21st-century philosophers - Peter Vallentyne,Bas van Fraassen,Philippe Van Parijs,Peter Vardy (theologian),Nicla Vassallo,Gianni Vattimo,Paolo Virno,Candace Vogler,Marc de Vries

Peter Vallentyne (born March 25, 1952, in New Haven, Connecticut) is Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Canada.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, under the direction of David Gauthier and with significant help from Shelly Kagan. He formerly taught at the University of Western Ontario (1984-88) and Virginia Commonwealth University (1988-2003).
Vallentyne has written on a variety of topics in ethical theory and political philosophy, including consequentialism, contractarianism, moral dilemmas, responsibility, equality, self-ownership, liberty, and justice. He defends a version of equal opportunity for wellbeing left-libertarianism. He was co-editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy (2003-08), and has edited the following books:
Equality and Justice, Routledge, 2003 (6 volumes).
The Origins of Left Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings, edited with Hillel Steiner, Palgrave Publishers Ltd., 2000.
Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, edited with Hillel Steiner, Palgrave Publishers Ltd., 2000.
Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen (born Goes, the Netherlands, 5 April 1941) is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, teaching courses in philosophy of science, the role of models in scientific practice and philosophical logic.He previously taught at Yale University, the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Toronto, and Princeton University. He coined the term "constructive empiricism" in his 1980 book The Scientific Image. Van Fraassen earned his B.A. (1963) from the University of Alberta and his M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1966, under the direction of Adolf Grünbaum) from the University of Pittsburgh.
A philosopher of science, van Fraassen's 1989 book Laws and Symmetry attempted to lay the ground-work for explaining physical phenomena without using the assumption that such phenomena are caused by rules or laws which can be said to cause or govern their behavior. Focusing on the problem of underdetermination, he argued for the possibility that theories could have empirical equivalence but differ in their ontological commitments. He rejects the notion that the aim of science is to produce an account of the physical world that is literally true, and instead insists its aim is to produce theories that are empirically adequate.Van Fraassen has also done work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, philosophical logic, and epistemology.
Paul M. Churchland is a vocal critic of van Fraassen, who in his essay "The Anti-Realist Epistemology of Bas van Fraassen's The Scientific Image", contrasted van Fraassen's idea of unobservable phenomena with the idea of merely unobserved phenomena, among other theories.
Van Fraassen is also known for his pioneering work in philosophical logic.
He is the laureate of the 1986 Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science.
Van Fraassen is an adult convert to the Roman Catholic Church.
He has been active as editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic and co-editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, as well as in the American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy of Science Association, Society for Exact Philosophy, Evert Willem Beth Stichting, Association for Symbolic Logic, and the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science, and as McCosh Professor of Philosophy (Princeton University); D. Lett (hon), (University of Lethbridge); LL. D.(hon),(University of Notre Dame), Ph. D. (hon), (Kath. Univ. Leuven), Foreign Member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences); Titular Member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences; Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Philippe Van Parijs (French pronunciation: [filip vɑ̃ paʁɛjs]; Brussels, 23 May 1951) is a Belgian philosopher and political economist, mainly known as a proponent and main defender of the basic income concept.
In Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) can justify capitalism?(1995) he argues for both the justice and feasibility of a basic income for every citizen. It promotes the achievement of a real freedom to make choices. For example, Van Parijs purports that one cannot really choose to stay at home to raise children or start a business if one cannot afford to. As proposed by Van Parijs, such freedom should be feasible through taxing the scarce, valued social good of jobs, as a form of income redistribution.
Another part of Van Parijs' work is about the economy of linguistic communication. In order to compensate countries with a small language for their expenses on teaching and translation he has proposed a language tax,which would be paid by countries with a widespread language, for their savings on the domains mentioned.
Van Parijs's work is sometimes associated with the September Group of analytic Marxism, though he is not himself a committed Marxist.

