.
His first degree was in philosophy, at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He obtained a doctorate in philosophy from King's College, Cambridge under the supervision of Bernard Williams.
He died from prostate cancer at the age of 54.
arojini Sahoo (Oriya: ସରୋଜିନୀ ସାହୁ) (born 1956) is an Orissa Sahitya Academy Award winner Indian feminist writer,a columnist in The New Indian Express and associate editor of Chennai based English magazine Indian AGE, who has been enlisted among 25 Exceptional Women of India by ‘Kindle’ English magazine of Kolkata.Born in the small town of Dhenkanal in Orissa (India), Sahoo earned her MA and PhD degrees in Oriya Literature and a Bachelor of Law from Utkal University. She now teaches at a degree college in Belpahar, Jharsuguda, Orissa.She is the second daughter of Ishwar Chandra Sahoo and the late Nalini Devi and is married to Jagadish Mohanty, a veteran writer of Orissa.
R. Mark Sainsbury (born 1943) is a philosopher from the United Kingdom who has worked in the areas of philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and the philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.
Sainsbury taught for many years at King's College London, and became professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002.(He still teaches in the summer months in London.) He was editor of the leading philosophy journal Mind from 1990 to 2000. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.
His first book was on Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 1979). His most recent book, Fiction and Fictionalism (Routledge, 2009) concerns the semantic and ontological status of fictions. Reference Without Referents (Oxford, 2005), is on the semantics of referring expressions. His book Departing From Frege (2002) is on the philosophy of Gottlob Frege. He has also written about paradoxes (Paradoxes Cambridge, 1988, 1995, and Tolerating Vagueness, published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1989-9).
Nathan U. Salmon (né Nathan Salmon Ucuzoglu, 1951-) is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic.
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (born in Algeciras, Andalucia, Spain, on September 17, 1915) is a Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, writer and professor.
After studying philosophy at the University of Madrid, Vázquez emigrated to Mexico in 1939 with thousands of other intellectuals, scientists and artist following the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Sánchez was appointed a full-time professor of philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1959, becoming a professor emeritus of the university in 1985.[1] Sánchez also holds honorary doctoral degrees in from the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the University of Cádiz (Spain).
He embraced Marxism, although an open, renovating, critical and non-dogmatic version of it. His fresh interpretation of marxism ran parallel to that of the Frankfurt School. As a matter of fact, The Philosophy of Praxis was published at around the same time as Marcuse was writing his One Dimensional Man . In regard to ethics, he opposes normativism.
Michael J. Sandel (born March 5, 1953) is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course 'Justice' which is available to view online, and for his critique of Rawls' Theory of Justice in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).
Sandel subscribes to the theory of communitarianism (although he is uncomfortable with the label), and in this vein he is perhaps best known for his critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls' argument depends on the assumption of the veil of ignorance, which allows us to become "unencumbered selves".
Sandel's view is that we are by nature encumbered to an extent that makes it impossible even in the hypothetical to have such a veil. Some examples of such ties are the ties we make with our families, which we do not make by conscious choice but are born with them already attached. Because they are not consciously applied, these ties are impossible to separate from someone. Sandel believes that only a less-restrictive, looser version of the veil of ignorance can be possible. Rawls's argument, however, depends on the fact that the veil is restrictive enough that we make decisions without knowing who will be affected by these decisions, which of course is impossible if we are already attached to people in the world.
David H. Sanford (born 1937) is a professor of philosophy at Duke University. He specializes in perception and metaphysics.
Sanford studied at Cass Technical High School, Oberlin College and at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1966, taught at Dartmouth College from 1963 to 1970, and joined the Duke Faculty in 1970. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon.
Much of Sanford's work is about conditionals. His book If P, Then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning was published in 1989, second edition 2003,
Sanford's influence in analytic philosophy extends well beyond his published work in metaphysics. From 2006 to 2007, he was president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Fernando Fernández-Savater Martín (San Sebastián, 21 June, 1947), is one of Spain's most popular living philosophers, as well as an essayist and celebrated author.
He was an Ethics professor at the University of the Basque Country for over a decade. Presently he is a Philosophy professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has won several accolades for his literary work, which covers issues as diverse as contemporary ethics, politics, cinema and literary studies.
He has taken an active part in several organizations engaged with peace in the Basque Country and against terrorism and Basque nationalism, such as Movimiento por la Paz y la No Violencia, Gesto por la Paz, Foro Ermua, and currently ¡Basta Ya!.
He defines himself as an agnostic, an anglophile and a defender of the Enlightenment in the Voltaire tradition.
