Thinkers

Find readings that examine a thinker’s arguments or work. Names are listed by surname or by the name a thinker is best known by; familiar variants also work in Search.

A

1 reading
Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno’s work with Horkheimer examines relations between rationalization and domination. Criticism must address what institutions promise as well as what they accomplish.
1 reading
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali challenges causal necessity and gives accounts of regularity and possible exceptions. Keep in view the argument’s religious purpose and the alternative replies to it.
1 reading
Al-Kindi
Al-Kindi defends learning across communities and argues that an opponent who rejects philosophy must give reasons for doing so, and giving them already involves the inquiry being rejected. The defense has limits: it does not prove every conclusion reached in philosophy’s name.
1 reading
B. R. Ambedkar
Can personal goodwill make an inherited restriction just? Read Ambedkar’s challenge to caste alongside Gandhi’s selected 1936 reply. The disagreement concerns which relationships reform must undo, as well as how people treat one another.
1 reading
Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas argues through objections and replies. What can reason establish from effects, and where does revelation play a different role?
2 readings
Aristotle
What counts as an explanation, and what would it take to live well? Two connected inquiries in Aristotle take up these questions, and the ethical reading also examines the unequal social roles he defended.
1 reading
Augustine
Augustine’s questions about willing and time belong to a confession addressed to God. Keep habits, grace and the limits of inward experience in view.
1 reading
Averroes
Averroes defends natural powers in his response to al-Ghazali. Why do causes need conditions, and what would an account have to explain if exceptions occurred?
1 reading
Avicenna
Avicenna distinguishes essence from existence and argues about necessity. What does a causal explanation of contingent things require?

B

1 reading
Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir examines freedom within bodily and social situations. Her ethics asks how acting for freedom can support another person’s future without taking control of it.
1 reading
George Berkeley
Berkeley challenges the inference from experience to material substance. His immaterialism retains ordinary objects, active spirits and a role for God in the order of experience.
2 readings
Reuben Binns
Binns examines what it takes to justify automated decisions to affected people. Prediction and explanation cannot replace contestable reasons and meaningful authority to reconsider an outcome.

C

1 reading
David Chalmers
Chalmers distinguishes explaining cognitive functions from explaining felt experience, and proposes treating experience as basic.
1 reading
Confucius
The Analects presents sayings and conversations associated with Confucius and his followers. The reading asks how learning and ritual might form humane conduct, and it keeps in view the collection’s several voices and uncertain history.
1 reading
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Crenshaw examines how single-axis categories can erase intersecting inequalities. Her argument requires attention to the case and its institutions, not identity alone as proof of causation.
1 reading
Ottobah Cugoano
Cugoano argues against enslavement through equal liberty and Christian commitments. His demands for abolition confront the supposed transfer of ownership in persons.

D

1 reading
Jacques Derrida
Derrida examines how meanings depend on differences and relations they cannot fully close. His criticism of oppositions involves more than destroying a text or reversing its hierarchy.
1 reading
René Descartes
Descartes uses deliberate doubt to seek a secure starting point. The certainty that he is thinking now is one thing; his further arguments about mind, body and God are another.
1 reading
Dharmakīrti
Dharmakīrti asks when a sign establishes its conclusion, and separates a necessary connection from our grounds for knowing it.
1 reading
Dōgen
Dōgen’s fish and fan passages ask how continued practice belongs to awakening, and why an action still calls for interpretation.
1 reading
Heather Douglas
Douglas examines the consequences of error in scientific judgment. Inductive risk concerns acceptable uncertainty, not replacing evidence with a preferred social result.
2 readings
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois examines the pressure of racial judgment on self-understanding, belonging and opportunity. His account of double consciousness is situated in Black American experience; it is not an account of every divided self.
1 reading
Enrique Dussel
Dussel asks how a person excluded by a system can challenge its starting assumptions. Taking that claim seriously need not make the speaker infallible.