Dr. Peter Vardy (born 1945) is a British academic, philosopher, theologian and author. Since 1999 he has held the post of Vice Principal at Heythrop College, London.
Vardy was originally a chartered accountant before becoming an academic. He holds a Masters Degree in Theology (with distinction) and a Ph.D (on ‘The Concept of Eternity’) from King's College London. He has lectured in Philosophy of Religion at King's and also at the Institute of Education, London on their Masters Degree in Education programme.

Nicla Vassallo (born 1963), is an Italian philosopher with research and teaching interests in epistemology, philosophy of knowledge, theoretical philosophy, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Genova, Italy.

Gianteresio Vattimo, also known as Gianni Vattimo (born January 4, 1936) is an internationally recognized Italian author, philosopher, and politician. Many of his works have been translated into English.
His philosophy can be characterized as postmodern with his emphasis on "pensiero debole" (weak thought). This requires that the foundational certainties of modernity with its emphasis on objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts.
He draws on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger with his critique of foundations and the hermeneutic philosophy of his teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Perhaps his greatest influence though is the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose "discovery of the 'lie', the discovery that alleged 'values' and metaphysical structures are just a play of forces" (1993:93) plays an important role in Vattimo's notion of "weak thought."

Paolo Virno (born 1952) is an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurhead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the '60s and '70s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune (lit. Cliché in Italian) in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. Virno Currently teaches at the University of Rome.
The early works of Virno were directly linked to his political participation, but after years of imprisonment, which along with his fellow prisoners, he conducted intensive studies of philosophy, and his focus on theoretical research has become more ambitious, covering political philosophy, linguistics and the study of mass media.
On the one hand, studies pertaining to Philosophy of Language have led to the confrontation of the classic themes of philosophy-like the analysis of subjectivity - with the limits imposed under linguistics. On the other hand, Virno has explored the ethical dimension of communication. The juncture of these fields was found to be a materialism that encompasses the processes of language and thought as a working link, keeping in line with the traditions of Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the interrelationship between work, thought, language, society and history is the nexus of its philosophical thought.
The philosophical concepts, however, maintained a close link with theory and action-related policies; notions of "world", "power", "potential" or "history", which have been the focus of many of his works, were in fact conceived in key by Marx. Virno, along with many of his contemporaries like Antonio Negri, has abandoned and argued against the hegemony of the dialectic tradition in Marxist philosophy.
Virno maintains the status of historical and linguistic concepts as being political-state, sovereignty, obedience, legality, legitimacy, which are accepted in social theory and philosophy as invariant, although polemically are considered to have been invented in the seventeenth century, with very specific and controversial political objectives. The reinvention of the concepts of society is part of the political task that has been proposed, regarding the concept of exodus - perhaps the best example of this joint, where the personal experiences of emotion are understood as an act of resistance toward established power and status quo. The assumption by the personality of the flight as a reaction to the social structure. On these lines, Virno has criticized these restrictions as symbolic of the counter-culture movements.

Candace A. Vogler is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Professor Vogler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her specific fields of interest are ethics, feminism, action theory, and social and political philosophy, as well as sexuality and gender studies. She has special interest in English literature and literary theory, and did doctoral work in cultural studies with emphasis in 20th century French thought. Indeed, in 2000, she became one of two philosophers invited to speak at the English Institute in the seven decades of its history, the other being Stanley Cavell. She works on Karl Marx, Thomas Aquinas, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Elizabeth Anscombe. She has emphasized the importance of a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level in various lectures, believing it extremely important that students learn critical thinking skills in college.
From 2004 to 2007 Vogler was Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Professor Vogler is the author of John Stuart Mill’s Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology, published by Routledge in 2001, and Reasonably Vicious, published by Harvard University Press in 2002. Vogler also sits on the Editorial Committee of the scholarly journal Public Culture and has co-edited two of its special issues, Critical Limits of Embodiment with Carol Breckenridge in 2002 and Violence and Redemption with Patchen Markell in 2003. Currently, she is editing the forthcoming Oxford Companion to John Stuart Mill.
Professor Vogler also serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Public Culture.

Prof. Dr. M.J. (Marc) de Vries (born 1958, Haarlem), is professor of Reformational Philosophy at the Delft University of Technology.