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (né McCord, born December 10, 1956 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a philosopher who works in moral theory, meta-ethics, the history of ethics, and epistemology and has written extensively in these areas. He is known especially for his work on moral realism and on David Hume's moral theory. He has also written on contractualism. His Essays on Moral Realism is widely used in undergraduate and graduate courses on meta-ethics and he was, for five years, a co-editor of the highly regarded journal Noûs. Sayre-McCord received his BA from Oberlin College and his PhD (under the direction of David Gauthier) from the University of Pittsburgh. The recipient of several university-wide teaching awards, Sayre-McCord is the Morehead Alumni Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of North Carolina, where he has taught since 1985.
Thomas Michael ("Tim") Scanlon (born 1940) is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy. He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana; earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben; studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship; and taught for many years at Princeton University, where he was an undergraduate student. His early work was in proof theory, but he soon made his name in ethics and political philosophy, where he developed a version of contractualism in the line of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, and human rights. Professor Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching in the department has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book, What We Owe to Each Other, was published by Harvard University Press in 1998; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Other recent publications include "Moral Theory, Understanding and Disagreement", Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 55 (1995) pp. 343–356, and "Intention and Permissibility I," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 74 (2000), pp. 301–317.
Scanlon is the father-in-law of philosopher and scholar of African American studies Tommie Shelby, and was a close friend to professors G.A.Cohen and John Rawls.
Richard Schacht (born c. 1940) is an American philosopher, currently professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a renowned expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, is the editor of International Nietzsche Studies and is currently Executive Director of the North American Nietzsche Society. His philosophical interests include continental philosophy, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and concepts such as human nature, alienation and value theory.
Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in Metaphysics and Epistemology.
Since earning his PhD. from Rutgers in 1999, Schaffer has published 37 papers.He wrote his dissertation - "Causation and the Probabilities of Processes" - under Brian McLaughin. David Lewis served as outside examiner. In 2000, he accepted a position as assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts, earning tenure by 2004.In 2007, Schaffer accepted a permanent research position at Australian National University.He subsequently won awards for two papers published that year, the American Philosophical Association's 2008 Article Prize, for "Knowing the Answer" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy's 2008 Best Paper Award, for "From Nihilism to Monism".
Theodore Schick is an author in the field of philosophy.His articles have appeared in numerous publications and include topics such as functionalism and its effect on immortality, the logic behind the criteria of adequacy, and applying a scientific approach to the paranormal.
Tad M. Schmaltz (born 1960) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to that, he was a professor of philosophy at Duke University, where he began his teaching career in 1989. He graduated magna cum laude with a BA in philosophy from Kalamazoo College in 1983, received his doctorate in 1988 from the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Malebranche's Theory of the Soul (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Radical Cartesianism (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.Schmaltz spent his early childhood in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attended St. Paul Lutheran School on Earhart Road.
David Schmidtz (born 1955) is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and joint Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona. He grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, and earned his PhD at Arizona under the direction of Joel Feinberg and Allen Buchanan and taught at Yale and Bowling Green State University before returning to Arizona. He has recently served as a visiting professor at Florida State University College of Law.
He is author of Elements of Justice (Cambridge, 2006), Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton, 1995), co-author of Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility (Cambridge, a “For & Against” book with Robert Goodin) and editor of a volume on Robert Nozick in the Cambridge University Press "Contemporary Philosophy in Focus" series. He also co-edited Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (Oxford) with Elizabeth Willott; a second edition of this book will appear in 2010. His first book, The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument (Westview, 1991), combined his interests in moral philosophy and economic analysis.
He has published in many journals, including the Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, and Political Theory. Over forty of his articles have been (or are in the process of being) reprinted, including Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Turkish, and German translations. Thirteen of his essays (one previously unpublished, on Peter Singer's approach to moral theory) were published by Oxford Press as Person, Polis, Planet in 2008. His current projects are The Purpose of Moral Theory and A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), with co-author Jason Brennan.
Schmidtz has also written on rational choice theory and environmental ethics.
In addition to his teaching, he directs a center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona.
Sir Michael Charles Scholar KCB (born 3 January 1942) is President of St John's College, Oxford. He was educated at St Olave's Grammar School, St John's College, Cambridge (BA Classics and Moral Sciences 1964, MA, PhD, Research Fellow, Honorary Fellow 1999). He held positions at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Leicester.
He joined HM Treasury in 1969 and was appointed Assistant Principal in 1970. He was Private Secretary to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury 1974-76. From 1979 until 1981 he worked for Barclays Bank. He was then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister (1981–83), Under Secretary HM Treasury (1983–87), and Deputy Secretary (1987–93). He was Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Office 1993-96 and of the Department of Trade and Industry 1996-2001.