E

1 reading
Epictetus
Epictetus distinguishes what is up to us from what depends on others. The distinction has demanding implications for judgment, distress and relationships.
1 reading
Epicurus
Epicurus classifies desires and argues about death. Why might a pleasant life call for restraint, friendship and choices that hurt?
1 reading
Erasmus
Erasmus joins the study of languages and texts to Christian renewal. His dispute with Luther asks what scriptural commands establish about human choice and grace.

F

1 reading
Frantz Fanon
Fanon examines racialization through lived encounter and colonial relations. His account separates the shaping force of others’ perception from an ordinary private self-image.
1 reading
Fazang
Fazang argues that the rafter is the house. How do distinct parts constitute a whole, and what can an analogy of dependence establish?
1 reading
John Martin Fischer
Fischer examines responsibility through the control exercised in acting. Responsiveness to reasons shifts attention toward actual guidance while leaving manipulation and history as challenges.
1 reading
Michel Foucault
Foucault examines how practices shape subjects and possibilities of action. His account of power leaves room for resistance while requiring evidence about particular institutions.
1 reading
Gottlob Frege
Frege distinguishes an expression’s reference from its way of presenting that reference. The distinction helps explain informative identities and difficulties in reporting another person’s beliefs.
1 reading
Miranda Fricker
Fricker shows how prejudice can wrong a speaker, and how unequal participation can leave an experience hard to explain.

G

1 reading
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Gadamer examines understanding as historically situated and open to revision. A reader’s inherited assumptions encounter resistance from the text rather than supplying its meaning unchecked.
1 reading
M. K. Gandhi
Gandhi’s 1936 defense of varna presents hereditary duties as equal. The dispute tests that argument; one exchange does not stand for his whole changing career.
1 reading
Gaṅgeśa
Gaṅgeśa’s later Nyāya account distinguishes establishing a connection from answering reasons to doubt it. The selected discussion examines experience and suppositional reasoning without promising certainty from repeated observations.
1 reading
Segun Gbadegesin
Gbadegesin asks about choice, destiny and responsibility. Can effort matter without making misfortune evidence of bad character?
1 reading
Gorampa
Gorampa raises a challenge about conventional appearances and ultimate understanding. How far his denial reaches remains open between competing interpretations.
1 reading
Guaman Poma
Guaman Poma addresses colonial government from a position it subordinates. His imagined dialogue with the king questions who supplies knowledge and who must listen.
1 reading
Kwame Gyekye
Gyekye examines Akan personhood, moral reputation and individual agency. His moderate communitarianism resists making communal approval the source of every human claim.

H

1 reading
Wael Hallaq
Hallaq challenges a simple history in which Sunni legal interpretation ceased. That historical argument does not by itself settle Iqbal’s case for institutional reform.
1 reading
Han Fei
Arguments associated with Han Fei concern standards, assessment and positional power. What can reliability secured by coercion cost those who are governed?
1 reading
Sandra Harding
Harding argues that starting inquiry from marginalized lives can expose assumptions others have missed. That does not make any participant infallible.
1 reading
G. W. F. Hegel
Hegel connects freedom with recognition and shared institutions. The readings examine those arguments while confronting exclusions in his account of world history.
12 readings
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger asks about being, practical involvement and the disclosure of a world. These readings assess his arguments together with their limits and his political commitments.
1 reading
Heraclitus
Quotations attributed to Heraclitus speak of rivers, measured fire and opposing tensions. How might order persist through change, and what do the later writers who quoted him leave uncertain?
1 reading
Gerald K Hibbert
Gerald K Hibbert’s 1941 reflection questions separating sacramental life from ordinary life. His passage is a named contribution, not an unrestricted statement for every Quaker.
1 reading
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes argues that vulnerability and distrust make enforceable common power necessary. His account of authorization leaves questions open about protection and the limits of obedience.
1 reading
Max Horkheimer
Horkheimer asks what reason becomes when it evaluates means while leaving ends unquestioned. Accurate calculations can still serve an institution’s unjustified purpose.
1 reading
Kahente Horn-Miller
Horn-Miller distinguishes consent to a decision from complete agreement with it, and examines what makes participation possible at Kahnawà:ke.
2 readings
Paulin Hountondji
Hountondji challenges accounts that erase disagreement within collective thought and asks who directs knowledge production. Shared identity cannot replace argument, criticism and an audience able to answer.
1 reading
Hu Shi
Hu Shi questions civilizational contrasts between material and spiritual life. His cultural criticism connects empirical inquiry and institutional change with critical study of inherited texts.
2 readings
David Hume
Hume examines the habits behind causal expectation, personal identity and judgments of action. His arguments distinguish explaining a belief from proving what it claims.
1 reading
Hunayn ibn Ishaq
Hunayn reports comparing manuscripts and revising translations. What does that work reveal about how learning was transmitted, and what can it not establish about an argument’s truth?
7 readings
Edmund Husserl
Husserl studies experience as directed toward things that exceed any single view. Bracketing changes how a belief is used in inquiry without denying an external world.

