21st-century philosophers - Michael Uebel, Peter Unger

Michael Uebel (born 1964), a pioneer in the application of psychological insights to the historical intersections of social, personal, and imaginative phenomena, is a psychotherapist and researcher in Austin, Texas. He has taught literature and critical theory at the University of Virginia, at Georgetown University, where he taught in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program and the English Department, and at the University of Kentucky, where he held a faculty position in the Department of English, and was affiliated with the Committee on Social Theory and Women’s Studies. He is the author and/or editor of three major studies and the author of over 40 journal essays and encyclopedia articles. Uebel lectures nationally and internationally on issues concerning social history, mental health, and the challenges of humanism. In 2009, he co-founded the Interdependence Project-Austin (IDP-A), a branch of the New York city-based nonprofit organization (IDP) dedicated to fostering the intersection of the arts, activism, and contemplative traditions. Uebel serves as Director of Contemplative Studies.Uebel’s research is best described as humanistic. Examining issues such as the formation of utopian thought, the ideology of gender relations, and the potentials of human existence, Uebel has urged a reconnaissance of disciplines as seemingly disparate as psychoanalysis, gerontology, philosophy, and social science. Uebel is forging an approach to literary, philosophical, and social phenomena that eludes the narcissistic allegorization of history that mires much contemporary cultural studies work. Increasingly, Uebel's writing focuses on the currents of cultural analysis in the humanities.
As a psychotherapist, Uebel’s practice and research focus on issues related to the social contexts of psychopathology and treatment modalities that address the person, the social body, and the relational world, including mindfulness modalities, gestalt therapy, and positive psychology.
Uebel’s major works to date include a study of the legend of Prester John and utopian thought formation in the early Middle Ages (Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, 2005), a volume of essays on the cultural intersections of race and masculinity (with Harry Stecopoulos, Race and the Subject of Masculinities, 1997), and a volume of essays on the significance of labor in the High Middle Ages (with Kellie Robertson, The Middle Ages at Work, 2004). He has also edited a volume of essays on medieval culture for New Literary History (1996).


Peter K. Unger (born 1942) is a contemporary American philosopher and professor at New York University. His main interests lie in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. He attended Swarthmore College at the same time as David Lewis, earning a B.A. in philosophy in 1962,and Oxford University, where he studied under A. J. Ayer[citation needed] and earned a doctorate in 1966.
Unger has written a defense of profound philosophical skepticism and claims that many philosophical questions cannot be definitively answered. In the field of applied ethics, he argues that one has a moral duty to make large donations to life-saving charities (such as Oxfam and UNICEF) if one can, even if one has to beg, borrow, or steal in the process. Unger, moreover, has also used the paradox of the heap to argue for mereological nihilism, which entails that he, along with all other composite objects, does not exist.