He became President of St John's College, Oxford on 1 August 2001. He is by incorporation a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Oxford. He is also a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Chairman of the Conference of Colleges, and Chairman of the Oxford University Careers Service, and a member of the Audit Committee. He is also a non-executive Director of Legal and General Investment Management (Holdings). In 1996 he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and 14 July 2003 he became an Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Glamorgan in 1999. He was appointed Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in 1991 and advanced to KCB in 1999.
Sir Michael is a keen musician and received the Associateship Diploma of the Royal College of Organists in 1965. He was Honorary Secretary of the Royal Opera House from 1988 to 1993.
Sir Michael's son, Tom Scholar is a civil servant who was appointed Chief of Staff at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. He has since returned to HM Treasury as a managing director and is the government's representative on the board of Northern Rock following its nationalization.
On 1 April 2008, Sir Michael became the 3 day-a-week non-executive chairman of the new UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), through which the National Statistician is accountable to Parliament. The board oversees the Office for National Statistics, following the "independence" which it obtained from ministers in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. It also has a duty to assess all UK government statistics from other departments. Following Gordon Brown's announcement of new constitutional arrangements for public appointments, Sir Michael became, on 18 July 2007, the first such nominee to appear for vetting before the House of Commons Treasury Committee and to have his nomination subject to confirmation by the House.
Egbert Schuurman (born 23 July 1937 in Borger (Drenthe)) is a professor of philosophy in the Netherlands, whose teaching is most concerned with exploring and developing Reformational philosophy and its organized expression, the Association for Reformational Philosophy. He studied under Hendrik Van Riessen. Schuurman has three related appointments to External Professorial Chairs, an arrangement with the Dutch government, at the technical state universities of Delft, Eindhoven, and Wageningen (the latter in large part devoted to agriculture). He is also a member of the Dutch Senate, serving currently as the Caucus Chairman for the ChristenUnie party caucus.
He has published numerous books in both Dutch and English in his specialty of the philosophy of technology; by which he means, consistent with Dutch and French conventions, the "science of techniques", as distinguished from what English speakers often refer to as "technology," which French and Dutch speakers would refer to as "technique".
Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a British philosopher and writer. He is the author of several books on aesthetics and politics, including Art and Imagination (1974), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996), England: An Elegy (2000), and A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism (2006). He has also written several novels and two operas.
From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London. In 1982 he helped to found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years.He has also held positions at Boston University, the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In January 2010 he took up an unpaid appointment as visiting professor at the University of Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics, and in spring 2011 a quarter-time professorial fellowship in moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews.In 2010 he delivered the Scottish Gifford Lectures at St Andrews on the topic, "The Face of God."A.C. Grayling has described Scruton as a "wonderful teacher of philosophy."
During the cold war Scruton was actively involved in forging "at some risk to himself",links between Czechoslovakia’s dissident thinkers and academics and their counterparts in Western universities. For his work in this area he was awarded in 2000 the Medal for Merit, First Class, by the government of the Czech Republic.
Neven Sesardić (born 1949) is one of the most influential contemporary Croatian philosophers.
In his first influential article, Heritability and Causality (Sesardic 1993), Sesardic argues that the environmentalist criticism of hereditarianism greatly exaggerate in claiming that the explanation of human behavior in terms of genes is faced with methodological problems and flaws. He says on this (Sesardic 1993: 396): "They reject the idea that heritability estimates could lead to genetic explanations by pointing out that these estimates are strictly valid only for a given population and that they are exposed to the irremovable confounding effects of genotype-environment interaction and genotype-environment correlation".
T. K. Seung is a philosopher and literary critic. His academic interests cut across diverse philosophical and literary subjects, including ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, cultural hermeneutics, and ancient Chinese philosophy.He is presently the Jesse H. Jones Professor in Liberal Arts, at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Jeremy J. Shapiro (born 1940), is an American academic, a professor at Fielding Graduate University who works in the area of critical social theory with emphasis on the social and cultural effects of information technology and systems, social change, and the aesthetics of music. His main intellectual products/innovations include
the concept of the universal semiotic of technological experience: a language of images, symbols, and technologies that integrates the conscious and unconscious, the public and the private, in advanced industrial civilization;
zen socialism, an approach to socialism that focuses on the need for simultaneous change at the personal, interpersonal and social levels, blends activism and non-attachment, and aims at the minimally, rather than maximally rational society;
mindful inquiry in social research (developed together with Valerie Malhotra Bentz), which integrates phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and Buddhism as a framework for research; and
metaphorical metadata, amplifying standard analytical and conceptual classification schemes through classification based on metaphors, symbols, and analogies;
an expanded conception of information literacy as a liberal art (developed together with Shelley K. Hughes); and
the notion of the streaming body (developed together with Linda F. Crafts).