I

1 reading
Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun explains how solidarity can support political power and how success changes the relationships that sustain it. What evidence would support that explanation?
1 reading
Muhammad Iqbal
When circumstances change, can loyalty to a tradition require a new interpretation? Iqbal proposes learned judgment and collective deliberation within modern Muslim thought. His is one proposal, and its limits on participation remain open to question.
1 reading
Itō Jinsai
Jinsai prefers the living Way to the vocabulary of principle, and he makes that challenge in the name of recovering Confucian teaching.

J

1 reading
Frank Jackson
Jackson’s 1982 Mary argument concerns physical knowledge and experience. Keep it apart from his later change of position.
1 reading
William James
James connects truth with verification and the wider course of experience. His account invites the objection that finding a truth may differ from defining truth itself.

K

1 reading
Kabir
One received Bijak poem challenges mechanical recitation. Its call to devotion does not reject every sacred word or shared practice.
3 readings
Immanuel Kant
Kant examines the conditions of experience, moral lawgiving and aesthetic judgment. These inquiries place different demands on what a claim can establish.
1 reading
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling approaches faith through a pseudonymous narrator, Johannes de Silentio. Treating every statement as the author’s direct doctrine would erase that narrator’s difficulty.
1 reading
Eva Feder Kittay
Kittay examines dependency and the support that care requires. Her account makes caregivers’ resources, recipients’ preferences and unequal power matters of justice.
2 readings
Elizabeth M. Kraus
Elizabeth M. Kraus emphasizes the mutual determination of Whitehead’s feelings and offers an atemporal reading of divine reception. The lessons examine what these interpretations clarify and which explanatory questions remain.
1 reading
Thomas Kuhn
Kuhn examines normal science, anomalies and changes in scientific frameworks. Shared standards can guide comparison without supplying a formula that guarantees agreement.

L

1 reading
Bartolomé de las Casas
Las Casas challenges arguments for conquest by disputing classifications, jurisdiction and the effects of war. His replies carry commitments and limits of their own, which call for careful reading.
1 reading
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Leibniz describes a world of many partless, perceiving substances. Their plurality and coordination contrast with Spinoza’s one substance, though they do not by themselves establish uncaused choice.
1 reading
Aldo Leopold
Leopold extends ethical concern to a land community. Ecological dependence matters to his argument without by itself proving every duty or settling each policy choice.
1 reading
David Lewis
Lewis proposes that experience teaches abilities. Do those abilities account for everything Mary learns?
1 reading
Liang Shuming
Liang Shuming draws on moral responsiveness in considering cultural renewal. His account of science and democracy belongs to a contested reconstruction of Confucian resources.
2 readings
John Locke
Locke examines the sources and limits of ideas and the grounds of political authority. His accounts of experience, consent and property each invite distinct objections.
1 reading
Martin Luther
Luther challenges Erasmus’s account of free choice. A command, he argues, can reveal human inability and the need for grace rather than prove an ability to obey.

