Philip Noel Pettit was born in 1945 in Ballygar, County Galway, Ireland, and became one of the most influential moral and political philosophers of the contemporary era. His work is best known for reviving republican political theory and giving modern…

Miranda Fricker is one of the most influential philosophers working at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. Her career is most closely associated with the concept of epistemic injustice, a term that names the ways people…

Ernest Sosa was born on June 17, 1940, in Cárdenas, Cuba, and became one of the most important epistemologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His philosophical career has centered on one of the oldest questions in human…

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is one of the most influential philosophers of contemporary epistemology, virtue ethics, and philosophy of religion. A native Californian, she entered philosophy through a path that joined technical analytic rigor with older questions about wisdom, faith, moral…

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was born on July 31, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, and became one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a writer and translator, and Hilary grew up in a…

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, often known as H.P. Blavatsky or Madame Blavatsky, was born in the Russian Empire in 1831 and became one of the most influential occult writers of the nineteenth century. She was born Helena von Hahn into an…

Edmund Lee Gettier III was born in 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland, and became one of the most quietly influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Unlike many major philosophers, he did not build his reputation through a long series of books,…

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey, England, into one of Britain’s most distinguished intellectual families. His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was the famous defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution, while his great-uncle Matthew Arnold…

Franz Clemens Brentano was born on January 16, 1838, in Marienberg am Rhein, Germany, into a cultivated Catholic family with deep intellectual roots. His uncle Clemens Brentano and aunt Bettina von Arnim were major figures in German Romantic literature, and…

Harry Gordon Frankfurt was born on May 29, 1929, and grew up in Brooklyn and Baltimore. He was raised by his adoptive parents, Bertha and Nathan Frankfurt, in a household far removed from the public fame he would later receive…

Thomas Reid was born on April 26, 1710, in Strachan, Kincardineshire, Scotland, and became one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is best known as the founder of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, a movement that defended ordinary…

Robert Hilary Kane was born on November 25, 1938, in Boston, Massachusetts, and became one of the most important contemporary defenders of libertarian free will. He grew up in Maynard, Massachusetts, and studied philosophy at the College of the Holy…