In addition he works in the following areas: the sociology of digital simulation and of on-line environments; the experience of multiple identities and multiple realities among users of information and communication technologies; and enhancing the experience of music listening. He has worked as a computer programmer/analyst, as a director of academic computing and networking, and as a computer journalist. At Fielding Graduate University he is also senior consultant for academic information projects.
He studied at Harvard with Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr.; at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main with Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas; at Brandeis University with Maurice Stein and Kurt H. Wolff; and at the City University of New York with Abbe Mowshowitz. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1976. Through his translations he introduced Habermas's work (Toward a Rational Society and Knowledge and Human Interests) and Marcuse's early work (Negations) to the English-speaking world. He has been corresponding editor for the journals Theory and Society and Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie and also writes cultural criticism and reviews.
Michael Joseph Shapiro (born February 16, 1940) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.His work is often described as 'postdisciplinary', drawing on such diverse traditions as political philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, film theory, international relations theory, literary theory, African American studies, comparative politics, geography, sociology, urban planning, economics, psychoanalysis, crime fiction, genre studies, new musicology, aesthetics and Indigenous Politics.
As the political theorist William E. Connolly has described him: "no one writing in English today has as wide a command over diverse references or develops more profound insights from them".
Stewart Shapiro (born 1951) is O'Donnell Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University and a regular visiting professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is an important contemporary figure in the philosophy of mathematics where he defends a version of structuralism. He studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University in 1973. Then, he got his M.A. in Mathematics at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1975. He transferred to the UB Philosophy Department, where three years later he got his Ph.D. (with Distinction). His doctoral supervisor was John Corcoran.
Gila Sher is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She has worked extensively in the theory of truth and philosophy of logic. Sher is a leading advocate of foundational holism, a holistic theory of epistemology.
Sher earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, where she studied the works of Willard Quine and Alfred Tarski. Her dissertation was directed by Charles Parsons. Her early work focused on Tarski's definition of truth. Her reformulation of this definition has been influential in modern truth theory. Her dissertation was expanded into the book The Bounds of Logic (1991),in which Sher also formalized definitions for unique second-order quantifiers such as 'most'.
Sher has pursued research into logical positivism and logical foundationalism. She has argued that strict-ordering Foundationalism, in the vein of Rudolf Carnap, is untenable, supporting Quine's argument from Two Dogmas of Empiricism. She has, however, resisted the mainstream move toward all-or-nothing and semantic holism. The former view she considers unexplanatory, and the latter she considers untenable (see: Jerry Fodor).
Sher has also written more generally on the metaphysics of truth. She put forward an influential criticism of John Etchemendy in the article "Did Tarski Commit Tarski's Fallacy?"This article was influential in defending Tarskian truth theory from the radical attack posed by Etchemendy. She is also a leading Quine scholar, writing about the place of philosophy in his theory of naturalized epistemology.
Vandana Shiva (Hindi: वन्दना शिवा; b. November 5, 1952, Dehra Dun, Uttarakhand, India), is a philosopher, environmental activist, and eco feminist.Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than 20 books and over 500 papers in leading scientific and technical journals.She was trained as a physicist and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, in 1978 with the doctoral dissertation "Hidden variables and locality in quantum theory."
She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization, (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.), and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime) that draws upon India's Vedic heritage. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank.
She was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1993.
Thomas Lloyd Short is a published philosopher of science, teleology, semeiotics, and conceptual change, specializing in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce.
or a list of Short's many articles (as well as his book) on Peirce, see Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography#Short.
Other articles:
"Divergent Sources of Conservatism", Modern Age 44:1, winter 2002. First Things Eprint.
Reviews by Short:
"Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America" in National Review, June 11, 1990. Review of Page Smith's book. Bnet Eprint.
"The Idea of the University: A Re-examination" in National Review, June 2, 1992. Review of Jaroslav Pelikan's book. Bnet Eprint.
"Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future" in National Review, August 17, 1992. Review of Martin Anderson's book. Bnet Eprint.
"The Educational Ideas of the American Founders, by Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle" in National Review, April 4, 1994, Bnet Eprint.
"Sham Scholarship" in Modern Age 44:4, fall 2002. Critical review of Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. First Things Eprint (the second review is the one by Short).
Theodore Sider is an American philosopher specializing in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language.Since earning his PhD. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1993, Sider has published three books and forty-seven papers.He has also edited a textbook in metaphysics with John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman.Sider has held appointments at the University of Rochester, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University. He is now a professor of Philosophy at New York University.Theodore Sider is the recipient of the 2003 APA Book Prize for his book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time.Sider is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics.