M

1 reading
James Maffie
Maffie offers a reconstruction of balance in a changing world. What does one particular Nahua discourse support, and where would a wider interpretation need further evidence?
1 reading
Maimonides
Maimonides interprets scriptural language and divine attributes. What can reason establish about God without claiming to know the divine essence?
1 reading
Karl Marx
Marx examines how work and exchange organize social relations. Alienation and commodity fetishism expose different ways those relations can constrain or obscure human activity.
1 reading
Mengzi
Mengzi describes moral beginnings and uses images of cultivation. How can an initial responsiveness to others grow, and how can circumstances damage it?
6 readings
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty examines perception through bodily possibilities and engagement. Different capacities to reach, move or approach can change how a shared world is encountered.
2 readings
C. Robert Mesle
Mesle questions whether possibilities need a divine valuation, presses a difficulty about self-determination and doubts the inference from an experience’s preservation to its subject’s continuing life.
1 reading
John Stuart Mill
Mill connects impartial concern for well-being with a defense of liberty. Aggregation, coercion and colonial exclusions test the reach and limits of his arguments.
1 reading
Mozi
The received Mohist arguments associated with Mozi use concern for outsiders to challenge conquest. That concern does not require the same affection for everyone.

N

9 readings
Nāgārjuna
Can dependence make change possible instead of making things unreal? A selected Madhyamaka argument rejects intrinsic nature, a nature something would possess independently of conditions. The reading explains the interpretation it follows and where others differ.
1 reading
Guru Nanak
Guru Nanak’s thread saloks speak of compassion, conduct, Nam and praise. How can a religious sign be judged by the life it expresses?
1 reading
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche investigates the origins, motives and effects of moral valuations. His genealogy invites scrutiny without making an accusation of resentment a refutation of every criticism.
1 reading
Nishida Kitarō
Nishida develops changing accounts of experience and of the context of subject–object distinctions. His metaphysics and his political claims each need examining, without assuming that either guarantees the other.
1 reading
Helen Nissenbaum
Nissenbaum examines answerability in computerized systems whose work is distributed. Shared causal involvement makes specifying duties necessary rather than making responsibility disappear.
1 reading
Robert Nozick
Nozick examines holdings through acquisition, transfer and rectification. A voluntary exchange does not by itself repair injustice in the history of what is exchanged.

O

1 reading
H. Odera Oruka
Oruka investigates philosophical reasoning in oral dialogue. Sage philosophy requires attention to an individual’s arguments and to the interviewer’s role in selecting and presenting them.

P

1 reading
Parmenides
Parmenides’ poem argues about what can be thought and what could come into being. How that argument relates to the changing world remains a difficulty.
1 reading
Charles Sanders Peirce
Peirce clarifies concepts through conceivable practical effects and treats inquiry as corrigible. Clarifying what a claim means is distinct from establishing its truth.
4 readings
Plato
Plato’s dialogues argue about examination, knowledge, justice and education. What a speaker says in a dialogue belongs to a role, not to a historical voice we recover directly.
1 reading
Plotinus
Plotinus gives an account of the One, Intellect and Soul. How do his arguments about unity relate to the reported experience of return?
1 reading
Karl Popper
Popper emphasizes risky predictions and the possibility of falsification. Testing also requires scrutiny of auxiliary assumptions rather than automatic rejection after any unexpected result.

Q

1 reading
Aníbal Quijano
Quijano examines how racial classification and labor organization can persist beyond formal colonial rule. Applying coloniality to a particular case still requires historical evidence.

R

1 reading
Rāmānuja
Rāmānuja finds real difference within unity. He also relates liberating knowledge to dependence on brahman and to loving remembrance.
2 readings
John Rawls
Rawls examines fair institutions through principles chosen under constraints on personal knowledge. His account also asks what generations owe one another to sustain just institutions.
1 reading
Tom Regan
Regan argues that subjects of a life have value that aggregation must not erase. His rights approach differs from weighing every individual’s interests within a total.
1 reading
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau examines dependence and the possibility of freedom through common laws. His general will requires more than a majority’s victory over dissenters.