Peter Simons, FBA, (born 23 March 1950) is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.
He studied at the University of Manchester, and has held teaching posts at the University of Bolton, the University of Salzburg, where he is Honorary Professor of Philosophy, and the University of Leeds. He has been President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy and is current director of the Franz Brentano Foundation.
His research interests include metaphysics and ontology, the history of logic, the history of Central European Philosophy, particularly in Austria and Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the application of metaphysics to engineering and other non-philosophical disciplines. He is the author of two books and over 200 articles. He is currently working on a project supported by the British Academy to chart the metaphysics of quantity.
Irving Singer is Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Singer is the author of numerous books on a diverse range of topics, but his major interests are cinema, love, sexuality, and the philosophy of George Santayana. Among his cinematic interests, he has given particular attention to the work of film directors Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles. Singer has been publishing writing on philosophy since 1951.
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective.
He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he ran unsuccessfully as a Green candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. He has been voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals.Singer serves on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.
Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.
Lawrence Sklar (born 25 June 1938) is an American philosopher. He is the Carl G. Hempel and William K. Frankena Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. He specialises in the Philosophy of Physics, approaching a wide range of issues from a position best described as highly sceptical of many of the metaphysical conclusions commonly drawn in the physical sciences. He advocates the 'MIMO' (metaphysics in, metaphysics out) principle, claiming that much of the metaphysical content of interpreted theories in the special sciences arises from metaphysical assumptions made during their formulation.
John Skorupski (born 19 September 1946) is a philosopher whose main interests are epistemology, ethics and moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy. He is best known for his work on John Stuart Mill.
Brian Skyrms (born 1938) is a Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine and a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He has worked on problems in the philosophy of science, causation, decision theory, game theory, and the foundations of probability. Most recently, his work has focused on the evolution of social norms using evolutionary game theory. His two recent books Evolution of the Social Contract and The Stag Hunt are both on this topic. These books use arguments and examples from evolutionary game theory to cover topics of interest to political philosophy, philosophy of the social science, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of biology.
Skyrms is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences.
Peter Sloterdijk (German pronunciation: [ˈsloːtɐˌdaɪk]; born June 26, 1947 in Karlsruhe) is a German philosopher, television host, cultural scientist and essayist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He currently co-hosts the German show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett.
John Jamieson Carswell "Jack" Smart AC (born 16 September 1920) is an Australian philosopher and academic who is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia. He works in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy.
Smart's main contribution to metaphysics is in the area of philosophy of time. He has been an influential defender of the B-Theory of time, and of perdurantism.
His most important original arguments in this area concern the passage of time, which he claims is an illusion. He argues that if time really passed, then it would make sense to ask at what rate it passes, but this requires some second time-dimension with respect to which passage of normal time can be measured. This in turn faces the same problems, and so there must be a third time-dimension, and so on.This is called the rate of passage argument.
Smart has changed his mind about the nature and causes of the illusion of the passage of time. In the 1950s, he held that it was due to people's use of anthropocentric temporal language. He later came to abandon this linguistic explanation of the illusion in favour of a psychological explanation in terms of the passage of memories from short-term to long-term memory.
Barry Smith (born 4 June 1952) is Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in the University at Buffalo (New York, USA) and Research Scientist in the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Leipzig and Saarbrücken, Germany. Since 2007 he acts as Research Director of IFOMIS.
He is the author of some 450 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books, and editor of The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Union. In 2002 he received in recognition of his scientific achievements the Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2010 he received the first Paolo Bozzi Prize for Ontology from the University of Turin.
Smith authored a letter to The Times concerning Jacques Derrida receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge University, in which he set out numerous reasons why he did not support this prospect.
He is leader of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) project, a Coordinating Editor of the OBO Foundry and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology Consortium, the OBI (Ontology for Biomedical Investigations) Working Group, and of the Cleveland Clinic Semantic Database.
Smith's research focus is ontology and its applications, especially in biomedicine and biomedical informatics, where he is working on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records. He is also collaborating with Hernando de Soto, Director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, on the ontology of property rights and social development.
Michael Andrew Smith (born in Melbourne, Australia on 23 July 1954) is an Australian philosopher who teaches at Princeton University (since September 2004).He taught previously at the University of Oxford, Monash University, and was a member of the Philosophy Program at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is the author of several essays in ethics and moral philosophy.
The moral problem
In The Moral Problem Smith diagnoses a longstanding tension between the apparent objectivity and practicality of moral judgments. The idea of moral objectivity is that "it is a distinctive feature of engaging in moral practice that the participants are concerned to get the answers to moral questions right." (1994 p. 5) Moral judgments are thought to be practical because they are thought to motivate those who accept them. But according to the Humean theory of motivation, a theory that Smith defends in chapter 4, it is not possible for a belief (a judgement about a matter of fact) to motivate someone without the presence of some antecedently held desire. Thus, if moral judgments are beliefs that motivate, they can only be beliefs about how to get something that we already want. But moral judgments, such as the judgment that murder is wrong, are not judgments about how to get something that we already want. Therefore, either they are not beliefs at all (and therefore not objective) or they cannot motivate us.
Neo-Humeanism
Hume famously claimed that reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions. Humeans or Neo-Humeans do not typically hold strictly to Hume's views because, for one thing, they do not think of the passions in the same way that Hume did. Nonetheless, Humeans take their inspiration from Hume in claiming that reason alone is insufficient to motivate us to act. Often this claim is expressed in terms of beliefs and desires, and it is claimed that beliefs are mental states that are insufficient for motivation. Smith gives an analysis of action whereby in order for anything to count as an action at all, it must be explicable in terms of a belief-desire pair. He defends this account against objections by appeal to a dispositional conception of desire.
Tara A. Smith (born 1961) is a professor of philosophy and holder of the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism and holder of the Anthem Foundation Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism at the University of Texas at Austin.
Smith specializes in moral and political theory. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Virginia and received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Her published works include the books Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (2000), Moral Rights and Political Freedom (1995), and Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (2006). She is also a contributing author to several essay collections about Ayn Rand's novels. Smith has written in journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Law and Philosophy.
Smith has lectured all across the United States including Harvard University,Wheeling Jesuit University,Duke University,University of Pittsburgh,and New York University,and to groups of businessmen.She has also organized conferences, often ones emphasizing objective law.
She is on the board of The Philosopher's Index and is on the Academic Advisory Council of The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University.Smith is a member of the Ayn Rand Society,which exists within the American Philosophical Association. She is also affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute.
Joseph D. Sneed (born 1938) is a physicist, and philosopher at the Colorado School of Mines. With his book The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics, published in 1971, and other important contributions to the philosophy of science he founded the structural theory of the empirical sciences.
Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux 28 November 1936, Bordeaux, Gironde) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel (along with the writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet), published by Seuil, which ran until 1982. In 1982 Sollers then created the journal L'Infini published by Denoel which was later published under the same title by Gallimard for whom Sollers also directs the series.
Sollers was at the heart of the intense period of intellectual unrest in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, he was a friend of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. These three characters are described in his novel, Femmes (1983) alongside a number of other figures of the French intellectual movement before and after May 1968. From A Strange Solitude, The Park and Event, through "Logiques", Lois and Paradis, down to Watteau in Venice, Une vie divine and "La Guerre du goût", the writings of Sollers have often provided contestation, provocation and challenge.
In his book Writer Sollers, Roland Barthes discusses the work of Phillippe Sollers and the meaning of language.
Sollers married Julia Kristeva in 1967.
Timothy L.S. Sprigge (January 14, 1932 in London – July 11, 2007) was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics and then an Emeritus Fellow.
Sprigge was educated at the Dragon School, Bryanston and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Long concerned with the nature of experience and the relation between mind and reality, Sprigge was the philosopher who first posed the question made famous by Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?" Throughout Sprigge's career he argued physicalism or materialism is not only false but has contributed to a distortion of our moral sense. There is, he claims, something non-physical to what a human being is and also to animals of a higher sort.
The author of The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984), Sprigge defended a panpsychist version of absolute idealism according to which reality consists of bits of experience combined into a certain kind of coherent whole. His work presents several new arguments in favor of the plausibility of such an account. His last book - which appeared in 2006 - was entitled The God of Metaphysics. A Festschrift for Sprigge appeared on the very day he died, Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge (Ontos Verlag).
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Also a defender of animal rights, he espoused a broadly utilitarian ethics (which he defended in The Rational Foundation of Ethics). Sprigge was influenced by philosophers such as F. H. Bradley, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Josiah Royce and George Santayana.
The Timothy Sprigge Room at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh contains Sprigge's library. The Sprigge Archive is located at the Edinburgh University Library.
Kyle Stanford (born 1970) is an American philosophy professor who specializes in the philosophy of science.
He earned his B.A. with Honors in Philosophy and Psychology from Northwestern University in 1991, and his M.A. and Ph. D. from University of California, San Diego in Philosophy, 1994, and Philosophy/Science Studies, 1997, respectively.
Jason Stanley (born October 12, 1969) is an American philosopher currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His primary interests include linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Stanley is an occasional contributor to Brian Leiter's Leiter Reports blog.