S

2 readings
Śaṅkara
Śaṅkara’s readings of self and brahman ask how knowledge removes ignorance, and how nonduality can leave room for ordinary experience and practice.
1 reading
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre questions the idea that people arrive with a preassigned purpose. The selected comparison introduces existentialism without making Beauvoir’s account merely an extension of his.
1 reading
Ofelia Schutte
Schutte questions exclusions that liberation discourse can reproduce. Her criticism, encountered through a scholarly discussion, tests whose experience enters an emancipatory argument.
1 reading
Amartya Sen
Sen asks what equal resources leave out about people’s real opportunities. Capabilities shift attention toward what people can do without ranking their worth by performance.
1 reading
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
Sepúlveda’s defense of conquest uses classifications of peoples and claims about protective war. Examining the argument shows how much work those classifications have to do.
1 reading
Sextus Empiricus
Sextus describes skeptical inquiry, suspension of judgment and ordinary life. How might someone keep investigating without claiming that knowledge is impossible?
2 readings
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson argues that knowledge can continue only with land, relationships and authority over learning, and her argument leaves room for consent and disagreement.
1 reading
Peter Singer
Singer argues for equal consideration of suffering across species. That claim differs from identical treatment and does not by itself settle every question about killing.
2 readings
Socrates
We meet Socrates through Plato’s portrayal of his questioning and his care for the soul. That portrayal is literary argument, not a verified transcript of his life.
1 reading
Baruch Spinoza
Spinoza understands thought and extension through one substance. His account of freedom asks how adequate understanding can increase activity within a necessary order.

T

1 reading
Rabindranath Tagore
Tagore examines art as expression in which manner and matter belong together. Form can contribute something that a paraphrase of a work’s message leaves out.
1 reading
Sunaura Taylor
Taylor brings disability criticism into animal ethics while preserving differences between their subjects. Her argument questions capacity hierarchies and attends to access, dependence and self-advocacy.
1 reading
Toegye
Toegye revised his account of moral feelings. How can principle take a distinctive leading role while remaining inseparable from qi?
1 reading
Tsongkhapa
Tsongkhapa connects dependence with emptiness. What does the search for intrinsic nature deny, and what remains available in ordinary life?

U

1 reading
Uddyotakara
Uddyotakara asks how seeing a sign brings a known connection into play. Read his account of reflection on the sign alongside the different work done by positive and negative cases.

V

1 reading
Peter van Inwagen
Van Inwagen’s consequence argument challenges alternatives under determinism. Its transfer of inability and the importance of alternatives to responsibility both remain disputed.
1 reading
Vasubandhu
Vasubandhu’s selected verses argue about appearances and continuity, and interpreters dispute what they say about representation and external objects.
1 reading
Vātsyāyana
Vātsyāyana explains how the parts of an argument help a hearer examine its support. His account of inference connects a remembered relation with perception of a sign in the present case.

W

1 reading
Wang Yangming
Wang Yangming refuses to separate genuine knowledge from action. Why does innate moral knowing not endorse every immediate impulse?
9 readings
Alfred North Whitehead
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty. It asks us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.
1 reading
Kwasi Wiredu
Wiredu’s account of Akan thought distinguishes forms of personhood and moral standing. Reading him alongside Gyekye reveals disagreement within a named intellectual setting.
1 reading
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A report about a tool and a request for it can use the same word differently. The reading sets selected early and later accounts of language side by side and asks what picturing a situation explains, and what attention to an activity adds.
1 reading
Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft challenges the conditions that deny women cultivated judgment and independence. Her proposals connect rights with education, work and political representation, and they have historical limits of their own.
1 reading
Allen Wood
Allen Wood questions treating Kant’s universalization formula as a general decision procedure. Worked objections about generosity and narrow maxims make that disagreement concrete.

X

1 reading
Xunzi
Xunzi distinguishes unlearned nature from deliberate effort, and gives ritual a role in nourishing and regulating desire.

Y

1 reading
Yulgok
Yulgok argues that the Four Beginnings are included within the Seven Feelings. How does moral goodness belong within the common process of embodied feeling?

Z

1 reading
Zhu Xi
Zhu Xi gives an account of investigation and cultivation. Why does learning concern actual affairs, and why does putting knowing before acting not mean postponing action indefinitely?