Bonnie Steinbock is a professor of philosophy at the University at Albany and a specialist in bioethics who has written on topics such as abortion and (in one article) animal rights. Questions from her examinations have appeared in the "Education Life" section of the New York Times.Steinbock received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
Hillel Steiner is a Canadian political theorist and is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 1999.
Steiner's writings are focused on contemporary philosophical work on the conceptual analysis of freedom, rights and justice, and on the relation between moral and economic rationality. His most noted work is An Essay on Rights which won the Political Studies Association’s best book prize for 1994. In it, he develops what has since come to be known as a left-libertarian theory of distributive justice. This book brings together Steiner's work on the pure negative conception of liberty, the Will Theory of rights, and a liberal model of exploitation. Embracing the libertarian right of self-ownership, he argues that its consistent universalization requires that individuals be vested with equal rights that are global in scope and that take account of genetic inequalities.
He is a member of the following organisations: American Philosophical Association, Aristotelian Society, Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, European Society for the History of Economic Thought, Political Studies Association, Society for Applied Philosophy, and the September Group.
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (born 1952 in Meßkirch) is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the university of Leipzig. He was the president of the international Ludwig Wittgenstein society (2006-2009) and is now a vice-president of this institution.
The philosopher studied mathematics and philosophy in Berkeley, Konstanz, Berlin, Prague and teaches theoretical philosophy at the university of Leipzig.
Steketer-Weithofer contributes to the philosophy of language, action theory, logic and the relationships between classical and analytical philosophy. An important point is the philosophy of Hegel.
Bernard Stiegler (born 1 April 1952, Seine-et-Oise) is a French philosopher and Director of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI). He is also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis, and founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, Ecole de Philosophie d’Epineuil-le-Fleuriel. His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
Dr. Harry Stopes-Roe (b. 1924) is a British philosopher and humanist. He is a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association.
He is the son of Marie Stopes, the women's rights and family planning pioneer, and Humphrey Verdon-Roe.He started his career as a physicist, and received a BSc and MSc in physics from Imperial College, London. He then went to Cambridge University, and took a PhD in philosophy.[2]
He became a lecturer in Science Studies at Birmingham University, bringing together physics with philosophy.His work led him to seek a non-religious basis for morality in secular humanism, and he became Chair of the British Humanist Association as well as having an active role in the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).
In the 1970s, he was largely responsible for developing the BHA's policy on education, covering both religious and non-religious life stances. Stopes-Roe invented and popularised the term "life stance", initially in the context of debates over the controversial content of the City of Birmingham]'s Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education in 1975, which referred to "non-religious stances for living".
In the late 1980s, he initiated a successful campaign for the adoption of the term by the IHEU and other organisations. He is currently president of Birmingham Humanists.
Mauricio Suárez is a Spanish anglophile philosopher who specialises in philosophy of science and philosophy of physics. He earned his BSc in Astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh (1991), and his MSc and PhD in philosophy of science from the London School of Economics (1992 and 1997 respectively).
Richard G. Swinburne (born 26 December 1934) is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of natural theology, that is, philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Christian apologetics
A member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, he is noted as one of the foremost Christian apologists, arguing in his many articles and books that faith in Christianity is rational and coherent in a rigorous philosophical sense. While he presents many arguments to advance the belief that God exists, he argues that God is a being whose existence is not logically necessary (see modal logic), but metaphysically necessary in a way he defines in his The Christian God. Other subjects on which Swinburne writes include personal identity (in which he espouses a view based on the concept of a soul), and epistemic justification.
Though he is most well-known for his vigorous rational defense of Christian intellectual commitments, he also has a theory of the nature of passionate faith which is developed in his book Faith and Reason.
According to an interview Swinburne did with Foma magazine, he converted from the Church of England to the Greek Orthodox Church around 1996:
I don’t think I changed my beliefs in any significant way. I always believed in the Apostolic succession: that the Church has to have its authority dating back to the Apostles, and the general teaching of the Orthodox Church on the saints and the prayers for the departed and so on, these things I have always believed.
Swinburne's philosophical method reflects the influence of Thomas Aquinas and identifies Swinburne as a natural theologian. He admits that he draws from Aquinas a systematic approach to philosophical theology. Swinburne, like Aquinas, moves from basic philosophical issues (for example, the question of the possibility that God may exist in Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism), to more specific Christian beliefs (for example, the claim in Swinburne's Revelation that God has communicated to human beings propositionally in Jesus Christ).
Swinburne moves in his writing program from the philosophical to the theological, building his case rigorously. Swinburne relies on his previous arguments as he moves into his defenses of particular Christian beliefs. Swinburne has attempted to reassert classical Christian beliefs with an apologetic method that he believes is compatible with contemporary science. That method relies heavily on inductive logic, seeking to show that his Christian beliefs fit best with the evidence.
Syed Muhammad al Naquib bin Ali al-Attas (born September 5, 1931) is a prominent contemporary Muslim philosopher and thinker from Malaysia. He is one of the few contemporary scholars who is thoroughly rooted in the traditional Islamic sciences and who is equally competent in theology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, and literature. He is considered to be the pioneer in proposing the idea of Islamization of knowledge. Al-Attas' philosophy and methodology of education have one goal: Islamization of the mind, body and soul and its effects on the personal and collective life on Muslims as well as others, including the spiritual and physical non-human environment. He is the author of twenty-seven authoritative works on various aspects of Islamic thought and civilization, particularly on Sufism, cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy and Malay language and literature.
Islam and Metaphysics
Al-Attas maintains that modern science sees things as mere things, and that it has reduced the study of the phenomenal world to an end in itself. Certainly this has brought material benefits, however it is accompanied by an uncontrollable and insatiable propensity to destroy nature itself. Al-Attas maintains a firm critique that to study and use nature without a higher spiritual end has brought mankind to the state of thinking that men are gods or His co-partners. "Devoid of real purpose, the pursuit of knowledge becomes a deviation from the truth, which necessarily puts into question the validity of such knowledge." [Islam and Secularism, p. 36]
Al-Attas views Western civilization as constantly changing and ‘becoming’ without ever achieving 'being'. He analyzes that many institutions and nations are influenced by this spirit of the West and they continually revise and change their basic developmental goals and educational objectives to follow the trends from the West. He points to Islamic metaphysics which shows that Reality is composed of both permanence and change; the underlying permanent aspects of the external world are perpetually undergoing change [Islam and Secularism, p. 82]
For al-Attas, Islamic metaphysics is a unified system that discloses the ultimate nature of Reality in positive terms, integrating reason and experience with other higher orders in the suprarational and transempirical levels of human consciousness. He sees this from the perspective of philosophical Sufism. Al-Attas also says that the Essentialist and the Existentialists schools of the Islamic tradition address the nature of reality. The first is represented by philosophers and theologians, and the latter by Sufis. The Essentialists cling to the principle of mahiyyah (quiddity), whereas the Existentialists are rooted in wujud (the fundamental reality of existence) which is direct intuitive experience, not merely based on rational analysis or discursive reasoning. This has undoubtedly led philosophical and scientific speculations to be preoccupied with things and their essences at the expense of existence itself, thereby making the study of nature an end in itself. Al-Attas maintains that in the extra-mental reality, it is wujud (Existence) that is the real "essences" of things and that what is conceptually posited as mahiyyah ("essences" or "quiddities") are in reality accidents of existence.
The process of creation or bringing into existence and annihilation or returning to non-existence, and recreation of similars is a dynamic existential movement. There is a principle of unity and a principle of diversity in creation. "The multiplicity of existents that results is not in the one reality of existence, but in the manifold aspects of the recipients of existence in the various degrees, each according to its strength or weakness, perfection or imperfection, and priority or posteriority. Thus the multiplicity of existents does not impair the unity of existence, for each existent is a mode of existence and does not have a separate ontological status".He clarifies that the Essence of God is absolutely transcendent and is unknown and unknowable, except to Himself, whereas the essence or reality of a thing consists of a mode of existence providing the permanent aspect of the thing, and its quiddity, endowing it with its changing qualities.
- A brief account of the history of logic, from the The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (edited by Ted Honderich), OUP 1997, 497-500.
- A biography of Peter Abelard, published in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 115, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, Detroit: Gale Publishing, 3-15.
- Philosophy in the Latin Christian West, 750-1050, in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Jorge Gracia and Tim Noone, Blackwell 2003, 32-35.
- Ockham wielding his razor!
- Review of The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books 2000 (367pp).
- A brief discussion note about Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.
- Review of St. Thomas Aquinas by Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame Press 1982 (172pp). From International Philosophical Quarterly23 (1983), 227-229.
- Review of William Heytesbury on Maxima and Minima by John Longeway, D.Reidel 1984 (x+201pp). From The Philosophical Review 96 (1987), 146-149.
- Review of That Most Subtle Question by D. P. Henry, Manchester University Press 1984 (xviii+337pp). From The Philosophical Review 96 (1987), 149-152.
- Review of Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages by Jorge Gracia, Catholic University of America Press 1984 (303pp). From The Philosophical Review 97 (1988), 564-567.
- Review of Introduction to Medieval Logic by Alexander Broadie, OUP 1987 (vi+150pp). From The Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 299-302.
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